First night/first full day

Joined: 23 Mar 2004 Posts: 72

Watch movies from Nikki's journeys in Summit, Greenland:

On a PC, right click - "Save Target As..." or on a Mac, right click - "Download Linked File As..."

http://archive.arcus.org/TREC/downloads/movie1.mpg
DOWNLOAD - Movie 1

http://archive.arcus.org/TREC/downloads/movie2.mpg
DOWNLOAD - Movie 2

I have a HUGE disappointing announcement for my students.... I have not gotten even a small amount of elevation sickness. I know I have let you down, but I'm sure I can make up for it this little tidbit: This morning, we got trapped in the tent that we slept in!! There, now don't you feel better:) I'll give you more details in a bit. Let me go back to the beginning.

Last night, it was a little weird going to bed because the sun doesn't completely set anymore. Not that it is shining brightly, its just not nighttime dark. It takes a while to fall asleep like that. The large tent that we slept in is somewhat heated, and the sleeping bag that vecopolar supplied me with is designed to work in extreme cold. I also took some advice from the more experienced: take a waterbottle of boiling water and put it inside the sleeping bag. It works!! There were times when I was actually hot!

As I said yesterday, we got a pretty strong windstorm yesterday afternoon. It went on through the night, and through all of today. As I look out the window, it looks like it may be slowing down. At one point in the night, I heard a loud bang. I looked around, and the door had been sucked open by the strong winds. I was hoping someone else would get up and close it, but everyone else was already asleep (or at least they did a mighty fine job pretending they were asleep), so I had no choice but to get out of my warm sleeping bag and shut the door!! Brrrr!!!
After that, I slept great.

In the morning, I awoke to the sounds of the others in the tent moving from one side to the other, pushing on doors, walking around, and just generally acting bizarre. I sat up, and discovered that we were snowed in!!! Andreas and Donna could not get the door open, so they were searching for an emergency exit. They found one, and Andreas climbed out and shoveled out the door way so we could get out.

After breakfast, I decided to walk out to the satellite camp. The winds were still really, really strong, and the snow was blowing. You couldn't see the sat camp at all. I knew that it was just past the swiss tower, but very faintly in the distance I could see TWO towers!! Not sure which one was the one I wanted to walk to, I stood there for a bit trying to decide which way to go. I knew, with my luck, I would walk toward the wrong tower and then get REALLY lost. So, I had to swallow my pride and go back to the big house and ask for help. I didn't like having to do that, but its better than getting lost!!

This is me on the way to sat camp!!! (With assistance, of course)

On the way back from the sat camp, I decided to try one more time to go solo- this time I made it!!! I also took some pictures of the blowing and drifting snow. This is blowing like we don't often see- even in Wisconsin!!
The winds were so strong, and visibility was so low, that the plane that was supposed to land today had its flight cancelled. Maybe tomorrow!!

Tomorrow I will be busy doing audio conferences all afternoon. I am doing one with Mrs. Rose's fourth graders (my son Ian's class), and then two with the Arctic Alive program, which includes my students and possibly others from around the country! That should be fun- we had such a great trial run last week before I left.

Looking forward to tomorrow

Nikki