How Many Calories Can You Burn in One Day?

At the end of a long day, so this entry will be short. We spent the morning organizing gear and separating our trail food into individual days. We will be skiing up to about nine hours a day. In twenty or thirty below, this means that each of us will burn at least 6,000 calories a day, possibly a lot more. We will stop for five minutes every hour to eat a snack, but there is no real lunch break, so you need a lot of high calorie snack variety. My two favorites are dried pineapple and chocolate hazelnut butter in little squeeze packets. You also lose a lot of water through sweat and heavy breathing, so spend a lot of time in camp melting snow to drink.

After kitting up, we went for a six mile shakedown ski, pulling a full expedition load. Halfway through, we stopped and practiced setting up our Hilderberg polar expedition tents. Then we worked the stoves, dug a snow latrine, etc. Interestingly, due to increasing activity, and the fact that human waste never degrades in Antarctica, we have to carry out all solids, and can only make one communal hole for liquid waste each day. The location of those holes is logged using GPS to monitor impact. Next we put on our full face protection (exposed skin freezes almost instantly in the wind on the polar plateau.). Skiing with a "Dart Vader" mask on generates a lot of moisture - you really need to work to make sure that it doesn't ice up inside your goggles!

There were the usual trail delays getting everything adjusted. David's size 14 boots are flexible enough that his skis kept rolling out from under him. Not fun, We finally tried swapping his two skis - using them on the wrong sides forced them to roll the other way, in instead of out, which worked beautifully. We made it back to camp at about 8 pm. I ate two enormous plates of stroganoff, yams, and carrots, plus lots of water to replace some of those calories we'd burned and sweat we lost. Then more gear reorganization, and finally bed. Tomorrow, if the weather holds, we will fly in a "Twin Otter" ski plane for four hours to a jump off point nearer the Pole. I hope that it goes better than the last time I flew in a Twin Otter - that flight started with breaking the landing gear on takeoff, and ended with a crash landing that did a million Dollars of damage to the plane. That sort of thing would never happen twice, right?