The day started again at 0630 and my eye still seriously bloodshot, I think I could have done with a few more hours in bed. The four of us headed down to UNIS at 0730where we each went to our separate groups, the boys off to the rifle range, Frances to navigation, and I headed to avalanche rescue (after getting my cup of coffee, of course).
The avalanche training was run by two energetic PhD students and their presentation was fun and interesting. Every time you answered a question right you got a chocolate thrown at you, though few of us in the class answered, obviously prompting the Tom Lehrer quote “now let’s not always see the same hands.” Always good to randomly laugh to yourself in the middle of class people will not think you are weird at all. We learnt how to use our avalanche beacons and how to deal with different avalanche scenarios and situations. We spent the last hour and a half of the lesson outside, where it was very cold. One of the leaders taught me a way to get blood pumping into your fingers; basically you act like a penguin shrugging its shoulders (it really works). I worked with Robert and we each hid the beacon while the other had to go find it. We then split the group into two and ran off to hide a big box with a transmitter inside so that the other group would have to use their beacons to find the general location, the avalanche probes to pinpoint the position and, the shovels to dig it out. We started looking for the other group’s box quickly finding the region in the snow pile. We did, however, take far too long with the avalanche probes to pinpoint its location. The shovelling of the snow was done quickly and efficiently and we were the first to get the box out of the snow pile and back to the start. The other team did pinpoint the boxes location first however we managed to dig ours out faster so we won. As there was more time left we repeated the exercise this time learning from out previous mistakes and won by a big margin.
After lunch, and more coffee we had the navigation session. We looked through a few maps of Longyearbyen and the surrounding glaciers and fjords and learnt what different symbol on the map meant. We went through how to answer a radio and satellite call as well as how to set up a GPS route and load it onto a handheld GPS device. Once a short route had been programed into the device we were split into groups of three and given both a radio and satellite phone. Heading outside into the cold once again we headed off from UNIS up towards the hotel where we called back to Stephan using the satellite phone and followed the route back to UNIS. Once back inside we loaded the tracker from the GPS to see how closely to the route we stayed and to view the speed and altitude profile.
Now, after a long but swift walk back from UNIS to Nybyen, I am sitting in my room with Stu cooking the dinner, pizza, watching Lie To Me again as there is no new TV this week and contemplating what revision I don’t want to do next.
Tomorrow, SHOOTING!!!
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