so much effort you probably won’t want to ‘waste’ any for cleaning and washing – small chunks of snow will do fine for this.
THE ARCTIC DESERT
It’s one of those strange facts about the Arctic that it’s actually a desert. In the Arctic, rainfall and snowfall combined comes to less than 25cm (10in) of water. This qualifies it as a desert region, though scientists make the distinction between hot and cold deserts.
It also feels incredibly dry; cold air has hardly any moisture in it. This means that as you breathe you feel very parched.
In these conditions dehydration is a serious problem. It’s hard to force yourself to keep drinking when it’s so cold and can be such an effort to get liquid, but you’ll need at least 5 litres (1 gallon) a day to cope with all the exertion of an expedition.
HOW DO YOU take something with you to drink? Won’t it just freeze?
This is a rather crucial question that may not even cross your mind unless you’ve been to the Arctic. The fact is that in temperatures way below zero just about all liquids freeze (even mercury used in thermometers freezes at around –39°C/–38°F).
So this is where a rugged vacuum flask comes into its own. It will keep water cold all day without freezing, though on an Arctic expedition it’s best to put a hot drink in it to help keep you warm.
DRINK YOUR HOT WATER BOTTLE!
One trick for avoiding dehydration is to drink the water in your hot water bottle. When you go to bed it’s great to have a sturdy plastic bottle filled with hot water to keep your feet warm. By morning it’ll be pretty cold, and instead of wasting the precious water force yourself to drink it all. You’ll already be getting dehydrated after a night breathing dry, cold air, and it’ll get the day off on the right foot (no pun intended).
THE ARCTIC DIET
Most polar explorers come back far lighter than they started, a result of the huge effort involved in most activities, plus the energy used in keeping warm. A male adventurer may use up more than five thousand calories a day in the Arctic, double what he needs on a typical day back in ‘civilisation’. To stay the same weight he would have to eat the equivalent of about eighty slices of bread each day.
So you need to eat a lot, and in particular a lot of carbohydrates for energy – a great excuse to eat plenty of chocolate and sugar (though a frozen bar of chocolate will need to be warmed in an inside pocket before you can bite into it). While most expedition food will inevitably be stuff you add water to, take along a little ‘real’ food to thaw out for special occasions. It’s amazing what a bit of bacon, sausage or salami can do for morale.
It’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
