11 November, 1997

Shackleton's Journal   11/11/97

Today was the last day of survival camp.   I spent the night in a
mountaineering tent on the Ross Ice Field with the wind blowing and snow
drifting around my tent.  The tent was warm because I was curled up in my
mummy sleeping bag and I had kept on my orange snow suit and blue hat.
The wind howled most of the night and then all of a sudden, it wasnít
blowing anymore. It was very very quiet outside.   When you are out on a
moving ice sheet and the wind stops blowing and everyone else is asleep, it
is a very very quiet and even a little scary.  Even in the forest the birds
sing or the leaves move or water seems to be trickling down in a stream.
There is no noise at all here.  Try being  very quite and still and see if
you can get the same feeling that I did.  Sometimes at home or in school
there is always another noise around.  Here there is nothing at all but
silence.

The wind began to howl again before I crawled out of my sleeping bag but it
seemed to blow the clouds away from the active volcano on Antarctica.   As
I stretched and scratched my way out of the tent, to the right stood Mt.
Erebus looking down on me.    They say that some days you can see smoke
coming from the center of its crater (a large hole on the top that allows
lava to come out).  Lava is melted rock that has moved from the inside of
the earth to the outside.   Mt. Erebus often throws rocks out of its crater
and even some that they call crystals ëcause of their shape.   I wonder if
the people who first explored Antarctica really thought that a dragon or
some other monster lived here because of the belching volcano?

Left of my tent was the extinct volcano - Mt. Discovery.  In all the other
directions are smaller mountains and lots of pretty blue ice in crevasses
(holes that have opened up in the ice) or ice slides. Here in Antarctica,
the ice is not only white but comes in pretty shades of blue.   Blue ice
means that the snow that fell has lost its pretty snow flake shape (now
they call it firn) and then they have been pushed together tightly to let
out the air between the snow flakes.   Have you ever taken a glass crystal
that hangs in a window and watched the pretty colors that come through when
the sun light hits it?   Have you ever seen a rainbow?   Well ice works the
same way but it only lets blue light be reflected back to you and not all
the other pretty colors.    Antarctica is made up of ice that reflects blue
much like a rainbow gives us the other pretty colors.

Our last thing for the day was to put buckets with faces painted on them
over our heads. We tied rope to our wrists then tried to find a missing
person (the instructor) and get him back to the hut.   Have you ever tried
covering your head with a paper bag and try to find  something?   We did
this to learn how they rescue people lost in a storm called a white out.

We headed home by taking turns driving a tracked vehicle called a Sprite
and then on to snowmobile training.   Can you believe that a bear likes to
ride snowmobiles?