Barb trying to cut Juliane’s long hair with the ulu on the cutting board. Unsuccessfully. Eventually we used a knife to cut off 8 inches.

Juliane with her trendy, 8inch shorter hair.

 

One disadvantage of being in the deep field is that you can’t shower, bath, or wash your hair in the normal way. To stay clean (and as I said before, we don’t really get dirty) we use baby wipes. 4 to 5 baby wipes per day are allocated for the entire body. On which body parts you use them is up to you. On tent days however, when we have napped, slept, eaten, snacked, worked, read, napped some more, talked and chatted, sometimes we take sponge bathes to wash our hair. For that you first must go and get lots of ice and snow to melt it all down to water, hot water. Than 1 liter of that is allocated and used for the bath. Our small dishwashing tray is used as a sink (since we wipe down our dishes we don’t really need the tray). Now you wet your hair over the tray with the hot water, then pour some semi frozen hand-soap (shampoo doesn’t cut it out here) on your head and massage it in. Try to rinse it with some of the water and then repeat. More semi-frozen soap, massaging, rinsing. The hair is usually so oily that it needs at least 3 repetitions before it is clean. And make sure to not run out of water. The problem arises when one has long hair like me. It’s easy to manage long hair without washing in Antarctica because it can be braided and then stays like that for 6 weeks. However if you want to wash it, it becomes a huge problem because of its length. And thus water consumption and drying time (wet hair and head is not something you want around here). So my solution was simple. Cut off the hair. It is just hair after all and will grow back. I had meant to cut it short before I came here but work, last minute preparations, and a sick kitty had prevented me from doing so. So now was as good of a time as any. It took some convincing but Barb finally agreed to be the barber and to cut it off. Now the question was how: we knew scissors would be best, however the only scissors we have are in the collection kits and those are sterile and thus out of question. The little scissors on our little leather-mans were next to useless. We tried them anyways but all it did was bending the hair instead of cutting it. Next we tried the ulu (a devise to cut frozen meat). It is super sharp but it turns out it is not good with hair. In the end we used my knife, which has a part smooth and part serrated blade. With that we cut off the hair after I put it in a ponytail. It took us like 5 min to cut through all that hair (turns out I have quite thick hair) but in the end my hair was 8 inches shorter than before. Success. Hooray!! We left it a bit longer than necessary so that the barber in McMurdo can fix our crude cut. And now I was able to finally wash my hair. I washed it once so far, and it probably will stay at that, unless we are forced to stay tent bound by bad weather conditio ns for a few days in a row. But hopefully we won’t have that. Barb washed her hair 3 times so far, Jim once, Brian none. To be fair, no one really needs to wash their hair here. It’s just us after all and having wet hair/head is no fun. As for my hair, I’m much happier with it being shorter. And Barb did a fantastic job as the barber. My back hair is shorter than the front hair and the left side is shorter than the right side. It’s the new trend in case you wondered. So if science doesn’t work out for us we decided that we will open a barber shop right here on the antarctic plateau!! Because who wouldn’t want to get a hair cut here! I know for sure I would 😉
Juliane with shorter hair, Mt. Cecily, Antarctica, Jan. 7th, at 7pm

Editor’s note:  OMG that’s a first for ANSMET (as far as I know)!  And very much a Juliane moment (Identify problem;  Fix problem; Happiness with no second-guessing). A critical ANSMET skill,  to deal with the things as best you can and move on.