Its getting darn friggin' cold!

While for an Englishman its been feeling damn cold here, since I arrived from the UK 2 months ago, people keep telling me how mild it is! While I don my thermal top, alpaca jumper, padded shirt, down vest, and two fleece jackets, I can only feel a shiver as I look on at the more acclimatised Alaskans, wearing just a t shirt and jacket, and can only agree when they tell me 4 years in the Caribbean turned me soft!

Until yesterday that is when the temperature plummeted. Fortunately my car lives in a heated garage overnight, so it had no problems starting. But as soon as I drove up my driveway, the car thermometer started registering record lows. And it kept adjusting all the way down the 5 mile hill as I drove towards university. At the bottom of the hill, the temperature gauge bottomed out - at minus 18 Fahrenheit! That's a full 50 degrees below freezing point! Anyway, the true Alaskans are now throwing on some extra clothes too, and some of them are even closing their windows!

Walking in temperatures that low is hard on the lungs. The air is so dry it sucks all the moisture out of your lungs. And some people - mostly runners - have collapsed and died from literally freezing their lungs!

This weekend I'm supposed to be off camping in the White Mountains as part of my winter camping course(great that I get to do some free courses as a university employee!). So hopefully we'll get to ski in, builda snow shelter (not an igloo, takes too long) and have a gourmet pasta & veggies dish to warm up. With luckwe might be able to camp near a hot spring - think we'll be needed it! That's the great thing about working onvolcanoes - there are usually hot springs to be found! We'll be just like those monkeys you see on those nature programs, somewhere out in East Asia, where they jump from the snow into the hot spring, turned more or less instantly, jump out again, freeze again - always trying to find the happy medium. Anyway,should be fun.

Of course, this is only the beginning of true winter. The temperature could easily slide another 20 or even 30 degrees lower. Indeed it was around -60 Fahrenheit when I left here almost 7 years ago to the welcoming warmth of Montserrat. And to add to the wilderness experience at that time, the fuel pipe to my cabin had frozen up, meaning that every time I returned to my cabin it was about the same temperature as outside, and took a couple of hours for the woodstove to heat things up. A world away from life in a Caribbean villa!