Natalie Morrison
Editor's Note: Our southernmost correspondent, Patricia Ballou, is currently stateside. She has enlisted some Antarctic friends to help her continue with her letters from Antarctica series, where we get a rare glimpse into the lives and purposes of the people that head to one of the world's most inhospitable places in the name of research.
My name is Natalie Morrison a.k.a. Talie and I recently celebrated my 62nd birthday in Antarctica! I had just completed a summer season when I was presented with the opportunity to winter on the ice. Due to my background as a Colorado wilderness guide, wilderness EMT and longtime member of the Crested Butte Search and Rescue Team, I landed a spot on the Joint Antarctic Search and Rescue Team (JASAR). It has been quite the experience donning extreme cold weather gear and training for 6+ hours in the frigid blackness of the endless night. Here is one unexpected adventure I went on when a non-emergency SAR call came as Fleet Operations personnel worked on a road leading to the front of Black Island.
Parts of the SAR team accompanied Fleet Ops during the recovery of some bulldozers. My SAR buddy Kish and I rode in a Hagglund. We were over 10 miles (16 km) from McMurdo Station and well on our way across the Ross Ice Shelf when a change in weather put our convoy into Condition 1 status. This means visibility less than 100 ft (3.5 m) and sustained winds of over 55 knots. We had marine radar but it wasn't working and the GPS unit was not programmed with the current road we were on. In the blowing snow we lost the road altogether and made a futile effort to find the marked path. Kish was doing his best to watch for irregularities on the ice and I continued to try to use the GPS to navigate us to safety and then something unexpected happened. The Hagglund was on its side - all the alarms were screaming at us - and we were falling around inside the cab! "Yikes, what has happened?!" After making sure we were physically in one piece Kish ventured out to assess the terrain. We had fallen off a five foot shelf of snow into a gully.
Hagglunds are all terrain vehicles designed for amphibious operation, and consequently they float. This is a fact one appreciates when driving on sea ice which always involves some risk of breaking through the ice into the water below.
We radioed our status back to McMurdo Operations and in the end, it was determined a rescue team would be deployed in the morning and we agreed to spend a night on the ice. The temperature was below -40C (-40F). There was a moment when my mind protested: "You are in Antarctica - you are stranded on the ice in Condition 1 - and you think you are going to spend the night out here?" Needless to say, risking others during the storm was not an option so Kish and I set out to make camp.
Our sideways world in the cab of the Hagglund was not working and we used our skills from Happy Camper class (Antarctic survival school). We had plenty of supplies including sleeping bags, hand warmers and our trusty saw which was used to cut blocks of compacted snow to make a wall screening us from the wind. With the tent pitched and us snuggled in for the long night it became a mental game. I fell victim to dehydration and leg cramps set in. By 9:00 am the rescue crew was on their way. We watched as another Hagglund negotiated the rough terrain. At one point it took them two and half hours to move a half mile. We made it back to McMurdo and now I can say that I survived a real Antarctic adventure.
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