Arctic Survival Class

Joined: 23 Mar 2004 Posts: 84

So, last weekend I got to meet all the other teachers who are going to
various destinations in the arctic over the summer as we all participated
in an Arctic Survival Training class. It was great--we got to learn how
to build shelters in the wilderness, improvise clothing and materials to
say warm and safe and also how to survive differents situations. My hope
is that none of us will have to use anything that we learned this weekend.
We also learned the best clothing to wear and why, how to build nets and
tie knots and even how to build snowshoes from stuff in the wild. We also
did some basic first aid and CPR which was a good refresher.

I also had the opportunity to get my laptop and digital camera and I
practiced using both of them hooked up to the satellite phone. Although
communicating from the Lena may be difficult, if all the equipment works,
I should be able to call and talk with my school and keep up this webpage
pretty easily. There have been a lot of people working hard to allow for
this to happen which I owe a big thank you to!

At this point, I am busy filling out lots of forms right now! It takes a
lot of paperwork to get anywhere in Russia I am finding out. First, I had
to get an official invitation to go--and I have gotten that--Yippee! Now
I am working on getting a Visa which is basically a permission to spend
time in the country and I am filling out medical forms. We are going to
have access to an amazing medical network, so if anything goes wrong
medically while we are there, we call one number and get matched up with a
network of doctors. Again, hopefully we will not need to use it!

Finally--with about three weeks to go, Max and I are working on getting
water quality kits together and are thinking of some lessons to do from
the field--so there is still a lot of thinking going on. Additionally, Max
has solicited the help of Salisbury students with another possible project
in the Russian Arctic concerning lakes, so my students are helping him
look at data and come up with questions, predictions, and hypotheses.