The Iceland field-trip crew has been busy preparing for our upcoming trip. Two weeks ago we had a camp stove cook-off. Students came up with recipes, bought the ingredients and cooked everything on the camp stoves.

One of our simpler creations.

Lighting the stoves proved trickier than expected. Now imagine typical Icelandic weather: driving rain and 30-miles-an-hour winds. We better practice some more …

In the end a bunch of very critical tasters agreed that team Lupine’s Cashew Beef Curry won first prize. Cameron’s recipe of salt with tasty salty bits and a bit of salt won first prize for nutritious content: it came out to have about 6000 mg of salt per serving. Better hold off on those bullion cubes, Cam!

Tough judges!

The following week we set up tents. The weather was again very Icelandic: in the low forties and some sprinkles of rain.

Looks good to me, what do you think?

Groups practiced setting up tents and checked whether all our tents were complete. Luckily, most of them were.

So, how many of these do we need?

Jon explaining some of the finer points of tent setup.

Given the fact that many students had been with us to Utah last year Jon had surprisingly little to do and all the tents went up in no time.

Four happy campers.