A few more photos.

I have been sifting through the hard drive of our laptop today and I found some photos that I received a while ago. These are of our now famous trip home from Happy Camper School.











And speaking of Happy Camper, Paula completed her trip to the wilderness on Sat. I now call all of the Snow Schools “Summer School” since the weather is so nice now. She did spend the evening in a Trench. And being the technical and proactive person that she is, she built the most minimalist trench that she could. That is because the Happy Camper School is a survival training class. If you end up in a downed aircraft, or a broken down vehicle, you might have to make a very rapid shelter to keep yourself reasonably warm and safe. So, Paula’s take on the trench practice was to se how long it would take to make an acceptable shelter. Hers was done in 45 minutes. And with that practice her next one could be done in 30 minutes. There are however people with other things in mind. Shane, one of our GA’s (General Assistant) in the VMF decided that he has always wanted to own a mansion. Shane started with a spiral staircase down into his hole. And he built two rooms with seats and cubby holes for shelves. In all it took Shane 6 hours to build his palace. Different minds at work. I am trying to get photos of the mansion. It sounds like they all had a very good time in Summer School.



On Monday I attended the SAR Team tryouts. (Search and Rescue) The team is the SAR Team for the entire continent and is base here in McMurdo. The team has a primary and a secondary group. The primary team is made up of entirely full season people. And full season people get the priority for making the team. The SAR team requires so much training that they are looking for members that can train for a full year. So, I have a chance to make the secondary team. They are looking for a combination of people for the team. They like people with Mountaineering, mechanical, medical, rescue, and other experience. So I have no mountaineering exp. But I have a bit of all of the other three. So overall I have a good chance to make it, but also there is very few spots open so I will wait to hear the results. The tryouts were treated as the first training session because there are so few chances to train. So we received some interesting education while we were in the tryouts. We covered basic mountaineering skills including ascending, descending, and traversing snow and ice slopes. Also we learned how to work with an ice axe and how to prevent and then stop falls on a snow or ice slope. Next we did Glacier traversing. For this we were all in out seat harnesses and we were attached to a climbing rope about 40 feet apart. The purpose for this is to prevent a member of the group from falling all the way into a deep hidden crevasse. If one person falls in, the others can quickly dig into the snow and stop the fall of their teammate. We practiced this by hiking up onto an area called the Ice Falls. This area is about 200’ above the ice shelf and there are many covered crevasses that we crossed. And then for the afternoon we practiced snow anchors and crevasse rescue. This is an interesting cross between technical rope rescue and rock climbing with snow anchors thrown in. We praticed in a crevasse that was dig by Fleet Ops, it is about 15' deep and about 50' long.

R.J.