Читать книгу Serious Survival: How to Poo in the Arctic and Other essential tips for explorers - Bruce Parry - Страница 20
ОглавлениеIt’s one thing to survive in such a hostile environment, quite another to contemplate actually working. Swathed in endless layers of clothes, worrying about getting too hot or cold and with all your liquids freezing solid, working effectively is a massive challenge. As with most things in the Arctic, you have to be incredibly organised and allow lots of time to do the smallest thing.
HOT TIPS FOR COLD CONDITIONS
Take lots of disposable chemical hand-warmers, which begin to heat as soon as they’re taken out of their airtight packet and last for five or six hours. Placed between inner layers of gloves they will keep your hands nice and warm, along with anything else you store there. On particularly cold days they can also be placed between layers of socks.
Searching pockets for your camera/sunglasses/compass while wearing three layers of gloves at –40°C (–40°F) is not good news. Work out a system for where everything goes in your clothes and rucksack pockets – and stick to it.
Losing an essential piece of kit like a glove will ruin your trip and may lead to serious cold injuries. Avoid misplacing bulky outer mitts by tying them together with a long cord. Then thread the cord through the arms of your jacket like a schoolchild. If you want to do something in a hurry, you can whip the bulky mitts off without worrying.
Take only a small digital camera. If there’s a dial with lots of different arty settings tape it over – otherwise it’ll probably get turned accidentally as you wrestle your camera out of a pocket, ruining a once-in-a-lifetime photo opportunity. Fiddly dials and buttons are almost impossible to use with gloves on anyway.
Disposable alkaline batteries are hopeless at low temperatures. Use lithium or if possible rechargeable batteries for all electronic gadgets like cameras and GPS handsets. Even these will go dead alarmingly fast in the cold, so keep the devices warm in an inside pocket, perhaps adding a hand-warmer, until the moment you need them. Keep a couple of spare batteries tucked in your gloves.
The Serious expedition was stormbound for three days on the sea ice in an Arctic blizzard.
FILMING SERIOUS ARCTIC
Making a major ‘fly-on-the-wall’ documentary series, the filming team didn’t have the luxury of sitting around waiting for cold cameras to get to tent temperature and stop steaming up. And they certainly couldn’t afford to have them ice up if they needed to quickly run out of a tent. The only answer was to have two sets of cameras – one for outside and one for in.
HOW DO YOU avoid your glasses steaming up when you go into a tent?
A big question with sadly no easy answer. While tents are likely to be far from room temperature they will almost always be warmer than anything coming in from outside, so any moisture in the air inside the tent will immediately condense on glasses, camera lenses and so on (just as the cold windscreen of a car will steam up on a winter’s morning).
If you want to take pictures inside, you just have to wait till the camera has warmed up to the temperature of the tent.
Whatever you do, don’t let your glasses steam up and then immediately head back outside. The moisture will freeze in seconds, leaving you to scrape the ice off the specs before you can see, or in the case of a camera possibly putting it out of action for the rest of the trip.
As a tent was erected a film camera would be deposited inside so it was always at the ambient temperature. Camera operators filming in the open could then follow a story inside by leaving their cold camera outside by the door, and picking up the ‘inside’ camera as they entered the tent – with no danger of it steaming up. Similarly, they could run back outside if needed and pick up the ‘outside’ camera to carry on filming.
There is certainly no polar filming guidebook with perfect solutions to every problem. Each Arctic camera operator has favoured compromises, for example, a battery pack strapped inside their body with a lead to the film camera. This helps keep the batteries warm so they last longer, but may be very awkward for filming. Similarly, some use heated camera jackets, which feel great as you poke your hands through special sleeves to get at the controls. However, they may be hugely frustrating as you flounder around trying to film a one-off incident in a hurry.
CAN YOU stop all your lotions and potions freezing?
Only if they’re somewhere warm, which basically means tucking anything that might freeze inside your clothes near to your body, or thawing them out overnight by taking them into your sleeping bag with you. Rucksacks or cases will be well below zero whether inside your tent or not, and anything left in them will be frozen solid.
This means some careful thought about what to take on the expedition. For example, do you need shampoo, deodorant and all those creams? (Most would say not – you won’t be doing much by way of washing.) And what about toothpaste? (Many would say yes, feeling that fresh breath is worth the space taken up by the tube in the sleeping bag.)
WILL CONTACT LENSES freeze to your eyes?
A common worry, but actually highly unlikely. As soon as the temperature plummets you should hopefully be wearing goggles, which will keep the icy wind off your eyes. More likely is for eyes to freeze shut as a result of them watering in the cold and the eyelashes freezing together. A warm hand placed over the eye will soon thaw it out.
Contact lenses are actually more practical in the Arctic than glasses, which are awkward to wear under goggles and are forever steaming up and freezing over. Not to say that lenses don’t have their own problems. Keeping fluids and unused lenses from freezing is another logistical nightmare.
The temperature inside the Serious Arctic base camp, erected on the frozen sea, rarely crept above freezing point. First job in the morning was scraping the ice off the ceiling.
