Now Is the Winter of Our Discount TentChapter 3
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Now, here well above the Arctic Circle, things started to get more serious.
We spent a day in Gjoa Haven with a new batch of Inuit instructors who tried to cram innumerable lifetimes of their Arctic survival knowledge into what seemed to us to be mere moments. Utter information overload.
We learned how to build igloos from out of both loose and packed snow and how to cut blocks from ocean pack ice as well. We were given a brief overview of the local fauna and flora, and the seasonal hunting cycle of the Inuit, so that we could find fish or game nearly any time of year, hopefully. This was not a land of plenty, but for careful and smart travelers there were meals to be found out here.
Then we received an all too brief introduction to kayaks and sleds and how to manage sled dogs and our group then joined a big traditional style hunting party that left King William Island for adventure and the unknown. It was below freezing cold outside but the pack ice down here wasn't frozen quite sufficiently here yet, so we sledded north a bit until we found some firm ice flows to start to work our way over eastward. We had to use the boats off and on, but we made fast progress.
We made igloos for the entire hunting party (we needed the practice and they didn't) and spent an Arctic night learning how to hunt for seal the old fashioned way, carving fish hooks from bone and using seal intestines as fishing line, and learning other bits of Inuit lore. The less said about eating nearly frozen seal blubber the better!
The next morning the hunting party took us further east across a section of now firm winter ice over to the Boothia Peninsula where for the first time, at about evening, we met our geology instructors. Our actual field problems hadn't begun yet, but for the rest of the week the Inuits accompanied our survival instructors while we trouped around the vast miserable stretches of the Canadian Arctic. We were always cold, sometimes wet and often utterly miserable. Still the smart folks picked an Inuit mentor and learned (or tried to) as much as about this seeming frozen desert as we could. A few of the little tid-bits of lore that I picked up probably saved my life several times in later years.
My buddy-partner this time was a Pennsylvania kid who really wanted to get into the Arctic petroleum exploration business and become obscenely rich. The kid was as smart as a whip but he was a bit too thin and weedy for this sort of business. He really didn't take the cold very well and was always taking unauthorized breaks to brew up constant batches of instant coffee to fend off the chill. It never quite worked. He received a pass for this field exercise, but the instructors had their eye on him as a very definite weak link. He withdrew from the class during the middle of the next official Field Problem and decided to get into the Gulf of Mexico off-shore drilling business instead. Definitely warmer.
The less I say about our actual survival exercises and the next week of our Field Problem out here in the northern Arctic islands of the Northwest Passage the better. The feeling of fun and adventure that most of us had had was well worn off by now. The weather was getting more like winter every day and our working hours of daylight were decreased noticeably. In another few weeks we would have lost the sun entirely until spring. Working half-way up a frozen cliff in bare minimal daylight is one thing, but doing it nearly all night long under electric lights powered by a diesel generator was a real learning experience. We suffered lots of falls and minor injuries, but no broken bones that anyone would admit to. I strained my left shoulder trying to take a core sample overly deep into the permafrost on our next to last day, but I grit my teeth and tried to think of happier thoughts, and took Advil by the handful to get by for the next week.
When the dog sleds returned a week and a half later to take us back to the Inuit town, hot food and a waiting snow plane, we were all nearly too done in and too exhausted to cheer about it. This time there was hot food, if you call hot boiled seal food. I was too tired and hungry to care. Doing hard physical work in freezing temperatures is the world's greatest known diet plan. I started off this Camp with at least twenty extra unnecessary pounds and I'm sure I had already lost at least a pound of body weight every single day so far. You need to eat at least 5,000 plus calories a day in the Arctic just to maintain your weight and I just couldn't eat enough, fast enough.
It's also funny that you start to crave rich and fatty foods, especially bacon and hamburgers ... not to mention bacon topped cheeseburgers. Om nom nom! Chocolate helped the cravings, but didn't stop them entirely. I was starting to understand why 19th century explorers loved pemmican and other weird high-fat/high calorie foods. Your body actually craves this sort of stuff under these conditions. How the three vegetarians and our sole vegan student suffered I couldn't possibly imagine. By the end of Camp, all four would (and did) happily kneel and beg for a single slice of bacon.
In theory, our course was now almost half done now and I vaguely assumed that the worst was now over. Ha! Not even remotely.
Our plane took us to Yellowknife, up in the Northwest Territories, where we hoped to have a warm week under a roof while we learned some more specific details of this region of Canada's geologic history. Instead we arrived at this small city too late for dinner and after a very rushed and quite inadequate breakfast we were split up into five groups of six, each group having one of our geology and survival instructors. We then flew off at first light in one of the floatplanes to a different geologic site.
I drew the Crinoid card this time and was buddied with a kid from New Hampshire who didn't panic every time it started to snow, lightly or otherwise. Thank heaven! His specialty was geochemistry and he'd spent enough time out in the wilderness back home that he didn't freak out every time an owl hooted above one of our shelters in the middle of the night. He did have a slight paranoid fear about running into a Sasquatch out in the woods at night, but that's a different story. Except for Estelle, he was my favorite partner and I wished I could have kept him for the rest of the Camp!
While in the plane in the darkness of the winter early morning, our work group would be lectured by one of our instructors and we'd study reference materials for an hour or two, depending how far away the desired outcrop of rocks was, work the site for several hours while there was light and then practice building crude emergency shelters. Once the shelters were done, we'd fix a quick lunch and then shuffle off onto the plane to a different site, where we'd perform the same routine all over again until we ran out of daylight. This time though, at the afternoon locations, we'd actually camp there for the night.
We tried making big communal beef stews to give all six of us a hot dinner at night, but we'd just about come to blows over the last scrapings in the bottom of the pot. We were eating constantly but feeling like we were starving. It wasn't good for our morale and caused quite a few sub-surface tensions to start to boil over.
For a week we visited at least ten different field locations, climbed hills, chipped out frozen rocks and then cut down small trees to construct lean-to's and small huts out of the local materials. We added yet more tools (and weight) to our already groaning backpacks as we tried desperately to think of and cover the next survival twist our sadistic instructors might yet inflict upon us. We never got close.
After these few days of wild runabout, we were given a few hours late one afternoon to stock-up on our food supplies in Yellowknife before the start of our next Field Problem. I didn't have much money to spend and I'd need to restock once more after this for the mountain phase of the course, so I concentrated upon the strict essentials. More MRE style dehydrated food, a small sack of dried beans and as much bacon as I could afford.
Then it was off for a fun filled week in the northern woods!
For this exercise, the thirty of us were split up into three groups of ten, and each group was dropped off at a different 'base camp' somewhere north-northwest of Yellowknife. My group was somewhere east of the Mackenzie River but west of Great Bear Lake, surrounded by wild nature and freezing cold ice and snow.
Once arriving at our base camps, we were given about two hours to construct a proper camp and get our bearing. We sent out two search groups to make a circular exploration of our immediate area for a miles distance and the rest of us dug out a proper stone lined cooking pit and started to cut and trim small fir trees. No, we were not allowed to use our tents for this Field Problem either. So far on this Camp it hadn't been used for real out in the field except for the overnight trip with Estelle and I was starting to regret all of the hassle I'd gone through to find and bring it along.
Estelle was in my group once again and we said 'Hi' quite a bit but not much else. I hoped we'd match cards again to be partnered up together, but she drew an Osteolepis (A Devonian armored fish) and teamed up right away with one of the other gals, a pretty blonde named Maisie, who was from UC-Berkley. I had drawn a Graptolite (a Silurian drifting filter feeder). Just a few million years too early for Estelle ... sigh.
My new buddy-partner was a bit of a head-case from UCLA who had failed a previous 'normal' Field Camp out in the middle of the Arizona desert. He said he didn't handle the heat too well but that he did alright out here in the cold. His geoscience skills were on the weak side and he wasn't very competent when handling a map and navigating either. Since he was bigger and stronger than me, we worked out an arrangement where I'd let him carry all of the rocks and extra tools, while I did most of the mapping, drawing and stratigraphy. It ended up being a fairly smooth working arrangement, but by the end of the week I was starting to resent having to do all of the 'hard science'.
Each of our grouped pairs of students was assigned an 'unexplored' grid area of about ten by ten miles to explore, photograph research, map, and of course collect rock samples. We were to be systematic and as precise as possible and geologically date (roughly) everything in our assigned area and note any indicators that would suggest that future exploration in this region would be commercially or scientifically advantageous.
We were allowed two trips back to our base camp for the purpose of dropping off rock samples, collecting a needed instrument, more food, or just plain rest and recovery in the event of a bad blizzard. It snowed regularly all week, but not heavily and with my sturdy pack mule bearing nearly a hundred extra pounds of rocks, we only needed one trip back to camp all week.
Other than our instructors, who always seemed to be right there over our shoulders just quietly observing, we never saw anyone else the whole week long. Allegedly, during this Field Problem, two more students quit due to the miserable cold conditions, and another four students were failed, having turned in excessively inaccurate or inadequate field work. Another student suffered an injury from a fall (three cracked ribs) that necessitated dropping from the course and finally, one student became utterly 'lost in the woods' entirely. It took the survival instructors about three days to find him and they sent him on home with a fail grade.
My buddy ought to have been failed out for his inadequate fieldwork, but like a good partner I covered over (most) of his lack of equal participation. Karma did catch up with him during our final Advanced Field Problem when his new partner wouldn't stand for his laziness (or stupidity) and complained. After an instructor conducted a surprise inspection specifically to check his work (or lack of it) he was promptly escorted off of the mountain and delivered gear and all to the train station at the local town of Field, for the trip back to Calgary ... and home.
When we finally flew out of there and returned back to Calgary to start the final mountain phase of the program, another two students just packed up and went back home, or to somewhere else where it was warm. They just said that they'd had enough.
That left twenty young, cold and utterly miserable students left for the final and by far the worst phase of the Camp. Two fun and snow filled weeks high up in the mountains of Yoho National Park. On the bright side, on the way up we would be supposedly stopping at the most famous fossil outcrop in the world, the Burgess Shale, where the long dead animals had their soft body parts preserved and thus the complete fossil remains of middle Cambrian era life were first exposed to science.
I should have known better ... our 'visit' to the famous Walcott Quarry of the Burgess Shale, right above the small town of Field, British Columbia, lasted for exactly fifteen minutes, or the full length of our scheduled rest stop. No collecting was allowed. Rat Bastards!
I turned over a few rocks and thought I saw part of an Anomalocaris, but I wasn't sure. A moment later and it was time to hoist heavy packs once more and on we marched around Mount Field.
Damn, I had so wanted to find a nice utterly perfect trilobite or even a Hallucigeni, but not this year.
Marisol
- 18.04.2021
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