Raising Camp

We finally arrive at the site that will be our base camp for the next week. It is a site Audun concludes he will never again use. We will hug the side of a mountain peak in between a mountain range that will serve as our jumping off point for our daily expeditions. The mountain gods will send us blizzards and violent wins to punish us for our choice of "refuge."

Upon our arrival, I am hoping for some rest and to ease my nerves. But we have arrived late, and while it will not be completely dark (or at least nearly dark) until midnight, it is only getting colder. So while the wind dares us and the snow races against us, we start digging. We will have to dig out a place for our tents and smooth and pack the snow to give us some decent surface on which to "sleep" at night. Almost immediately and despite Audun's warnings, one of our camp mates walks right through the wire that stakes out our space in the snow from any possible polar bear intruders. The wire is a couple of feet from the top of the snow pack and if a bear walks into the wire, it sets off firecracker sounds intended to scare him off. Audun now has to stop and reconstruct our bear wire.

It takes the five of us and several hours to fight against the conditions and raise our tents, and then we will each dig our own ditch between the outer and inner openings to the tent. The hole is so that we can take our boots off and put them on again, and Audun tells us the theory is that the cold that enters the outer zipper entrance will go down into the hole rather than into the interior of the tent. He raises his eyebrows when he tells us this.

We have a small common tent where we will cook and eat our meals and play cards after dinners. Our first meal consists of seal meat, a repugnant tasting plate, but after our first day, I have no room for hunger anyway.