glacier hygiene

So there I am, on a glacier for the next twelve days. There are a lot of little things that one has questions about but are afraid to ask. Things like, how often do you change your underwear? How do you change out of contact lenses? How do you keep everything from freezing? Well there are little things that made it comfortable for me. The sacred socks were essential. That is a dry pair of socks to wear at night after I had soaked through the pair I was wearing all day. I was even more decadent and had a pair of sacred pants, that's right sacred pants. Pants that I would not wear for climbing or snowshoeing, but only for sleeping. Every night we went to sleep with EVERYTHING that needed to be dry and shouldn't freeze ... yes in the sleeping bag: sunblock, hand creme, toothpaste, contact lens solution, baby wipes, linings of the plastic boots, the wet socks I had already worn, the camera and batteries, the iPod (which should've been fully charged before I left town because the battery was empty the first night). For the next of skin of items, well I changed every three to four days, and the baby wipes were absolutely essential. Since water is precious and you can't actually wash your face or really want to get your hands wet, our instructors let us in on the teabag bath secret. Yeah, take the teabag you used for brewing the morning cup and wipe your face with it. Six straight days of slathering on SPF 70 sunblock six times a day gave me the complexion of a leprous zombie. It was suggested to me I take a 'teabag bath.' After doing a quick self portrait of myself with my digital and looking at the effect, I was aghast at my appearance. But otherwise, living on a glacier for 12 days was no sweat (except when we were shoveling and the ambient radiation of the sun reflecting off the glacier made it feel like we were in the Saharan desert while moving camp). What did I wish for? A way to call my mom (apparently old school cell phones can work once reaching certain peaks) and prescription glacier glasses for the days my eyes scream at me for putting in hard lenses.