I once camped on a frozen lake. Another time a blizzard hit when we were setting up camp.
I actually miss those severe midwest winters.
About a quarter of my science instructors took off summers and sometimes an additional term on a regular basis to do research; about a third were engaged in research and the funding sources were always posted. That makes a majority of my science profs getting grants.
It was interesting to see the time limits on those. Many were one-year-renewable; some were X amount of money to be spent within a specified number of years (three was common) but that meant it could be spent faster; the most interesting was “with participation” and a list of options for participation was given – that was a biology grant for research in remote isolated environments, which took some botany and some zoology professors on “camping” trips to isolated “cloud island” environments in Central and South America at least every other year. Then there was an arrangement that several professors had with JPL that allowed two of them to spend summers at JPL doing whatever was of interest!
There were also a bunch of grants for research into anything pertaining to forests, most of them from endowments established by long-ago ( and a coupe of more recent) lumber tycoons who wanted to further forest science, so there were substantially more forestry professors per student than I think any other department on campus (they also owned their own extensive arboretum and their own research forest!), and they were constantly doing research (lucky students got to participate and there were always a batch of summer forestry research internships – I had friends who plotted brown spotted owl populations and devised new ways to find them, who researched the benefit of standing dead timber to the forest, who looked into the ideal size of a timber clear-cut for “harvestable” wildlife – i.e. species that get hunted, who proposed and studied alternative to clear-cutting, and other bits). [Ever seen a nine-layer overlay for a plot of forest, representing nine different points from which a forest could be evaluated?]