Antarctica’s tiny teeth blowing around us in the form of snow in today’s storm. Jim and Brian try to dig out their skidoos.

As I said before, every fairytale has heroes and villains, has beauty and beasts. Antarctica is no different. In fact, Antarctica is both Beauty and the Beast. We have been in the deep field for more than a week now and you totally deserve to hear the truth about the Beast.

Antarctica is the most beautiful and magical place I have ever visited, of all 7 continents I have been to. And Antarctica is a Beast. Everything here is hard. The air is beautifully clear, clean and dry, and so it sucks all the water out of your body. We are constantly fighting dehydration. In order to drink enough water we have to chip ice and snow first, melt it to get liquid water. Unlike previous seasons, this year we couldn’t set up camp on the blue ice so we have to melt icy snow instead of blue ice. A 5 gallon bucket of icy snow gives you one gallon of water and takes about 3-4 hours to melt. We have a constant water production going on. But not only do we need water for drinking, we also need water for cooking and for brushing our teeth. Since making water takes a lot of energy, wasting water becomes a huge sacrilege here. We don’t waste precious water, and that means for example, we don’t wash dishes. Dishes get wiped clean with only a paper towel. So do our bodies (with baby wipes). Period.
Antarctica has teeth, invisible, tiny, extremely sharp teeth that will bite into every inch of skin that was unintentionally left exposed. It hurts. The wind hurts, the coldness hurts. You body is constantly fighting to keep your core temperature up which makes us physically exhausted. We are tired. All the time. But the great thing about this is that we constantly get to eat chocolate, potato chips, and all sorts of other fatty goodness foods without feeling guilty about it because this food keeps our internal furnaces burning to produce body heat (turns out my body isn’t very good at that. Yet!)
And then there are the ice fields. Beautiful, translucent, magical ice fields that look like frozen oceans. And they are hard as cement. They have beautiful ripples, sun-caps, and rilles, that have extremely sharp edges. They are unforgiving and bruise every inch of your body when kneeling or laying down to recover meteorites, no matter how well protected you think you are.
And the snow. The rainbow sparkling snow. That snow acts like little ball bearings under your rubber boots on the ice. And literally will sweep your feet out from under you and make you crash onto your back like in a comic sequence. Hilarious for everyone who sees it, painful for the one who falls.
Getting dressed and undressed is a huge and exhausting exercise alone. It takes about 20 min each way to put on all the layers necessary (and take them all off again) to protect ourselves from the cold. And sometimes that is not enough. Sometimes the icy wind still seeps through the fabrics. Getting dressed and undressed in all these layers is not the hardest part. Getting dressed in all these layers while laying on your back or being hunched over is the hard part since you can’t stand up straight in the tent (unless you are Barb, but then it is still freakin hard nonetheless). Walking around in all these layers (about 25 extra pounds of weight) is hard exercise. We feel more like penguins waddling from one side to another when walking. And if you are shorter like Barb, then Big Red goes down to your knees and makes moving your various body parts even harder. And suddenly climbing onto or off a skidoo is a huge act and getting up from the ground after recovering a meteorite…good luck. Our muscles are sore from just walking and kneeling on the ice, from driving and balancing on the skidoos, from chipping ice and snow. Our skin on our hands and fingers is dry and hard from the cold and cracks open constantly. Our bodies simply hate us. But we love them nonetheless for trying to hold up.
Living in the tent itself is hard in these conditions. In this 9×9 feet floor space with inclined walls (the tent has the shape of a pyramid) is where we cram our living room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom (minus the toilet), mudroom (and drying room), and office into. There is really not a lot of space. We each have about 9 x 3 feet (2.7 x 1 meters) of personal space. That is where you sleep, where you sit, where you read, where you eat, where you store your stuff like clothes (good luck with that), some personal items, and maybe some personal food items you brought from home. Everything else has to stay outside. Deeply frozen. There is simply not enough space inside. So we learn how to utilize items in multiple ways. For example, we use the clothes we wear during the day as pillows and insulation against the cold from the tent walls at night. That way we don’t need to find storage for them. The tent walls are yellow, so inside the tent the light is also yellow and totally falsifies all other colors. Suddenly purple colors turn into all sorts of shades of brown, blue-ish colors have a green tint, white and orange don’t exist (I can’t define what the color orange changes into, it’s just weird). I think this is how some colorblind people must experience the world, like my friend Max. That’s hard. But unlike Max, for us this is only temporary and it makes us humble and appreciate our eyesight even more. Sleeping here is hard because you sleep on the floor on a thermarest, and it is freakin cold on the floor. But it makes us appreciate our puffy down sleeping bags even more. Another annoying factor is the sun. The sun is high in the sky 24 hours. So the tent is brightly lit 24 hours. Great for those who are afraid of the dark, not so great for everyone else. But a wool hat pulled over our eyes does the trick and helps keep our heads warm as well. A win-win situation.
And then there is the issue of going to the bathroom. Our poo tent. The poo tent contains a bucket in which you poo into. Peeing is done outside at the pee flag (we don’t bring back our pee from the deep field, just our poo). Now, being a woman and peeing by -20C is hard since we have to expose our bums to the cold wind. Thus, Barb and I dedicated one empty poo bucket as pee bucket, so we can pee inside the poo tent and at least be protected from the wind. It is still cold. Poo-ing and Pee-ing becomes a very quick business and only if absolutely necessary by these temperatures.
And although things are insanely hard here, even though it is freakin cold, and recovering meteorites is physically and mentally demanding work, we love it. Just like in fairytales, we simply have learnt to see the Beauty in the Beast, we have fallen in love with the quirks, the hardship, the small but protective tent space, the pain, the cold; we have learnt to appreciate the little things (like a windless day, a piece of chocolate, hot tea for lunch, good company, …) and we are truly lucky to be here, grateful to be part of the ANSMET family, and humbled by the experience of this amazing adventure in a magical fairytale-like land. It is one of the best things we have ever done! And thus, as in fairytales, we all live happily ever after (at least until the end of our season).
Juliane, Dec. 24th at 6pm, Mt. Cecily, Antarctica