Barb doing Antarctic Yoga on her skidoo during lunch to stay warm.

The view of our gear hung up in the tip of the tent to unfreeze and eventually dry.

When we get out to search and recover meteorites our day starts at 7am with the alarm. At that point we are huddled up in our puffy down sleeping bags and even peeling out an arm to turn off the alarm is unpleasant because the tent has cooled off and is frozen at a temperature of about -5F (-20C) at the bottom where we sleep without the stove going. The stove can only be operated when we are inside the tent and awake! The stove is a big fire hazard and produces CO so we want to make sure we are safe and alert when operating it. So the first thing we do after turning off the alarm is igniting the stove. Usually that means Barb because I totally refuse to put any body part outside of my sleeping bag. After Barb has ignited the stove she dives back into her sleeping bag and we wait for 10-15 min until the tent is warmed up to about +35F (+1C). A good indicator that some warmth is produced is when I see less and less of my own breath condensing while breathing out. Although it is awesome for the first few days in the field to wake up to the puffy clouds that one produces simply by breathing in and out the cold air in the morning (you feel like you are a dragon! You produce puffy clouds from your mouth AND your nose, my fantasy ran wild), but after a few days it loses its magic and becomes just simply cold. Once the tent is warm enough we peel ourselves out of our sleeping bags, I usually wait and see if Barb falls over frozen, if not I know its safe to come out too. Usually all my muscles and joints are stiff and sore and it takes a minute or so to get comfortable again in my own body. Then I start immediately to put on more layers on top of the ones I already wear. I usually wear 3 layers in the tent (I sleep in 1 layer). Then I try to get comfy on the little space that our little thermarest mattress provides, search for my water bottle so I can brush my teeth but realize it has turned into a solid block of ice. Crap. So has the water in the water kettle and any other liquid water inside the tent that was not in our sleeping bags with with. Luckily we fill up hot water bottles at night and shove them into our sleeping bags before we get in. The sleeping bags are between +5 and +10F (-12C) when we crawl into them at night (we have thermometers and it has been so much fun to measure the temperature of literally everything here). So we heat up the sleeping bags before we get in with those hot water bottles. That water is still liquid the next day. So we put the water kettle on the stove, empty most of that sleeping bag bottle water back into the kettle and heat it up. The rest we use to brush our teeth. I use one of my pee bottles as designated spit bottle to spit out the toothpaste, Barb just swallows hers. After that its “washing time”; we clean our bodies with 2 baby-wipes (we have about 4-5 wipes total per day for cleaning). For all of you screaming and rolling your eyes in disgust…it is fine. We don’t sweat here, simply not warm enough at any given time, and that means we are not really dirty anyways. And if we were it wouldn’t matter since everyone knows that women smell like roses. Always! Eventually the water in the kettle is hot enough for tea and oatmeal (yuck). I started eating just peanut butter or I make toast in butter in a frying pan and eat that with peanut butter. No…more…oatmeal!!! I just cant do it. Then I think really hard whether I really already need to go pee. I usually wait until my bladder hates me and is about to burst. Because I need to get dressed more to go outside. So eventually, when my bladder is seriously yelling at me, I put on more layers and big red, shovel myself out of the tent (unless Barb already did that) if there was a lot of snow drift during the night, which seems to have become our new norm, and hastily run towards the poo tent, grab the pee bucket that hangs outside, put up the flag so the other people know the poo tent is now occupied, crawl into the tent and do my business as quickly as possible. You have no idea how fast you can pee before you come here! Trust me! Then you crawl out of the poo tent with your pee bucket, empty it at the pee flag, and take the poo tent flag down on your way back to your own tent. By the time you are back inside your tent and you have peeled yourself off of most of the layers it is 10-15min later. At this point it is usually 8:15am. We then make more water by melting snow and ice to fill our water bottles with hot water for the field and make sandwiches for lunch. The sandwiches we put in ziplock bags and attach hand warmers to them so they don’t freeze before lunch time. Now it is 8:25-8:30am and it is time to get dressed in all..the..layers..possible. In my case that means usually 7-8 layers. Plus bunny boots and head layers. I get dressed while Im laying down, bent or crouched over. Barb can get dressed while standing up but even she is still restricted in her movements. Getting dressed usually takes 15-20min and is an exercise itself that leaves you panting by the end. Before we are completely dressed we crawl out of the tent to check up on our skidoos, if necessary dig it out from the snow drifts (also a new norm it seems), and try to start the engine. That takes about 5-10 min. Once the engine is running we go back into our tent to finish dressing, for example putting on our knee protection, big red (if we are not already wearing it), gather our lunch items, the collection kit and blog kit, and store everything on our skidoo. Barb puts the emergency survival bag for the team on her skidoo while I stock up on flags (we flag each meteorite). At 9am we all meet in front of Jim’s skidoo to go over the days plan. And then we are off. We ride the skidoos to the ice fields that we are searching that day and then sweep/traverse those. At 12:30-1pm we stop to eat lunch. Usually I’m thrilled to find that my sandwich managed to stay unfrozen (the hand warmers we have don’t work very well here, so its always a gamble). But once I start eating, after the second or third bite, exposed to the cold air and biting wind, the sandwich becomes frozen. Sigh… The water usually stays at least lukewarm. I once made the mistake to fill my bottle in the morning with just warm water not boiling water. At lunch time my water was ice cold and it is absolutely no fun to drink icy water when you are cold yourself. By the end of that day my water bottle was frozen. So now only boiling water is filled into my bottle. Lesson learned. Lunch time usually only lasts 10min because it is too cold to stand still for longer. After I have gobbled down my frozen sandwich I usually shove some frozen beef jerky in my mouth and suck on it until it gets unfrozen and becomes chewable. Jim and Brian don’t even bother eating real lunch, they just snack on various things throughout the day such as frozen meat sticks, crackers, nuts etc. Candy and chocolate also freezes and one day I almost broke my jaw trying to eat a starburst chewing candy. It was frozen solid. You definitely need good teeth and jaw muscles here. After lunch we continue to traverse or search moraines, we recover every single meteorite we come across no matter its size, take pictures of it in the field, measure its dimension, get a GPS coordinate, and very carefully bag it all while we are super careful not to contaminate it. All the tools we use for collecting the meteorites are sterile. Usually around 5pm we call it a day and make our way back to camp which can take up to 30min depending on where we are. Back in camp we have to re-fuel all our skidoos with a hand cranking pump that sits on top of a fuel barrel. That is usually my job, simply because I’m always the coldest of us and cranking the handle means muscle movement which in return means body heat. Once the skidoos are fueled up, we do our meteorite inventory and store our precious cargo safely away. The meteorites stay frozen. Always. At this point it is usually 6-6:30pm and now we go chip ice and snow and bring a bucket load back to the tent. Once inside the tent we ignite the stove and wait a few minutes before we peel our layers off. The tents are usually 0F, on cold days -10F or lower, when we get back. Once we have taken off our layers, we hang everything up in the tip of our tent. Heat rises and so the tip of our tent is the warmest and bestest place for our gear to unfreeze and dry. However, taking off layers also has the side effect that it “snows” inside your tent. And that “snow” is not composed of H2O but of skin cells. The first time I noticed all the skin flakes and dead cells raining down, settling on all surfaces, in the water, everywhere, I was disgusted. Totally disgusted. Now, I mentally shrug my shoulder and go on with my life. After all its just extra protein. Add to that the feathers from our sleeping bags, hair, and lint and the whole mix becomes something lovingly called “flavor crystals” (by former ANSMET participant Gretchen B). So we go on and start melting the ice and snow to have liquid water for drinking and cooking including flavor crystals and all. While the kettle is on the stove melting ice we use another baby wipe to clean our feet since they were confined to rubber bunny boots all day. My feet usually are red, cold icicles by the time they come out of the boots. Once we have liquid water we start cooking. We usually have food ready between 7 – 7:30pm. We eat quickly, wipe down our plates with paper towels, get dressed again in multiple layers to meet in the science tent at 8pm. We talk for an hour about the day and the potential plan for the next day, play some games, and call the Team B (or vice versa). At 9 – 9:15pm we all crawl out of the science tent, use the poo tent one last time and hurry back into our own tents. The stove gets lit again and we start getting ready for bed: brushing teeth, using the remaining 1-2 baby wipes of the day to clean the rest of our body, making hot water for our hot water sleeping bag bottles, writing the blog, and sorting the meteorite images from that day. By 10-10:30pm we are usually cuddled up inside our sleeping bags. We read for another 30min or so and then pull our hats over our eyes, close the sleeping bag all the way until only our noses can be seen, and then try to ignore the winds howling and rattling on the tent walls, trying to ignore the brightly lit tent from the sun, and trying to fall asleep. I noticed that my body needs a lot more rest here than at home. 8 hours of sleep here feel so short and not enough and I usually wake up tired, while at home 8 hours is a luxury.

And then we start all over again at 7am the next day. Every day. We don’t take days off unless we are forced to by unsafe weather conditions and we have to stay inside our tents. These days then become tent days and are usually filled with sleeping, napping, water production, eating, chatting, and other mischievous things. But that is a story for another time.