As many of you know I have been here before. And I’ve done the safety training, which is discussed at length in this post. However, I’m back, and we did it all again! Though this time there is the added layer of darkness and coldness to everything, EVERYTHING. We had some fun loading and firing the rifles in -15 degrees, it’s amazing how hard it gets to load a bullet when your fingers are frozen. Not to mention the released cartridges melting the ice on the floorboards and getting frozen to the floor, ahhh the cold, all these things you never think about.
So we had some classroom lessons, basically looking at various pictures of how the winter can kill you, well in most cases how it can seriously disrupt your day.
Basically, we’re remote, it can take days for rescue if something goes wrong and the weather is bad, and as they say, small mistakes escalate quickly. Of course this is the kind of thing that makes parents worry, but for any kids out there with parent’s going all “grey nomad” on them, just remember, the desert can be just as treacherous as the snow. It’s just a different kind of treacherous.
But, as usual, BE PREPARED and don’t do anything overly dumb, which is the pretext for most safety briefings.
So we had some classroom lessons, basically looking at various pictures of how the winter can kill you, well in most cases how it can seriously disrupt your day.
Basically, we’re remote, it can take days for rescue if something goes wrong and the weather is bad, and as they say, small mistakes escalate quickly. Of course this is the kind of thing that makes parents worry, but for any kids out there with parent’s going all “grey nomad” on them, just remember, the desert can be just as treacherous as the snow. It’s just a different kind of treacherous.
But, as usual, BE PREPARED and don’t do anything overly dumb, which is the pretext for most safety briefings.
The good news is that because it’d midwinter we don’t need to worry so much about avalanches, they become more of a problem in Spring when the snow starts to melt and get a little bit unstable. Sadly, however, we won’t be playing with any sea ice. There hasn’t been ice in the Fjords around Longyearbyen or Ny Ålesund since about 2007 due to warm waters coming up from the Atlantic, so that’s one less worry. Though it does mean more time on boats…
Glaciers sound like trouble all up, trouble in a geographic feature. Fall into a crevasse and you’re going to have a really bad day, including melting the crevasse wall and then freezing back into it, which sounds like a distinctly unpleasant afternoon. All up, it sounds quite dramatic, the basic line, don’t fall into a crevasse.
However, even when you take into account the bears, the foxes, the avalanches and the crevasses the most dangerous thing you can do is walk on the roads in the dark without high visibility clothing. Like in most places, dangerous though the wilderness can be, ultimately it’s the people that are more dangerous.
Glaciers sound like trouble all up, trouble in a geographic feature. Fall into a crevasse and you’re going to have a really bad day, including melting the crevasse wall and then freezing back into it, which sounds like a distinctly unpleasant afternoon. All up, it sounds quite dramatic, the basic line, don’t fall into a crevasse.
However, even when you take into account the bears, the foxes, the avalanches and the crevasses the most dangerous thing you can do is walk on the roads in the dark without high visibility clothing. Like in most places, dangerous though the wilderness can be, ultimately it’s the people that are more dangerous.