Like a switch was flipped, we changed from winter to spring, in several ways. A few feet of fresh snow had fallen during the last week of May and early June. Then we had 3 days of warm, mostly sunny weather, just long enough to get the drill gear and team out and the newest member of team in. By the time Dirk took off with our final load of gear, a serious rain had begun and spring was here – the snow was melting, the streams were running, and we began scrambling to catch up on all of the winter work we had wanted to get done in the past month but just didn’t have the time or weather. With this new weather also came a change in work dynamics, with just five us now and all focused on our process studies, we are a much leaner and more focused team, concentrated on supporting Jason’s process studies at the stream and upper cirque, as well as enjoying the surroundings and each others’ company.

Kristin takes Turner for a ride down the ski-way.


Turner reciprocates.


Lifting the winch was the crux of the pull-out, but it turned out to be pretty easy with so many hands.


Turner helps load the last of the ice cores.

With the new weather comes new challenges. This is the first year we’ve used a snow machine here, and at this point we’re hoping to make use of it to help finish up our winter work before summer really arrives in full force. Using the snow machine, what would be an all day trip to the terminus and back takes only 30 minutes, but it’s not without its own challenges and limitations. The day after the last flight went out, Jason and Joey traveled down-glacier to move some gear to the stream and download some dataloggers along the way. By the time they got half-way down though, it was raining and snowing and causing the snow beneath them to turn to slush and the snow machine to bog down with no traction, and it was not the greatest weather to be dealing with electronics. Potentially worse, running water could be heard in the streams we now cross on natural snow bridges, and the difference in weight between a snow machine carrying two people and two people crossing separately on skiis can make the difference in bridge stability. Given the issues, they returned by mid-day and we enjoyed a nice evening with new food that Joey had brought in.

Joey prepares some cookie dough for baking.


Time for a few crosswords while they’re baking.


Yum.


Turner tries to sneak around for some more cookies.

Turner: “If I give you these flags, can I get some more cookies?”

The next morning I had woken up about 6AM and saw that the snow was frozen solid and the weather was good, so I decided to head out right then and try to get some of our down-glacier work done. I was up early largely because I spent most of the day before sleeping in my tent. It’s really been a few months since I had a real day off with no work involved, and with my mind now off logistics finally, I think I just needed a day to reset my brain and get back into science mode. My plan was to be back about 9AM or so, so that we could still have a full day of something else once I was back. The conditions were fine, and I was able to change out our logger batteries, download all of the new thermistor strings, and haul a load of gear to our stream camp. It took a little longer than I anticipated as it turned out that one of our thermistors strings was miswired at the factory (it’s actually just someone’s garage…) and it was the one string that I was not able to test in Fairbanks before I left, but in the end I was back by 10AM and all of our equipment was functioning as expected. I then dropped off Jason and Joey near the terminus so that they could shuttle the loads the final part of the way on ski and foot, and hunt for a suitable camping spot there. Given all of the work we have planned down there, our plan is to keep tents and stoves down there for the summer. This deployment got held up a bit by the multiple camps used during the drilling effort, but the stream was not running high enough to make this too difficult yet and lack of snow made finding a camp spot much easier, as they were able to find some old tent pads leftover from the 1970s most likely. So now we have campsites on both sides of the river, almost directly across from each other, so we should have a good base to work from.

Joey shuttles an empty barrel to the terminus to store our food in later.

Today Jason and I were up at 5AM to head back down to the terminus to install some new ablation stakes. The snow is almost gone in the lower glacier, just like it was when we first arrived in April. The major difference now is that the exposed ice is no longer the zero-friction stuff we first encountered, as the sun has melted it a bit and made it crunchy and sticky. To install the stakes, we use a steam drill to melt a hole just large enough to drop the stakes into. The stakes are pieces of electrical conduit joined together by couplers we made for them. Once we stick them in the ice, we measure how much sticks out over time as a way to measure how much ice has melted. In the terminus area, we try to make the stakes as long as possible, because this is where the glacier melts the most and we’d like to have them last several years to minimize having to drag the drill back and forth. The drilling went fine, though slower than we expected, and we got back at noon instead of 9AM. About the time we got back, the weather had changed again, like it had yesterday afternoon, and we experienced intervals of rain, snow, fog, and sunshine throughout the rest of the day. But we’re staying cozy and dry in camp, and settling in to a new pattern that I think everyone is enjoying.

Jason begins drilling a hole with the steam drill.


The hole is finished, 9 meters deep.

 
Installing a survey pole in the ablation area (07 June 08 08:54) in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Trying to steam drill a hole before the snow turns to slush in the hot sun and we have to walk home because the snow machine will get stuck.

Poledrop -- Jason lowers a 9 meter survey stake into the hole he just drilled. (These were handheld shots spliced into a movie) The surface of the ice melts about 3 meters per year here, so this stake will be completely exposed again in about 3 years.

08 June 08 (Day 48): Installing survey stakes to measure index velocities
We left early again today to install two more stakes, this time in locations we have previously installed stakes. The glacier is always in motion, and in these locations it moves about 15 meters per year. This means the stake we installed last year is now 15 meters down-glacier. We keep installing poles at the same initial location so that we can track how the glacier’s speed is changing with time. We cant just keep measuring the same pole because the glacier’s speed varies with location, and as the pole moves into a new location its speed will change. In this case the fastest moving part of the glacier is about 2/3s of the way towards the terminus, above and below this it moves slower. By installing poles each year in the same initial location, we can then tell whether that part of the glacier is slowing down, speeding up, or staying constant. We call this measuring an “index velocity”. In general, the glacier is slowing down, largely because the deformation of ice is strongly dependent on its thickness, and the glacier is getting thinner with time.

The steam drill in action.

Installing a survey pole on McCall Glacier (08 June 08 9:36) in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge  

I like this panorama because it shows several things. The long pole laying in front of Jason is the one we are about to drop in the hole that Jason is drilling. It is 6 meters long, and if we sink it so that the top is flush with the surface, it will melt out completely within 3 summers. A little downglacier you can see the pole we installed at this same point in space last year. It now has a GPS antenna on it and we are measuring its position every 15 seconds. A little further downglacier, you can see the pole we installed 2 years ago. It will likely melt out completely this summer.

09-10 June 08 (Day 49-50): Jason sinks his teeth into the firn
One of the questions Jason is trying to answer as part of his PhD is ‘How much of the snow that falls here gets refrozen within the glacier and how we can apply this knowledge to improve our ability to model this process on other glaciers?’ So the past two days Jason and Joey have been busy getting more experienced with the shallow coring drill and developing a plan for measurements for the next few years. It’s a tricky question and one that has not been answered well as yet, largely because it is so tricky to make direct measurements of this internal accumulation of ice. The state of the art paper was written 30 years ago, based in part on research done on McCall Glacier. So it seems like there is still a lot of progress that can be made if the right work plan could be developed. Our basic idea is to extract cores throughout the next few years of the upper 8 meters of glacier in the accumulation area and see if we can measure changes in their density. That is, if the water is refreezing within the firn (snow from previous years that is slowly getting buried by more recent snow) there, then the density of the firn should be increasing.

The weather pattern lately has been reasonably good weather in the mornings and poor weather in the afternoon, and we’ve adapted our schedule to that. Several days ago we had thunder and lightening nearby in the afternoon, and yesterday and today we had rain, snow, fog, and sunshine, often in the same hour. So Jason and Joey headed out at 5:30AM to get a jump on the weather and also drill while it was still cold, hoping to keep the drill from getting stuck. In the morning I had mostly been trying to catch up on phone calls to stay ahead on logistics for later parts of the trip and keep other projects moving along. In the afternoon today I went up to the upper cirque to check out Jason’s latest borehole, and drop the video camera into it. Unfortunately I don’t have the cable it takes to download the video to a computer, otherwise I would post it. It’s a neat area, with alternating layers of ice and firn beneath the surface. Our expectation is that the ice lenses are going to grow with time, due to the refreezing of surface meltwater. So the cores and measurements we’re making now are the baseline against which we can compare future accumulation. A major challenge in assessing these changes is simply getting a handle on the variability in the baseline measurements, which is substantial. That is, you cant drill a borehole in the same place twice (because the second time there is just a hole there), so you have to drill some distance to the side of the original, but without knowing the spatial variability (are two locations a meter apart identical?) in the measurements, you would have no way of knowing whether a temporal change (are two cores taken a month apart identical?) occurred or a spatial one. So by doing a lot of coring and pit digging now, we can get a better handle on these spatial variations so we have a better baseline to assess whether temporal changes occurred.

Jason and Joey head off to storm the castle.

The view down a shallow borehole. You can see alternating layers of thin ice layers between thicker firn layers. Possibly the ice layers represent annual layering, but it’s not really clear. You can also see the cable and light from the borehole video camera.

Drilling is hard work…


But successful thus far.

One of the more exciting accomplishments of the trip was the Turner learned to ski yesterday. We were done at the cache organizing some food and took the opportunity to help Turner carve. In the past, he has been reluctant to put on the skis, but today he said he wanted to try it. So we strapped them on and tried to give him the idea of how it works. He picked up amazingly quickly, and actually managed to slide downhill a few meters on his own without falling. Personally I think this ranks with learning to walk.

Turner, ski stud.

Turner’s first time on skis.
Ten minutes later he’s a pro.
Looks like we’ll be regulars at the annual ski swap.

Skiing is hard work.

11 June 08 (Day 51): Sun + Snow = Clouds, at least in summer
Sunshine melts snow, but it also turns it into vapor which tends to rise and later condense into clouds. At McCall Glacier, we have the neat opportunity of watching this happen before our eyes. Today was a sunny, clear day, at least on the synoptic scale of regional weather. But once the sun rose high enough to increase its energy flux to the surface, it began creating clouds locally. Because our camp sits within a bowl shaped valley, we can watch the sun as it swings from the east to the west in a big circle and heats up the backside of our valley walls. So when the sun is in the east, we see clouds forming directly behind our eastern valley wall, and as it swings to the south we see clouds there but not in the east, and so on. To better visualize this, I took a sequence of panoramas throughout the day, as well as setup a time-lapse camera to show the processes.

Early morning fog on McCall Glacier (11 June 08 06:41) in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Sun generating clouds on an east-facing wall (11 June 08 07:46) in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Sun creating clouds on a south facing valley wall (11 June 08 14:11) in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Sun generating clouds on west-facing wall (11 June 08 18:33) in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

 
Sunset on McCall Glacier (11 June 08 20:54) in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Timelapse of clouds forming throughout the day. Unfortunately I mis-programmed the camera so it ended early, but it gives the sense of local cloud formation.

This process of sun vaporizing snow can create more than just clouds – sometimes it creates new snowfall and sometimes it just stays a clear sunny day. The difference is likely to do with air temperature, which controls how much vapor the air can carry before it must condense . For example, on several bright sunny days this April, instead of forming poofy clouds like today, the vapor condensed directly into snow, skipping the liquid stage, such that we had blue skies and snow at the same time, without any intervening clouds. That is, snow was falling on us, but there were no clouds, just blue skies and sun. We had several days of this during our camp move from the upper cirque to the ablation area. Jason and I began thinking of ways to try to collect the snow and isotopically compare it to that on the hillslopes, but it would be tricky business to do correctly and we were quickly distracted by other tasks. In terms of glacier mass balance, it’s probably a pretty minor process, but it is still a mechanism by which mass (in the case snow) moves from the hillslopes onto the glacier. Whether sunshine creates snow, clouds, or invisible vapor, I think this movement of water is still an interesting process, and not one that is probably well studied.

In between taking cloud panoramas, I went halfway up to the upper cirque and found a new photo spot. There are several ridges that descend to the ice surface, all of which used to hold small tributary glaciers 100 years ago. As the ridges become exposed, they become somewhat good places for photography. Apparently I wasn’t the first to discover this, as the one I hiked up to had been used as a survey station in the 1970s, as the mark and foil used to locate it on air-photos was still visible. Though it was not far above the current ice surface, it was a still a challenge to reach because of the large, loose rocks surrounding it. Here giant slabs of bedrock were detaching and sliding off the outcrop on their own. But once on top, it was a comfortable place to work, and I took several high resolution panoramas.

Old survey point on McCall Glacier (11 June 08 16:30) in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge  

Turner and T Rex take a bath.

12-14 June 08 (Day 52-54): Studying lenses of ice and glass
Our primary occupation the past few days has been studying lenses. Jason is studying ice lenses within the firn, and I’m studying glass lenses on my camera. It’s difficult to say who’s job is harder, but I suspect it’s Jason’s.

Ice lenses are layers of ice that form within the snow. The surface of the snow warms up from the sun, melts, then drips into snow beneath it. When this water hits colder snow, it tends to freeze. When it does, it prevents more meltwater from dripping down further, since the ice is too dense for water to flow through. So the additional water has to spread out to the sides, where it too will find colder snow and freeze. This goes on throughout the day (or spring), such that wide layers of ice form within the snow. We call these ice lenses. As the snow continues to warm up, many of these lenses melt again, forming new lenses even deeper within the snow. This process of creating deeper and deeper lenses continues until either there is no more meltwater or the snow and firn layers beneath it are all warmed to the melting point, preventing new ice from forming. Over the years, lenses as thick as a meter may form, and eventually all of the layers merge into one giant layer we call the glacier. This is the process that Jason is studying, by coring (to look at the layers and track their growth), by installing thermistor strings within the layers (to look at how much energy is available for freezing), and by digging pits on the surface (to track how much water is available to melt and drip down). Thus far he’s drilled 3 cores, installed 2 thermistor strings, and dug about a dozen snow pits, and he understands the process about 10 times better than he did last week, but has 100 times more questions about it, most of which have no answers yet.

Jason, drilling holes.


Joey, wondering how he’s going to reach the top.

Glass lenses on a camera focus sunlight reflected off the glacier surface into a recognizable image. The light enters the lens and is bent to hit the digital sensor in my camera, where it is recorded. To create a seamless mosaic of hundreds of photos, the camera has to be rotated about a particular spot, which is dependent on the optical properties of the lens and how it bends the light to make an image. Each lens has a different such spot, and in the case of a zoom lens, the spot changes with the amount of zoom. To find this spot, a lot of testing has to be done, as even a millimeter of error in any of the three dimension can cause visible seams in the mosaic. So I’ve spent the past two days largely trying to determine the exact location of this spot on one of my lenses. It’s the Nikkor 18-200mm zoom lens which I used last year. This year I bought a bunch of nominally higher quality fixed focal lenses on ebay, as I wanted to take the best quality panoramas that I could this year. Unfortunately, higher quality typically means heavier (more glass) and thus more weight to carry around. So I made some comparisons in image quality between the lenses, and found that though some of them do create sharper and richer images, the differences are pretty slight, and I decided that for those times that I’m backpacking, my original zoom lens would be the best (and lightest!) choice. But it’s a complicated lens in terms of finding this magic spot and I spent the better part of a day finding it for various zoom settings, then the better part of the next day taking panoramas and stitching them to confirm that I found them. Fortunately we’ve had some great, clear sunny weather to facilitate this and even more fortunately it appears that my settings are pretty darn close, so I shouldn’t need to do this again.

GIGAPANO west ridge goes here

This is a snapshot out of the high resolution version of this panorama.

In between testing and various other tasks (mostly phone calls and attempts at emails again to line up project components later in the summer), I took advantage of the weather to hike around our moraine here and take some spherical panoramas, documenting the transition between the true glacier moraine, and this weird knoll that we camp on. During the Little Ice Age peak, about 150 years ago, our camp site was not overlain by ice, but it was clearly affected by the glacier. I think what happened was that the glacier ice came up to nearly the same level and created a stream channel between the ice and mountain behind ice which was probably covered in a permanent snow field, and we are now camped on the remnants of that stream channel and snow field. We know that ice was not here because there is an outcrop of rock right next to us that is heavily covered by lichens, and these take hundreds of years to grow to this size. But behind this, where our tents are, there are various zones of lichen covered rock, non-lichen covered rock, and little gullies and runnels. Probably this was a snow field much of the year, and the snow melt from this hillslope and the ones further upglacier reworked a lot of the rock here in various ways, and subsequently various types of permafrost dynamics reworked it further. It would be nice to have someone out here with expertise in glacial geology to have a look at it and see what can be learned, but until then, I can have fun speculating, documenting it with panoramas, and sharing them with others who may have good ideas about them.

Moraine patterns on McCall Glacier (12 June 08 12:24) in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge  

15 June 08 (Day 55): Slush flow announces the true start of summer!
Summer truly arrived today with an enormous slush flow which opened the main stream on the glacier. Slush flows are like low angle avalanches. Water slowly saturates the snow and makes it heavier and more fluid. At a certain point, the weight of the water can no longer be held back by the snow matrix and gravity takes over. Over the past few days we had been watching meltwater pool up within the stream channel from last year. This morning there was standing water visible within a large section of it. I set up a time-lapse camera hoping to capture it, and about 10PM it happened. I was in my work tent preparing for a few days of work at the terminus when I heard a loud roar. I ran out and saw a wall of slush and water working its way downglacier. We all stood and watched as the peak rushed past our previous snowmachine crossing and washed away our trail marker. It was a neat event to see. After an hour or so the main event was over, as the store of pooled up water became so distributed that it no longer had enough force to move the snow out of its way. Soon after dark clouds moved in and bringing lightening, thunder, and graupel with it. I suspect tomorrow will see the rest of the channel open up, either through more snow melt or rain. Hopefully our continuous GPS is still operating on the glacier surface, and we will be able to see if this major hydrologic event has an influence on the glacier’s motion.

Summer arrived with a slush flow on this day. It’s tough to actually see the flow because it only takes a few frames near the end. The movie appears to slow down near the end because I began manually snapping pictures every second or so rather than automatic once per minute. The cloud motion appears jerky because I’m using the Microsoft movie maker, which apparently has no ability to make movies at the normal frame rate of 24 per second.

I changed the camera angle and zoomed in on the active front of the slush flow. Note how the scene gets darker near the end, as thunderstorms approached.

Today we spent mostly getting ready to spend a few days at the terminus, studying the outlet stream there. Our primary goal here is to track the amount of water leaving the glacier, but we also hope to study how water moves beneath the glacier by release of dye on the glacier surface. To facilitate this, we staged camp supplies there about two weeks ago so that we can avoid commuting 7 hours there and back to our main camp. In addition to this, we have a lot equipment to prep and lug down there too. For example, Jason has stream gaging and dye-tracing tools, and I have a bunch of time-lapse cameras. We had become settled here on our moraine camp, so some preparations were also needed to get a selection of personal gear and food ready to go. For Kristin, Turner and I, we hoped to use this trip as a shake-down for longer-distance hiking later in summer, so we had some organizational work to do for that too.

It was a nice day overall. In the morning, Jason and Joey left early to drill another hole in the upper cirque while I made some final tests with my panoramic equipment and then continued to photographically survey our local area with its odd mix of glacial moraine, fluvial channels, and permafrost features. By about noon we were all back at camp and decided to have a Fathers’s Day brunch of bacon and pancakes. The rest of afternoon was spent packing and preparing, and capped off by the slush flow and storm. We joked that this weather was expected, for it seems that every time we’re at the terminus it’s rainy and nasty.

Jason and Joey avoiding the rush hour traffic.


Jason and Joey back from drilling. Or was it Panama.

Since it’s Fathers’ Day, I thought I’d go heavy on what that means to me…

Time for sunscreen.


Time to tickle your belly.


Turner’s got his belly-protector on.


See?

Turner and his moose, now cleaned of orange stuff.
Turner and mama discuss anatomy.
Mine!
Turner busts a move.

Fathers’ Day brunch.


Turner: “You want the last piece of bacon?”


Jason: “You put what in the pancakes?”


Turner: “For Fathers’ Day I got you these magic shelf brackets.”

Not something you typically see.

16-17 June 08 (Day 56-57): Typical weather for the terminus
The glacier is just a visitor to this valley, and nowhere is this more obvious than at the terminus. Where the glacier has recently been is a jumble of debris where once was order, like the aftermath of Turner visiting his toy box. Hunks of rocks are strewn all over the place, some stranded in high places, some washed continuously in the river, and everywhere in between. Apparently the party is not completely over, as we witnessed a boulder the size of a school bus tumble down the mountain, catching air and doing flips before crashing into the valley floor not far from us. This is where geomorphology comes alive and works on time-scale faster than glacier motion.

Jason and I were up at 6AM yesterday to begin staging equipment for our trip to the terminus, by shuttling a load with the snowmachine. It was a clear day at our camp, but the lower valley was choked with fog. We stopped at our old stream crossing spot, where there is now an active stream thanks to the slush flow. We followed the stream downglacier without crossing it, and eventually came to the site of our second borehole. There was little snow there, but the snow machine was doing fine on the ice. No longer were the ice hummocks the zero-friction bane of our previous travels, but rather now had a crunchy surface thanks to the action of the sun. We made it nearly down to the terminus riding on the ice and dropped off our gear, mainly dataloggers, tools, and hardware for automated monitoring of stream dynamics. On our way back, we crossed the stream to check out the runway. The snow machine made it fine over the water, but Jason got a bit wet as the stream bed was not as solid as it looked. The runway was still in good shape, still with 40 centimeters of snow beneath it.

Slush flow on McCall Glacier (16 June 08 08:22) in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge  

By the time we returned, it was nearly 11AM, and the weather showed signs of change. I had a few phone calls to make before we left, as we would be gone most of the week, and in one of them Dirk told me that a large weather system was moving in from the west and would likely keep us wet for the next few days. Sure enough, by the time we were packed and ready to go, a heavy, wet snow began to fall and reduce visibility to nothing. We decided to wait a while rather than leave in such nasty weather. I think we all thought about staying in the comfort of our current camp until the blue skies returned. But after an hour or so, the snow and rain had stopped and we could see a bit of blue sky, so we decided to go for it. By the time we got suited up and down on the glacier, the fog had returned, but without the precipitation, so we headed off.

The trip down was uneventful and mostly dry, and we soon found our new camp site. Jason and Joey had found this location a few weeks ago, on the other side of the stream from the site we had used the past few years, thankfully preventing a stream crossing. This site had two tent pad that had been cleared some time in the past. At first I thought they were from the 1970s, but having looked around further, I think this spot was under ice at that time, making them sites from the 1990s. Clearly this was a man-made clearing, as there was also a pile of charred survey stakes, leftover from some marshmallow roast. This site was also more centered in the valley, with a very pleasing and symmetrical view of the terminus. By the time we set up our tents, the rains had started again, so we called it a night as it was already quite late.

Not the greatest weather, but not too bad.


Turner: “I got juice!”


Kristin: “I got coffee!”

 
The terminus region of McCall Glacier under fog (16 June 08 08:44) in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

We arrived at the terminus in weather that seems typical for here, cold and foggy.

Today we got our first taste of stream studying. It was foggy most of the time, with occasional rain, but it wasn’t nasty enough to slow us down too much. Right next to camp there is a place where all of the water from the glacier flows into a single channel, perfect for measuring discharge and water quality. After shuttling a few more loads of gear from the ice edge to camp, over about 300 meters are sharp, loose, slippery rocks, Jason spent most of the afternoon preparing dataloggers to put in the stream. I set up a few time-lapse cameras to provide a visual record of stream variations. We scoped out the river a bit more and try to think through how our studies should shape up, and dropped the instruments in the water before dinner to get a night’s worth of data to ensure they were operating properly.

18 June 08 (Day 58): More wet field work
We knew that studying the stream would likely get us wet, but it wasn’t river water that soaked us today. Over night the weather detiorated further and we got rain and snow most of the night. This continued throughout the day without much of a break, though we did get a variety – snow, rain, sleet, freezing rain, slushy snow – pretty much anything that could fall around freezing. Nevertheless, it was still a productive day.

One of our goals is to get a sense of how much water leaves the glaciers and flows towards the ocean, and then use this information to better understand how much water glaciers in this region contribute to the major rivers of this region. But this is tricky business. ‘Normally’ stream discharge is measured by attaching instruments to the pier of a bridge or by pouring a lot of concrete to make a gaging station that wont be damaged by the force of the moving water and the rocks it carries. These are not options for us, so we have to find work-around solutions. In our case, it is much easier to measure the height of the water than the amount of water flowing. We do this by putting pressure transducers under the water and by suspending a distance measuring device above the water, and hoping that at least one of them will survive. Then we can come back periodically and manually measure how much water is flowing by wading across the stream and measuring water thickness and velocity with a handheld instrument. If we do this when the stream is at various heights, we can determine the relationship between the continuous height measurements and the manual water discharge measurements, so that we can then estimate discharge throughout the summer using only the automated measurements. Later in the summer we will then visit some of the larger rivers in the area that receive water from many different glaciers and make similar measurements there, and scale up our local measurements to estimate the overall glacier contribution.

So today we got a start on these measurements. Jason and Joey measured discharge at our natural wier (as opposed to a concrete one) formed where the river has cut through a moraine formed by the glacier about 30 years ago. We then suspended a cable across the river to hand our distance measurement device on. Jason also set up a pole on the river bank that will hopefully be photographed by our time-lapse cameras, such that as the river rises and falls it will obscure more or less of the pole and give us a back up to the other instruments. The precipitation didn’t let up until dinner time, and I think this was about the coldest we felt on the entire trip, even during the April storms. The cold, humid weather combined with a slight breeze from the terminus is bone-chilling, especially when you are up to your knees in ice cold water.

The stream was still low compared to peak summer, but cold and fast nonetheless.

Jason wades the stream and uses the headset on the radio to relay the measurements back to Joey, who records them in the field book.

Jason: “Welcome to McCall Creek, can I take your order?”

Unlike yesterday, Turner spent most of the day in the tent. He does an amazingly good job navigating the rocky terrain for a two year old, though I don’t have much basis for comparisons. Just when you think he’s about to miss a step and faceplant into a boulder, he plants his foot and hops to the next rock. It’s a little nerve wracking, and the many bumps and bruises on his legs and arms indicate that he doesn’t always succeed with his plans, but he’s never more than a few steps from us and so far his skills and judgement continue to improve. Having backpacked down here, we don’t have a lot of toys for him to play with, but his creativity seems to make up for that. Jason gave him a river rock on our first night here which is now his ‘dinosaur egg’, which he keeps warm and hatches about 60 times an hour. We also play swords with survey stakes, play jump over the instrument cables, chase the ‘rats’ (more rocks), and other invented activities. But today it was more fun to hatch the egg in the tent, out of the rain and snow and wind, and that seemed reasonable enough. So far tonight is dry and calm, so hopefully our hike back tomorrow will be pleasant and he can walk and ski on the ‘big ice’ and play with his other toys tomorrow night in ‘other home’.

It’s Dumbo’s turn to hatch the dinosaur egg.

19 June 2008 (Day 59): Successful shakedown at the stream
We left the terminus today having succeeded with most of what we wanted to accomplish there. This morning we tested out the fluorometer, a device that ingests samples of water and tells you whether there is any dye in it before spitting it out again. The dye in this case is a glorified food coloring that we drop in by the teaspoon; it’s too diluted in the stream to see it, so the machine tells us whether its there or not. The idea is to put some in the stream on the glacier (that had the slush flow a few days earlier) before it disappears into a hole in the ice and see how long it takes to travel to outlet stream at the terminus where we are now. If it takes a short time, chances are there is a well developed conduit system beneath the glacier – basically a river. But if it takes a long time, chances the drainage system beneath the glacier is not very efficient, perhaps a network of cavities linked together by thin connections. It’s also quite possible that the drainage system will evolve over time, changing from an inefficient and slow system to something more like a subglacial river. The reason is that because the glacier spends 9 months or so with no water draining into it, any conduit system formed over the summer would get squeezed closed over the winter and it takes a few weeks of melting to form such a system again. We didn’t have the chance to do any actual experiments yet, but we consider it a good sign that the equipment is working as expected.

The weather today was also much nicer, and made for a pleasant trip back to our base camp. A disappointment for me was that the weather was not good enough for the high resolution repeat photography that I had planned. In 2003, I took a repeated a photo of the terminus taken by Austin Post in 1958, and this pair has been reproduced widely in many publications as it shows an impressive change in an arctic glacier that can only be caused by a change in climate. One of my major goals for this trip is to repeat that photo again, but this time using my new high resolution techniques. I also have several more photos of the terminus from other locations that I have yet to repeat. But it takes reasonably good weather for this, and we just didn’t have that yet. Fortunately there will be more opportunities for doing this later in the trip.

Turner: “OK, it’s a nice day, I’m ready to go! You grab the backpack.”

Are we there yet?


Turner: “I want fruit snacks!”

Staff gage on McCall Creek (19 June 08 12:53) in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge  

Jason’s makeshift staff gage can be seen directly across the stream. A timelapse camera is pointed at it, such that as the stream rises it will cover more pieces of tape on the pole and obscure them in the photos, allowing him to get a quantitative estimate of stream height from them.

 
Sensor cable suspended over McCall Creek (19 June 08 12:59) in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

We extended a cable across the stream and will return to install a device which will measure the distance from the cable to the stream, as another means to measure stream height.

A final goal of this excursion was simply as a shakedown for the backpacking we plan later in the trip. We sometime catch ourselves talking about this as camping, as if we not camping already. But it is qualitatively different in that in our base camp we have many luxuries that we don’t have while we are backpacking. For instance, we pre-cooked and froze most of our dinners at our base camp, so that all we have to do is heat them up in hot water. But this system is too heavy for backpacking. Similarly with clothes, pads to sleep on, etc – only so much fits in a backpack and we still need space for science gear, so it’s a challenge to decide what to bring and what to leave. We got most things right, but it was nice to have the opportunity to practice before getting too far from camp.

Jason and Joey enjoy a ride through the park.

20-23 June 08 (Day 60-63): Preparing for 6 trips at once
On our return from the terminus, the clock began ticking once again with deadlines. Kristin, Turner and I need to be in Kaktovik by July 1, and a lot of preparations are needed before we leave: we have to pack for a week at the terminus doing stream work, a several day hike to our airstrip on the tundra, for two weeks in Kaktovik, for a one week trip to Colorado after that, for a hike back in to the glacier in late July, and for another month or so on the glacier. Because we are avoiding helicopter use, anything we have here that we need on any of these trips we must now hike out with. Plus we need a good inventory of what’s here so we know what else we need to bring back with us, especially in terms of food. For example, I need a computer in Kaktovik plus all of my files, so I need to pack my laptop, it’s charger, and several external hard disks. Similarly, we need to bring the chargers for our satellite phones, cameras, radios, etc, so that on the hike back in everything will be at full charged. The smart thing to do would have been to have left extras of all of these in Kaktovik, but we didn’t think that far ahead, mostly only staging the really heavy stuff there. We had some hope of having another ski-plane flight here and avoid all of this, but summer tourist season has picked up considerably and Dirk doesn’t have the time available to put the skis back on, as this takes a day or so. So we’re hiking.

We also had a lot of work to complete before leaving. Our first day back I headed up to the upper cirque with Jason to complete another core hole. Jason is really getting into drilling and has considerable expertise now doing it. What we’ve learned so far is that the firn area is actually quite small and thin – within 100 meters of our deep core site, the firn is less than 4 meters thick. A couple of hot summers could melt nearly all of this away. The coring continued the next few days at other sites, and hopefully tomorrow morning this part of the project will be wrapped up for a while as we spend a week or more at the terminus.

Jason prepares to drop the drill into the hole for another core run.


Down it goes. (If you tilt your head).
Drilling the first few meters is a little awkward…
The next few are easier.
Jason wants to pump you up.


Once the core is extracted, the first step is to knock out the loose cuttings.


Here they come.


Next the core comes out.

Here it is.


Jason measures the length of the core…


… then cuts it into sections to measure its density.

Summer is now here in full force too. Last night the snow didn’t harden up and it seems the snow pack ripened completely below the cirques, as a number of new slush flows and tributary streams opened up today too. Snowmaching is getting to be a challenge, due to the slush and streams. Once Jason and Joey returned this morning (early, because it was too hot to drill), I took off to the terminus to try to get my photos. When I left at noon, it was clear blue sky with hardly a cloud. Within an hour, I was at our camp site taking panoramas – the snow machine is really a revolution in terms of productivity. Unfortunately during that travel time, the clouds arrived and began blocking the sun, so I wasn’t able to get the repeat photos I was after. The problem is not so much the clouds themselves, but the fact that they drift in front of the sun and create moving shadows, which make it also impossible to stitch a seamless mosaic of photos. But it was nice to get out on my own and have a look around. I was back in camp by 3PM, a fact that still astonishes me, considering that walking to the terminus and back is about a 7 hour trip. So this left the afternoon free for other preparation, like devising a contraption to keep our instruments afloat in the river.

Jason, looking skeptical that this contraption is going to work.

The idea is that by tethering the boat to shore, we can attach the instrument to the end of the paddle and it will stay vertical in the water above the bottom.

Turner: “You guys build stuff, I’m going to eat chocolate and watch Scooby Doo”

Turner watched a lot of Scooby Doo the past few days.

Exercising on the helipad, the only flat and level surface to run on.

24 June 08 (Day 64): Impacts of 50 years of climate change on the terminus
Today I was up at 5:30AM to try to complete the work I attempted yesterday. Jason and Joey were up earlier, getting ready to complete the drilling they started yesterday too. After shuttling them up to the upper cirque, I headed down the terminus with a load of science gear and food, trying to take advantage of the crystal clear skies for my 50 year repeat photo of the terminus. The clear night had hardened the snow, but also made the ice surface slick. So slick in fact that I had to drop off the sled before the last hill because the ice provided no traction for the sled and made it tend to try to get in front of the snow machine. On the way to the photo site I took a few quick panoramas of the stream and aufeis, while the terminus was still in the shade of the early morning. I had forgotten how awful the hike to the photo site was – large loose rocks for a few thousand feet of elevation gain. By the time I arrived at the site, the sun was high enough that the ice was now all in sun, but it was also generating clouds which drifted in front of it, which made panoramic photography impossible. By this point it was after 10AM. I hung out for a few hours, and just about the time I thought I was shut down for the day, the cloud formation slowed down and I was able to start taking photos. In the end I was able to get exactly the photos I wanted, which was a major relief. Nearly fifty years to the day, I was able to repeat one of Austin’s photos and update a photographic pair that has become an icon of climate change in the arctic since I took the first repeat in 2003. With the resolution of this new photo, someone in the future will be able to repeat it and see not only coarse-scale terminus retreat, but examine individual rocks throughout the valley and determine erosion rates and other geomorphic processes at unprecedented detail. I had been looking forward to taking this photo for 5 years, and I felt a great sense of relief at having accomplished it successfully.

Repeat photo on McCall Glacier (24 June 08 13:42) in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge  

This photo pair has been reproduced widely (1958 by Austin Post, 2003 by me). I took the 2003 shot with a 4 megapixel point and shoot camera that fit easily into my pants pocket. Now my camera gear weighs 15 pounds, but the resolution is 1000 times higher.

Click here to see this gigapixel panorama.

Maybe if I take pictures like these someone will give me free gear.


Even way at the top of this rocky mountain, pretty flowers eek out an existence.

More flower photos from the trip back down the mountain. For some reason they seem to prefer the most dangerous places to stand.

By the time I returned back to camp, the others had broken down our large cook tent and were making final preparations to leave. We decided to hold off moving for another day, as it was already getting late and there were still a lot of little things to take care of. This was fine with me, as I was beat. On the way back, I got the snowmachine stuck in a slush swamp, and this took quite a lot of effort to beef it out and get moving again. I had to abandon the sled as the drag it created is what got me stuck, hoping that another clear night would harden the snow such that I could retrieve it. We enjoyed a nice dinner outside in the sun as we continued packing, and after a few hours of downloading and backing up the 20GB of photos I had just taken, I fell asleep instantly, glad that I had just crossed off a major item on my list.

25 June 08 (Day 65): A desperate camp move to the terminus
We spent this morning leisurely packing in the sun, but by the time we actually moved, conditions were about as desperate as we’ve dealt with in the past 2 months. I shuttled Jason and Joey down to the weather station, where our second borehole camp was, about noon. The glacier then was covered by high, dark clouds, but the coastal plain was crystal clear and we didn’t have much thought about the weather. By the time I returned to get Kristin and Turner, however, rain showers had begun and the skies darkened. It didn’t take long to load up and started heading down the hill, but by the time we started down it began to hail. We hoped it was just a quick cloud burst, but by the time we were at the bottom of the hill, lightening was striking all around us and the hail was intensifying. Before leaving I weighed my pack at 80 pounds and Kristin’s with Turner in it exceeded 60, so we were not inclined to hike back up the slippery rocks back to camp. And if we did, there would be no guarantee that the storm would end, and then we would be in the difficult logistical predicament of being split from Jason and Joey, as we have to use our satellite phones to communicate, which is problematic. So we went for it.

I realize I’m biased, but I think I must have one of the heartiest wives in the world. I’m out here enduring the conditions because it’s part of my long-term career goals. Kristin is out here because of me. Yet even in the most desperate of conditions – getting soaked by hail, nearly fried by lightening, dragged through slush swamps on a sled, while holding on to our 2 year old son – there’s never a complaint or a whine. As we stood at the bottom of the hill with instantaneous thunder following lightening and I said “Let’s get thefuckoutta here”, she calmly and drippily said “Agreed”. When things are bad enough I don’t want to take the time to get a picture of it, it must be pretty bad. Conditions for snowmachining couldn’t have been worse either. Freezing rain on already slippery ice meant that I was just on the edge of being able to keep control of the machine and sled and left little margin for error. I drove within minor stream channels, as the walls of the streams provided sidewalls to keep us pointed in the right direction, but also meant I was continually flooding the sled with water. By the time we made it to the weather station, the hail had turned to rain and the lightening was no longer crackling around us. I made Kristin walk down the last hill in her crampons because I couldn’t be sure to be able to keep control of the sled on the slope, and the last stretch to the terminus after this was equally sketchy and wet. Soaked to the bone, she continued on with the hike onto the solid ground of the moraine after crossing an ice bridge over the now raging McCall Creek, all with a smile on her face. And not the smile of those ignorant of their predicament and how they got there, but the smile of those that grin and bear it because it was a result of deliberate decisions to choose this path. Turner was equally a trooper, sleeping through most of the trip, remarking only “My foot wet” when loaded into the backpack. How I’ve been so blessed I’ll probably never know.

The greatest family ever.

By the time we reached the terminus camp, Jason and Joey had set up the tents and got the stove going. It was a welcome relief to warm up and dry off a bit. The rain subsided after a little while and we wore our wet clothes (the only ones we had) to dry them off in the cool breeze. Turner woke up and was eager to explore the surroundings after a Scooby snack, searching for new eggs to hatch and new dragons (which also resemble large boulders) to fly on. The river was huge compared to a few days ago, swollen with all of the rain run-off, as were all of the waterfalls in the valley and surface streams on the ice. It was a remarkable thing to see, especially from a tent on high ground.

Turner drives the mystery machine.

The Nolans, glad of better weather.

26 June 08 (Day 66): Final stream equipment installed
Jason and Joey were up early this morning to shuttle the last remaining gear from the glacier, which was mostly related to a sonic distance ranger to be suspended over the stream to measure the water height over time. A week earlier we had suspended a cable across the stream at a location where the high banks would hopefully protect it from being washed away. Today we hung the sonic ranger on that cable, with the help of some metal conduit we salvaged from the glacier from previous campaigns. The idea is that once a minute, the unit beams down high frequency sound waves downwards onto whatever surface is beneath it. The waves then bounce off that surface and the unit receives them, counting the time it takes for this to happen. The speed of sound is a pretty straightforward function of air temperature, so the unit can then convert the travel time of the waves into a distance measurement. We use these instruments primarily to measure snow accumulation and ice melt on the glacier. But as the stream rises and falls, whether due to rain or to differences in ice melt throughout the day, the unit will also record this in the same way. To convert this height measurement into a discharge measurement, Jason manually makes discharge measurements at different stream heights to determine the relationship between height and discharge. We then use this relationship to convert all of the height measurements from the sonic ranger into discharge. Fortunately for Jason, it was not snowing or hailing today, so the conditions for wading across the stream and making measurements were substantially more pleasant than the last time he did it last week, though the higher water did overtop his hip-waders, leading to chillier feet.

Jason surveys while Joey writes down the numbers.

The water moves faster than the glacier.
It moves fast enough to move big rocks.

27 June 08 (Day 67): First ten days of stream data record our flood
Given that this is the first time we’ve worked at the stream, we were relieved to find out that our equipment was functioning as expected and recorded the flood that occurred during our move down here. I downloaded the time lapse cameras today and stitched the images into the movies below. These cameras were designed for hunters to figure out when is the best time to shoot deer or whatever, so they are not the highest quality. But they are cheap and waterproof, and suit our needs well enough. I stitched the images into the movies below. The date and time is stamped on the bottom of the image. We arrived on the 25th in the late afternoon, and you can see the stream start to rage at just about this time, due to the intense rainfall which has no where to go but into the stream. The plot below is from the pressure transducer we left at the bottom of the stream. You can see the stream is gradually getting bigger each day, due to the increase in ice melt, and on the 25th it jumps up substantially due to the rainfall. One of our goals in this project is to determine how much of the water in the larger rivers in this area is coming from glaciers and how much from precipitation. Collecting data like this is the first step in that process.

Ten days of timelapse camera data at our stream gaging site. Note how the water rises in the afternoon of 25th, when we arrived there.


Here’s the camera set up for those images.

Another ten days of timelapse camera data, looking up towards the terminus.

Here’s the camera set up for those images.

The data from our pressure transducer, quantitatively showing what the photos reveal.

The sonic ranger is suspended on the cable over the river. The logger is in the blue tote, next to the white air temperature sensor on the pole.

A close-up of the sonic ranger.

In general it was a foggy day today, and our energy level was pretty low. Jason and Joey hiked up to the glacier a little ways to install another time lapse camera that we had left there 10 days ago but didn’t have the chance to set up. I spent the morning on the phone dealing with the logistics of our airborne lidar campaign starting next week. Some chaos erupted with that over the past week as Tom, the pilot we used based in Kaktovik, had to return to civilization due to some medical issues, leaving Kaktovik without a plane. This also caused some concern with our take-out in a few days, but I think everything will work out. Jason also returned with some scrap conduit he found melted out from the glacier, so we beefed up our sonic ranger station a bit. The mosquitos have come out in full force here as well. I had never seen so many at our base camp before we came down here so we knew there would be lots here. Likely this is just a taste of what they are like down on the tundra. We even saw some caribou today, hanging out on the aufeis, trying to escape them. Likely we’ll see lots of those too in the next few days.

Turner likes the tent.


Time for zerberts.

 
McCall Glacier terminus at 3AM (28 June 08 03:49) in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

The light was nice when I rolled over, so I tried to capture it.

28 June 2008 (Day 68): Caribou stampede!
Tonight as we settled in to bed for the evening after the first day of our hike to the tundra, a herd of about 200 caribou ran through our camp heading towards the same destination. We began the day in fog and occasional drizzle, but the most annoying part of it was the thick swarms of mosquitos. Fortunately just as we began hiking, a small headwind picked up and kept them mostly at bay. The aufeis provided a bit of a highway for us on the way downhill, but it didn’t last long and soon we were in the worst section of hike – scrambling over large loose rocks covered with slippery wet lichen, to avoid the waterfall that forms in the bedrock constriction in the stream. This section is truly awful, especially when its wet, and the most nerve wracking for Kristin and I as it is the only section with a serious risk of hurting Turner. But we took our time and Kristin did great as usual. We also took our time because of the seriously heavy loads we were carrying. With the additional food and fuel I was carrying for the hike, my load was now pushing 90 pounds, probably 40 pounds of which was various electronics and camera gear needed either for the trip or in Kaktovik or safety gear. Jason was carrying a differential GPS unit with battery, a multi-parameter stream probe, and a packraft to attach the equipment to in the water. Kristin, carrying Turner at 40 pounds and their essential gear, was probably about 65 pounds. So we were pretty loaded.

The hike started out on the aufeis, which was pretty easily traveling.


It wasn’t long before the ice was too broken to travel on.


Descending from the nasty rock down to the stream bed, Turner needs a drink.

Turner eating lunch without the mosquitos eating him.
Turner feeding the mosquitos.
Turner’s favorite pastime is throwing rocks in the water.

The bugs knew we were here.


And they brought their friends…

Once past the scary rocks, we descended back down to stream level and had relatively easy hiking to our campsite at Jaeger Pass. The bugs were a continued annoyance but not overly so, and before long we were heading up the pass to the flat spot our tents sit on. We have a nice view of the valley here, as it takes a bend here and we can see up to the glacier and out to the Jago River. After dinner, the Nolans hung out in our tent while Jason and Joey went for a hike up to the top of the pass – without packs! – to enjoy the view.of the coastal plain. Our tent is an interesting lightweight design, with an inner shell made completely of bug netting. So in nice weather we can leave off the rainfly and enjoy the view, sans bugs. I wish we had done more of this earlier on the trip. With a rainfly on, one really gets the sense of having a space separate from nature and surrounding environment. It’s almost like being in a house, and the philosophy that goes along with being in a house. But just being inside a nearly transparent net tent creates a much different mental feeling, which is apparently difficult to describe. In any case, it affords much better opportunities for wildlife viewing. We noticed a small caribou herd up on the ridge near Jason and Joey, no doubt finding a breeze there to escape the bugs. After they returned to camp and went inside their tent, which was out of shouting distance from ours, we noticed the caribou beginning to muster and head down the pass towards us. We watched from inside the tent for a while, but after a few minutes it became clear that this was not just a few isolated individuals, but a small herd led by bulls and followed by cows and calfs. Kristin ran over to wake the others, while I took some photos of the animals that were probably not more than 150 meters from our tent. It was a really neat experience. There is something about seeing packs of caribou out here that is invigorating and magical.

Jason and Joey hiked up to the pass.


They were trying to be steathly, looking for caribou.

The Nolans were just glad to be horizontal.


The locals wanted to join us.

The caribou, preparing for attack. Fortunately we saw them from inside the tent, where this photo was taken. Jason and Joey had just been here, but didnt see them.


The bulls led the charge.


They were about 200 meters from our camp.


Going for a swim.



The cows and calves took up the rear.


The mamas always had an eye on their babies.


Turner watned to go with them.

 
Caribou stampede in McCall Valley (28 June 08 21:51) in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Watching caribou is hard work. Time for a snack. Note how the bugs are only in the lee side of the breeze.

29 June 2008 (Day 69): A long day ends in success
It began as a straightforward day, but quickly took a number of twists and turns. The biggest major wrinkle was that Jason discovered that he had forgotten a cable for the differential GPS. The idea was that we were going to survey the valley on our hike down and use these data as QC data for the lidar acquisition, planned to start in a few days. But he decided not to turn it on during our rock crossing as likely the antenna would get jostled too much to acquire reliable data, so we didn’t find out about the cable until now. So the choices were for one or more of us to go back and get it, or try to find an alternate cable and get it sent to Kaktovik fast. Given that it was Sunday in civilization, we opted to go back and get it. So Jason and Joey headed off – with no packs! – while Kristin, Turner and I headed down valley, with the idea that we would all meet our airstrip south of Jago Lake in the evening.

The main reason our trip to Kaktovik, and this hike to get us there, was to help manage the chaos of running a major airborne geophysical project out of Kaktovik. Though strictly speaking this is civilization, in the end it’s a village of 300 people on the edge of nowhere with a very limited infrastructure. Plans have a way of going awry here, and people who live or work here regularly accept this as situation normal, and the unspoken strategy for success here is the standard one of ‘if you want it done right, you better do it yourself’. So my role in Kaktovik is basically just to keep the project moving by solving problems as they arise. The first major problem arose about a week ago or more, when Tom decided to go back to Palmer due to medical reasons. He is the local fixed wing pilot and without him, Kaktovik has no local air taxi operator, greatly stressing a thin logistical network. This creates problems for us because we had planned to use him to deploy our GPS base stations throughout the tundra. So a new plan arose where Aerometric hired a consultant to help with this and to do this based out of Coldfoot, working with Dirk, the pilot that did all of our work with the Beaver in April and May. I had also already primed US Fish and Wildlife to help with this effort, and they also now ponied up with personnel and support. So now we had more personnel help than we needed with less air support, and I’m trying to coordinate this while hiking with a 90 pound pack and a 2 year old, down a caribou trail covered in grizzly tracks and half-eaten caribou carcasses.

Diaper change in McCall Valley (29 June 08 14:44) in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge  

Turner seems unimpressed with this diaper change, but doing it without turning him into mosquito bait is no minor feat.

It took us a while to get there, but eventually we did, and so did Jason and Joey. We took a number of breaks, both to rest our backs and give Turner the chance to stretch his legs. Once we got onto the open tundra, all Turner wanted to do was run. He hadn’t been able to run for the past two and half months due to the terrain. Now, with no obstacles, sharp rocks, slippery ice, etc, he could run in any direction he chose and was incredibly happy about it, and so were we. After a final stretch of tussocks, we found our airstrip and old camp site, and within an hour and a half of our arrival, Jason and Joey did too, so we ate a quick dinner and were asleep by midnight. The clouds parted during this time, and we were treated to views of the sun sweeping across the northern horizon throughout the night in our bug net tent, warm enough that we didn’t need sleeping bags.

Dragon wanted to eat the mosquitos.

30 June 08 (Day 70): Phase Two of the project ends
Today we ended Phase Two of the project and began Phase Three. It started out bright and sunny, but by mid-morning the thunderheads had built up and by mid-afternoon we had been getting rain for a while. Dirk launched about 2PM from Coldfoot to come get us with his Beaver, now on tundra tires instead of skis, bringing a contractor hired by Aerometric with him to deploy some GPS base stations. They showed up at our strip about 5:30PM, and we loaded up to set up another base station further up the valley before heading back to Kaktovik.

Joey, hiking in mosquito country.

Joey, walking into the wind in mosquito country...

The packraft deployed on the Jago River.


Using the paddle as part of the bracket saves having to carry something extra.


Turner: “Well having three laptops going in the back of Beaver kind of spoils my wilderness experience…”


Turner likes being part of the conversation…


At least in between political satire cartoons. (And speaking of politics, in case any lawyers from UAF or NSF have nothing better to do than to try to get me fired for having Turner on the plane, this flight was not paid for by either organization…).


Taking off in the Beaver.

A GPS base station complete with bear fence.

For us, this represented the transition from one phase of the project to the next. Now back in Kaktovik, we were suddenly in civilization again. No more sleeping bags, no more thinking about how much food or fuel we had left, no more heavy packs, no more studying the earth in person. By evening I had told the story of our research to 10 different people and it wasn’t until 10PM that I had the opportunity to get a shower. Jason and Joey are still out there, continuing process studies and helping with lidar ground support. Jason had set up our instrument raft in the morning while I collected GPS ground control points. The mountains that were our home are now just outlines on the horizon, often obscured by clouds, and the tundra is just a memory. Our studies now are airborne – using a laser to measure the shape of the land, so that later we can better understand how the shape of the land has changed. As gadget geek, I’m excited to have gotten this lidar work funded and be a part of it now, but I already miss the simplicity and focus of field work and the beauty of our study area.

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