Thanks for the very interesting tales Bruce. Until someone experiences that level of cold it’s hard to get a grasp on just what minus 35 can do to man, machine, and human spirit when you live and work in it.
After retiring from active duty in 2000, I was invited to take part in a population survey of bowhead whales on the north slope of Alaska. I flew from Virginia Beach on a late winter day with 60F degree weather to Anchorage, Fairbanks, and my final destination to Point Barrow, the northern most point in the US. A few days later I was sleeping in an Arctic tent on the shorefast ice off the point with scientists, technicians, and some local indigenous folks. My first night on the ice was minus 35F with a fierce wind and blowing snow. I didn’t sleep much that night.
I remember getting up the next morning and I wanted to brush my teeth. Before I could do that I had to thaw my solidly frozen toothpaste in my armpit. We deployed five hydrophones through the ice along the lead between shorefast and polar pack ice. We used five sonobuoy transmitters to relay the acoustic data to a tiny insulated hut which housed computers and other equipment which was heated to a balmy 40 degrees by a lantern to operate the equipment in that harsh climate. Our acoustic data significantly extended the range and opportunity to determine the bowhead population which had normally been done using visual survey techniques alone.
As the spring approached and the temperature climbed to near zero I found myself peeling off layers of clothing and working bare armed by the time the temperature arrived to 20F degrees. We’d see the northern lights frequently at night as well as sundogs in the day. We were usually armed with shotguns due to the roaming polar bears following the scent of dead whales taken during the subsistence hunt by the locals. A friend and I were hunted by a polar bear one day as we conducted maintenance on the phones and transmitters. It was a very odd feeling to not be the top predator. I felt like a pork chop lunch when this bear looked at us. We finally chased it off using our snow machines and firing off a couple of rounds.
Cooking, using the bathroom, keeping warm, hydration and hygiene are all major challenges at that latitude (71+N). Once the ice started to break down due to the longer hours of sunlight we evacuated our camp and went ashore. The fun was over and the statistical work started to determine the population and growth trend of the bowheads.
Cheers
Growing up in NE Iowa I experienced several -35F mornings - but only for hours, not days like Bruce and Chuck experienced. After getting out of the Navy in the Spring of 1975 I started graduate school at Rutgers (NJ) that fall. However, that summer I went to Alaska with a group of graduate students and professors from Rutgers that were doing research on the salt marshes near Valdez and Homer, Alaska. We were locating permanent sampling plots and identifying/counting the marsh plants within them with the goal of being able to return and resample them following an oil spill. The group in Homer had great weather as Homer is known as the “banana belt” of Alaska. Unfortunately I was in Valdez.
Being graduate students, we were running around Valdez bay in a 14 foot ski boat and camping in tents since we couldn’t afford the inflated hotel prices in Valdez at the time the Alaskan pipeline was being constructed. Camping in Alaska may sound great but Shoup glacier was on the mountain side above us and it definitely got colder at night. Our goal one day was to go out the mouth of the bay, around a spit of land, to a marsh on the other side. There were 4 of us in the boat and as we started out of the bay we realized there was a rip tide (tide coming in, wind blowing out). We took a wave over the bow of the boat which instantly filled it half full of water. The chairman of the botany department was driving the boat and had the heaviest one of us lay on the bow to keep it down, two of us bailed water for all we were worth, and he somehow kept the motor going. In the excitement he took a 6 gallon gas can and tossed it over the side like a feather to lighten the load. Somehow we made it to land to assess our situation. Had we sunk, our life expectancy was less than 2 minutes and we definitely wouldn’t have been able to swim to shore with multiple layers of clothes, parkas, and hip boots on! We got the boat bailed out the rest of the way and started back - realizing we had tossed out our spare can of gas. We never did see it on the way back but since I am here to write this - obviously we made it. Definitely gives you a new perspective really fast on working in cold climates and needing to taking extra precautions to stay safe.
Of course there was the night when a black bear came into our campsite. But that’s another story.
Well, when I checked into NOPF Ford Is. in Jan 1994 it was 71 degrees. I had to think about changing my shorts for pants.
Randy:
One August in the early 70s, I came from Adak where the temperatures had been no higher than 55-60 and I had been running seven miles a day from the base to the FAC and back via the road that skirted Mt Moffet to COSP where I nearly died trying to run three miles on a golf course with temps close to 90, and then to San Francisco where it was 54 when I arrived.
Given a choice of Oahu or Andpya year round, I think I'd take Andoya. The older I get, the more I like winter and the less I like summer. My perspective from living most of my life in Virginia and Kentucky: go north in the winter; go further north in the summer.
Bruce
Bruce,
I lived in Norway from 1990 to 1994. I remember getting up one morning in December just before Christmas and looking outside to see the air sparkling with ice crystals and all the trees frosted over. It seems we had a inversion overnight and the temperature had dropped some 20 degrees in the night hours from just above freezing to well below. Any moisture in the air became frost and stuck to any surface it could find. It was on that morning that I truly came to understand what the expression 'it's a dry cold' really meant. It also brought a whole new meaning to a white Christmas.
Regards from the desert of Nevada,
Bob Ainsworth OTMCS (Ret.)