BLACK FLAGS I

There must be hundreds of thousands of bamboo flag poles in Antarctica.  That's probably going to drive some paleontologist mad a few million years from now.  Different colored flags on those poles have different meanings.  A flag pole with a black flag indicates that something about the area is dangerous.  One of the dangerous things that could be in the area are crevasses.  Since our journey in Western Antarctica would take us through areas where crevasses lived we did some training before we left McMurdo on the various techniques one must know to extract a person should they fall into a crevasse.

The training was conducted by our two mountaineers, Ash Morton and Peter Braddock.  The first portion of the training was indoors and it covered things such as how to get yourself up and down a rope without hanging yourself or kicking the crap out of the guy next to you.

The second part of the training involved going out to the crevasse training area near where snow school was conducted and where a large trench had been bulldozed into the snow.

The scenery was pretty hard to take.  That's Mt. Erebus behind Peter in the picture below.  There was little or no wind at the summit, so the plume from the volcanic activity just hung around the top of the mountain all day.

DIRECT LINKS TO PAGES:
THIS IS SUMMER?
NICE ZEALAND
McMURDO, ANTARCTICA
GETTING AROUND
HAPPY CAMPER SCHOOL
JUST PRACTICING I
JUST PRACTICING II
JUST PRACTICING III
SCOTT
SHACKLETON
BLACK FLAGS I
BLACK FLAGS II
BLACK FLAGS III
THE KIWIS ARE COMING!
THE SUNDAY BOONDOGGLE
WEATHER
AND AWAY WE GO!
THIS IS IT??
AN EXTRAVAGANZA OF SCIENCE
WHERE WERE WE?
LINE SHOOTING 101
GOOD HOUSEKEEPING
FOOD
OTHER CAMP STUFF
GPS CONFLUENCE GEOCACHING PHOTOGRAPHY
BYRD SURFACE CAMP
PACKING IS SUCH SWEET SORROW
THAT'S ALL FOLKS!

2006-Jul-30