The best field trip in the world

I received a notice from my boss that I would need to attend a class on sea ice safety. I was excited about the class, but I did not know it would actually be the best field trip I could ever imagine. After an hour in the classroom talking about safety on the ice, examining sea cracks, and how to drill and test the depth we loaded up. The vehicle of choice for the day was called a haglundd. These are similar to snowCats, but they have a driver control panel cab and a caboose for passengers. It was a bumpy ride out but we cruised into our first stop after an hour. Riding in these vehicles was a thrill. This and snowmobiles are the most coverted vehicles for riding in on station. A tourist might pay a few hundred dollars for a joy ride in one of these bad boys, but instead, I was getting paid for job training...pretty cool. We learned emergency shelter building techniques on the ice and use of ice screws for anchors. From there the adventure began. After about an hour and half of rolling over drifts in the rubber tracks we arrived at Cape Roids. Cape Roids protrudes out of the coast like a lighthouse to an otherwise white and blue island. We stepped out of the Haglundd to find seals all around us...maybe fifty of them, and huge ice formations called pressure ridges. The sea ice was very weak in these spots and the seals come up through the holes here to hang out in the sun. We were directly at the base of sea ice cliffs and glaciers on smoking Mt. Erebius. The sun was as bright as I could imagine and we were in awe. Being twenty miles from station surely brought the feeling of being in backountry Antarctica. We then did some drilling in the ice, took some quick samples, and headed home. It was my favorite field trip ever!