Living on a Glacier

So I've been living on a glacier for about a couple of weeks now. The first week I was up with a small crew and we build dog houses all week long, along with shoveled out groomers, walk through 2ft of fresh snow and of course, as always, take care of dogs.

This past week the full crew was up and we transported another 100+ dogs to camp. There are 13 people living on the glacier with me. There are mushers, dogs handlers, tour assistants (that's me!), the cook and our manegment team.

Tours started on Monday and have been going ever since. We have tours every day. We never have a scheduled 'day off' without people coming up the glacier. On certain days of the week there are less tours than others and during those days we are flown down from the glacier (via helicopter!) and we get to have the next two nights in town and then we are flown back up in the morning. For those who are curious my schedule goes a little like this:

5:50am alarm goes off

5:55 roll out of bed and put rain pants/ boots/ jacket on

6:00 grab a shovel and start finding poop, put poop in a 5 gallon bucket. Usually a dog yard of 40 will have approximately 2-3 buckets of poop

6:30 feed dogs if necessary, put eye drogs in irritated dogs eyes and use zinc on any part of the dog that's pink to prevent sunburn.

7:00 breakfast! (eggs, bacon, sausage, toast, pancakes, oatmeal, yogurt, fruit....coffee...)

8:00 first helicopter lands full of tourists! I unload the helicopter of the tourists/ gear and put gear back on.

Next I lead tourists to mushers after they recieve their safety speech

I then go and stand in the 'photo spot' and wait

I take an 'action shot' of them on the sled

I then walk briskly back to the photo tent where I edit and print off the pictures

I hopefully am ready a few minutes before they get back to the camp so that I can get their pictures organized.

I remember that I sell thousand dollar a night condos when I'm trying to get these people to purchase a picture of themselves

I then lead them back to the helicopters 'no I'm sorry you cannot change seats...' and get them ready to go

Once the helicopter lands I help the new tourists in the helicopter and then I put the old tourists, photos hopefully in hand, back inside. I then unload the gear/ load our gear into it.

This process repeats itself every hour. Tours on 'slower' days run every hour, a full day is every half hour.

5:00ish-7pm tours stop. we feed dogs/ water/ poop scoop once last time.

7:30pm we eat.

8pm a crew does dishes/ we hang out.

I usually go to bed sometime between 9:30 and 10pm.

The picture is of what I'm living in. Note the snow is above the door on either side by about 2ft. I'll keep you all posted about what's going on but for now I'm oging ot get my things organized again to go back up to hang out with the 240 dogs!