On Falling Temperatures and Long Shadows

Hey everyone, sorry I’m a day late. I think blog posts are going to start getting shorter for the most part as there’s not really a lot of different stuff that happens from week to week. I’ll still try and keep posting every week though for the time being. That being said, this last week is when we really started to notice that we are coming up on sunset! We had our first temperature below the -70 F mark, in fact it was down to -76 F at one point if I remember right. Windchill also dipped below the -100 F mark for the first time. It is definitely getting colder!

The shadows are also starting to get very, very long and the snow and horizon have tons of beautiful colors (when the weather is clear enough to see). I decided to not play any volleyball last week and enjoyed taking it easy on those nights, Friday night I even played my video games, that’s the first time I’ve done that since I got down here! ERT training this week consisted of blindfolded search and rescue drills in the gym, basically what we do is put our SCBA masks on, then put our hood over it but backwards so we can’t see anything. Our goal was to locate the ‘victim’ and safely get them out of the gym. All of our teams succeeded and we definitely learned a few things along the way.

That’s about it for this past week, I’m working on getting some photos and I’m going to try and get a time lapse going as well so I can show off some of the gorgeous views before sunset. Hopefully the weather will be clear so we can actually see the sun go below the horizon. As always, I appreciate you reading and, if you ever have any questions, feel free to email them to me!

-Matt ‘dem shadows be gettin’ long” Butcher