Windy Day At high Camp

Bill called and I could just hear him over the noise of the tent flapping in the gusts. He said the last 24 hours have been a challenge with very high winds buffeting their camp. They all got out of the tents today and fortified their snow walls. The forecast is for the winds to relent a bit tonight, so they might have a summit chance tomorrow.

The snow walls i mentioned are made from blocks of snow that they climbers cut from the snow packed ground using specialized snow saws. There is a definite art to constructing solid walls that will not topple over under a particularly strong gust. We get lots of practice with this on Denali, and the same techniques help make for efficient work down in Antarctica.

We are using two types of tents on this expedition. Our Hilleberg tents are made in Sweden and are of the "tunnel" variety. they have four hooped poles that form a tunnel, with the climbers sleeping lengthwise under the tunnel. They are very strong and quite spacious for their relatively light weight. Our other tent of choice for Arctic and Antarctic expeditions is the venerable Trango 3.1 from Mountain Hardwear. These are somewhat more traditional "dome" tents that are very strong in high winds and are able to withstand heavy snow loads without collapsing.

Though the winds have been high, the temperatures have been relatively mild. Nighttime lows have not gone much below -20 Fahrenheit, and last night a thick cloud cover, associated with the current storm, kept temps even warmer.