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13 February 2007-Comments:

Cameron has made it back safely to the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium (BASC). He will have a comment later tonight (13 feb).

The following is Cameron's email comment:

"I started at minus 24 this AM, that's 24 degrees below zero Farenheit...which doesn't mean much. A better way to describe the temperature is to work down from, say 70 degrees, the temperature at which most folks feel comfortable in shirtsleeves. From there, drop down 40 degrees to freezing (32F), which most of us have experienced. From there, drop down a further 32 degrees to zero Farenheit...at this point you're 82 degrees below what most people call comfortable. Now drop another 24, to 24 below zero, and you're about 100 degrees colder than comfortable. Getting out of the sleeping bag at that temperature -- when every breath is a roil of crystalline fog and the whole tent interior is glittering with froms from your breathing all night -- is an act of will. But to tell you the truth, as long as I'm moving, and active, I'm OK, so rule #1 is: no standing around! To do fiddly things like take photos or video almost alwyas removing gloves, and even in liner gloves, a few seconds exposed to -24F nixes my fingers for the next hour -- taht's when I'll feel them again. So, every move has to be carefully planned out.

At the 6th of today's 7 miles, I was given a ride back into town by a native hunter, Billy Leavitt, who talked to me about polar bears, wolverines, arctic foxes, and his cabins on the Chipp River, just South of Smith Bay. He's going out to them in a week or so, and invited me along -- he also invited me to help with the preparation of his umiaq, the large walrus-skin whale-hunting boat used by natives here. Well, as an anthropologist and archaeologist, I can't pass up such opportunities, so I am changing my plan for this year quite a bit -- and for the best.

Since my real objective is a book and educational DVD on the North Shore in Winter, it would be crazy to pass up these opportunities to learn from the native people here. Sure, I could learn a lot by trekking the north coast (though the sea ice is apparenlty poor for it this year), and I certainly learned more than I can write here in just this last little jaunt...however I can learn more -- a thousand years of adaptation by native people more -- by accepting their invitations to learn from them. So that's waht I'm going to do. After this week's Kiviuk festival of Arctic native peoples, I'll make some combination of learning about the umiaq, living in a cabin on the coast for a couple of weeks, and travelling overland with a native hunter, to his own hunting camp just South of Smith Bay. I already have dozens of notes and photos and the form of the book and numerous other writings about this extraordinary place are taking shape. I'll keep posting plans here as they develop."



All Material Copyright 2007 Cameron McPherson Smith unless otherwise credited.