6 May 12 McCall Glacier

It's hard to believe but we are now into our 10th field season on McCall Glacier. It's a bit shocking to have my own measurements spanning a decade, but here we are.

This year's goals are similar to those of the past but of course with new twists. Or less twists, in terms of drilling. This year we're testing a thermal drill which does not spin its way down into ice but rather melts its way down. We used this same drill in 2008 for our deep drilling, as have many others, but my goal is to see how well it will work for shallow drilling. The general idea is to develop a lightweight system that we can use on other glaciers nearby. To accomplish that, we need a system that it as light and compact as possible to minimize flights in small aircraft. The general goal is to reach about 40 meters down, as then we will be sure to hit the tritium layers leftover from nuclear bomb testing in the early 1960s, giving us at least one place in the shallow core that we know the absolute age. Given that the firn areas are largely gone now, many glaciers are losing the upper layers of their ice and we cant simply count annual layers to date the core since we dont know how many layers are lost. In any case, the "new" thermal drill is simply missing some of its heavier pieces, relying on humans to lower and raise it from the hole. My thought in using the thermal drill over mechanical is that the mechanical drills require solid drill sections all the way down the hole such that twisting the top also twists the bottom, whereas the thermal drill doesnt need those heavy tubes and weighs almost the same when extracting the first meter as the last meter.

Also on the list of things to do is test a new radar system to measure ice depths. Again here "new" is a relative term, as the radar transmitter is the same as I and many others have used before. The difference is that I've designed a new way to tow it behind a snow machine so that I can use it by myself and map extensive areas with great detail very quickly. Again the idea is to be able to take it to other glaciers and do the same thing, once its fully operational here. The main design flaw with the transmitter is that it is not waterproof and cannot simply be dragged over snow or ice without substantial protection. Most solutions involve sleds of various kinds filled with the transmitter and battery in a waterproof or semi-waterproof box. The trouble with most sleds is that they are prone to tipping over and if you are not watching it can cause painful results, but creating more stability adds more bulk and hassle. My technique puts the transmitter and battery inside a piece of PVC pipe which can be dragged directly and can roll or tip without injury to the electronics. The antennae can also be put into PVC, making a selfcontained system that requires no sled. That's the theory anyway, hopefully on this trip we'll see if it works or not.

The prototype radar housing, on the driveway.

Also on the list are the standard items done each field campaign. I measure the mass balance of the glacier by measuring how much of a pole installed previously is sticking out of the ice and compariing this to how much was sticking out the year before. I also measure the position of the pole with differential GPS. Then there are the dozen or more weather stations on the glacier, all of which need some attention. At some point I'd like to get a project funded just for weather stations, so that I can revamp them all.

This campaign's participants include Kristin and Turner, Mike Ewing and Keith Mountain, all verterans of prior campaigns here. The members of our trips seem to vary quite a bit, partly because we seem to be doing something new each trip, but partly because I have not put emphasis on minimizing variation. Maybe its time to start doing that. Ultimately my goal was to simplify baseline measurements such that the Nolans could do everything on their own, and maintain it on our own should funding dry up, but it's nice to have company and have a chance for new insights to get added to the mix. In any case, I was glad to have this crew and know in advance that drama would be at a minimum.

Turner, trying out a new approach to arctic survival gear.

I guess the trip officially began on May 1st, when Mike and Keith arrived in the evening. Practically speaking it began a month or two earlier, when my main attention got turned to preparing for the trip. I'm always surprised at how long it takes to prepare. It some senses it gets easier every time, but I think because of this I opt to do more, keeping the overall time fairly constant. This year, as usual, I stayed up all night on the 30th, two days before leaving, so that I could get a decent night sleep the night before departure. And it always works out that the last minute stuff is my own, like packing clothes, preparing my camera equipment, backing up data, etc.

Shuttling a load of lumber to Coldfoot. We invest a lot more than our time in this project...

In any case preparation came together reasonably well such that on the morning of the 2nd I was pretty much ready to go. Unfortunately the weather was not cooperating. Winds on the glacier were reaching over 25mph and the forecasts were for IFR everywhere north of the Brooks Range. I had talked to Dirk the day before and he saw little hope of us flying on the 3rd, especially considering that he was backed up by four days of bad weather for other projects. So we decided not to drive up as planned, despite good weather between Fairbanks and Coldfoot. Rather, Kristin and Keith flew up to Coldfoot carrying some of our bulkier supplies to lighten our driving load, while Mike, Turner and I ran some errands in town. So it was a fairly mundane experience for us, and we barely got back to the house before the flying team.

Kristin and Keith, ready for takeoff...

We decide to enjoy some of the local culture for the evening. We began with dinner at Silver Gulch, which was surprisingly busy and forced us to wait at the bar for 30 minutes before a table would be ready. Kristin bumped into some old friends from Antarctica, who were apparently hatching a scheme to buy a DC-3 and fly it to Antarctica on their own, and who were looking for a pilot to actually get it there and back. So much of the dinner conversation revolved around DC-3s. Afterwards, Kristin and Turner headed home and we decided that we weren't sure what to do next and barely made it out of the parking lot when we noticed the Howling Dog was open, so drove across the street for another beer. The experience here is typical of those I've had here. It's not a place for shrinking violets or those looking to get drunk in isolation, and seems to always have a mixture of bikers, hippies, yuppies, and blue collar types. I bumped into a few old friends and I think Mike and Keith made some new ones, and by the time we left the sun was rising again and was not long before it was time to pack the vehicles and start driving.

Professor Mike, explaining orbital variations of the earth about the sun to uninterested onlookers...

The drive to Coldfoot was fairly uneventful. It was about 1:30PM by the time we actually left Fred Meyer's parking lot full of gas and road food. It was about 6 hours later before we got out of the car for the last time in front of Coyote Air. No one was around, but the office door unlocked and the heater on so we unloaded our gear and made ourselves at home. I totaled our loads for the first time and confirmed my fear that we were into 3 loads for the put in. The drilling gear alone weighed 600 pounds. Ultimately I hope that weight will get reduced by half or more, but given that this is a proof-of-concept we did not invest in the lighter weight options, which also took more time than we had to sort out.

In retrospect it was a good thing we flew up a load the day before.

I was also testing a new camera on this trip...

Fortunately the weather the next day, May 4, was stunning across the northern half of the state. Keith and I were on the first flight, along with all of the food and camp gear. There wasnt a cloud in the sky for the entire trip, allowing us to fly direct and minimize flight times. The big unknown was the snow conditions. Last year there were awful drifts in our typical landing area, making for eventful landings and take-offs and causing a lot of stress. We circled a few times to try to assess the surface, but even in good light it's difficult to tell such things. As it turns out, the snow was as smooth and hard and fast as it has ever been and Dirk landed without the slightest bump.

Keith, wiping...

How many PhDs does it take to set up a tent?

Given the weather and our shortened flight times, Dirk went back planning on another load later that day while Keith and I began opening up our camp. The first task was to get the snowmachine working. It was clear that this was a high snow year. As we began getting the snowmachine visible again it also became clear that there was a major thaw event sometime over the winter based on the amount of ice on the machine. There was also a quite hard layer of snow overlain by a few inches of looser snow, so it may be the thaw wasnt too long ago. So it took longer than usual to get the machine out, and a lot of extra back strain trying to free it from the ice, but it fired up on the 2nd or 3rd pull and soon we were shuttling a load towards camp. The snow may have been great for airplanes, but for small snowmachines it was not. The loose snow on top of the harder layers meant that we could not pull much of a load without the track slipping. Similarly, the trail to camp from the glacier required a fair amount of post holing. But before long we had the cook tent up and tied down, and were headed back down the hill in anticipation of our second load. About 6PM Mike arrived with a load of gear. We all headed back to camp and focussed on digging out the stove, pots, snow scoops, etc so that we could make a bit of dinner. It had been a long day and by the time we had a functional camp, I and my back were in no mood for setting up a sleeping tent, so I just crawled into my sleeping bag on our tent spot and enjoyed sunset over the ridge about 9PM before pulling the bag over my head and falling asleep.


We woke up the next morning to another perfect day of no clouds or winds. I spoke to Dirk about 7AM and he thought the third and final load would be off the ground in an hour or so. So we spent some time digging out gear that could be sent out, such as old totes, collected garbage, etc., and headed down to meet the incoming flight. Along the way we also dug out the second snow machine, and by the time Kristin and Turner arrived we were able to haul two loads at once.

Keith uncharacteristically supervising extraction of the second snowmachine. It literally started on the first pull. The snow machine that is.

We all headed back up to camp to regroup and have some lunch. This was probably one of the most efficient put-ins we've had from Coldfoot, we 3 flights within 27 hours or so, with the good weather reducing each leg to under 2 hours each. Now that we were all here, the general plan was to get camp fully functional and distribute the gear to where it needed to be. Mike and Kristin focussed on camp while Keith and I shuttled loads. We brought everything up to the main cache without much issue, but getting the drill gear to the upper cirque proved more of a problem. The hill here is steeper than the others and the soft snow layer was loosening up in the afternoon sun and reducing traction, even on the track I had set the night before. After two exhausting loads it became clear that we had lost our oppornity for shuttling any more gear this day, as it was tough to even get an empty machine up the hill. So we called it a day on the glacier, and moved up to camp to sort gear and get ready for an early start in the morning. By 7PM we had eaten and I was falling asleep in my chair. I'm not sure it was due to just the day's work or pent up exhaustion and stress relief of the past few weeks, having now accomplished one of our major goals of the trip, which was just arriving safely with all of our gear.

Dirk landing

Turner, stuffed in with the cargo.

Turner, getting out.

Dirk taking off.

My new camera took fully stitched panoramas simply by rotating the camera. I left my real camera down on the snowmachine nearly the entire trip...

Kristin and Turner shuttle loads up the hill.

Cheers!

Cheers!

I awoke the next morning quite refreshed after a comfortable 12 hour sleep. It was another clear day, but with a brisk cold wind. I headed down the snow machines straght away to finish the shuttling before breakfast. The snow was quite grippy and in a few loads I had everything staged and was back to camp before the others began filtering into the cook tent. We were headed back down the hill about 9AM, looking forward to a productive day of drilling.

Early morning, before breakfast, looking down on camp.

It was still fairly breezy on the glacier surface, so I set up the old, modified megamid that I've been using out here for the past 10 years. We added broad snow flaps that all you have to do is open it up, throw miscellaneous gear around the edges and stick up the center pole. It's not something you want to sleep in, but its great for getting out of the wind and getting work done without gloves on. The first major task was attached the thermal drilling head to the core barrel, which entails screwing in about 100 small flathead screws with a tiny allen wrench. These screws hold down a thin strip of metal beneath which lies the wires that deliver eletrons from the generator to the thermal head on the bottom of the drill. This went fairly well, though tediously, and before long we were attempting to retrieve our first core in a test hole.

The first run went reasonably well. We drilled through the soft fresh snow from this winter and brought it to the surface. Extracting it is somewhat of an art form, as the core has to come out the same hole it came in from, unlike most drills where you push it through the back end of the core barrel. The trick here is that you have to help the core past the core dogs, which are designed to keep the core within the barrel so that it doesnt slip out when you bring the barrel out of the hole. To do this, one has to slide a thin piece of sheet metal (modified stove pipe) past the thermal head far enough to force the core dogs to stay open. But of course the core is there too, so some finesse is involved with getting the metal between the ice and the dogs. We eventually got it out, though in pieces.

The next run proved more problematic. About halfway down, the drill stopped drilling. According to the control box, no more current was flowing down to the thermal head. It wasn't clear why, but aparently the device had shorted out. We tried all of the standard Windows tricks of turning it on and off and plugging things in again, but to no avail. I scraped away some of the electrical insulation so that I could check for continuity and found that indeed there was a break in the line. I then scraped away more insulation just about the thermal head and it was clear the short was in head itself. There was no obvious sign of charring, though there were a few bright spots on the wires that might have been the source. In any case, it meant another hour and half of unscrewing the 100 or more little screws, soldering a new thermal head into the main drill cable, then reattached the metal strip. This being our only spare thermal head, we were on our guard that thermal drilling could end at any moment, and not knowing what we had done wrong we decided to dig down to the ice surface and start drilling directly in ice, in case the firn had something to do with it.

Digging out the sarcophagus.

Heat shrinking over the new electrical connections. Both the soldering and the heat gun could only be powered from the generator. But without the drill, there would be no need for the generator or the soldering...

The thermal drill and driller in action. The red box controls the amount of power coming from the generator to the drill. The yellow coat controls the smell in the area.

One of the weight savings was to not use a winch, but we then had to use Keith instead. So the weight was about the same, but the comic relief was much higher.

Pulling 10 amps at 180 volts and getting ice.

The third run successfully brought up 2 meters of ice. It was a little lumpy due to uneven drilling rates that melt a bit deeper into the extracted core, but it was a success nonetheless. Pulling the core barrel out proved a bit more of a challenge and a bit more stress, but eventually it did come out. We decided to do one more run, this time with only 1 meter extracted, just to get a better feel for drilling rates and keeping the hole straight. About 65 cm down, the drill seemed to just stop. Current was still flowing though, so at least we hadnt fried our last thermal head. Things like rocks, dirt or water conduits have the capacity to slow or stop drilling, but it seemed odd to encounter any of those so high up here. When we pulled the core barrel out, it was empty, which likely meant that the heat of the thermal head standing still for so long had melted the diameter of the core already acquired so much that the core dogs no longer touched it to hold it in. In any case, we felt that we had done about as much as we could in testing. We decided to break out the mechanical drill we had used in previous years to make sure we had all of the pieces, and our plan was to use it to start the first real hole tomorrow to acquire the firn down to ice, which would be 6-7m there, and then switch to the thermal drill to try to acquire another 30-40 m. Once we had sorted out the gear, we packed up and headed back to camp.

It being only 5PM, we decided to do a little snowmachine maintenance before heading back to camp. The sled we had used since 2008 had developed some cracks in the hitch over the years and had finally given way the day before. Fortunately I had anticipated this and staged a spare hitch here last year. Fortunately they were identical and 10 minutes later we had another functional sled. Last August I found one of the snowmachines upside down after a summer of melt, with the only damage being a destroyed windshield. So I brought one from our personal snowmachine in Fairbanks in to replace it, which again took about 10 minutes to install. So at least we had accomplish 2 things today and headed up the hill victorious. The wind had died down and we were treated to clear skies during our spaghetti and meatball dinner, followed by some ampgard swordfighting on the helipad, and then a cheesecake-oreo desert. It's now 9:30PM and I'm feeling like I've settled in to life on the glacier again.

08 May 12 McCall Glacier

Well, it's two days later and we haven't done any drilling. That morning we woke up to strong winds, winds strong enough to flatten tents. So we spent the morning milling about, resecuring tent lines, reading, making hot drinks, and the like. The cook tent does horribly in the wind, reducing interior volume to about half, as the windward side flattens towards the interior, trying to rip itself to shreds. Winds at camp are usually gusty too, and this day was no exception. The winds came from the east, which usually bring snow. There wasnt a lot of it but it it blew like a sandblaster and accumulated in any lee it could find, like the vestibules of tents. Drilling would have been a waste of time, as would nearly any other activity on the glacier, so we stayed at camp all day.
So the excitement of the day largely revolved around watching people get in and out of the cook tent. With the wind blasting against the door, as soon as the zipper was opened the loose flap of door material flung open and flapped wildly, resisting all attempts at being zipped back up. Some resorted to unzipping it just at the floor and crawling on all fours, while other attempted to open and close the inner material before opening the outer, getting pinned between them. Inside the tent, we had the cookstove going all day along with the kerosene heater, and even this wasnt enough to keep the chill off, though it was sufficient to cause watery eyes and headaches. Overall it was a pretty depressing day, and I went to bed taking all of my electronics and paperwork with me, in anticipation of the cook tent blowing away in the middle of the night.

Passing the time in a windy tent.

Turner, explaining paleontology to Keith.

Playing cards in the wind.

There wasnt a lot of snow, but there was a lot of wind.

It's really a miracle this tent has survived so long.

Despite the wind, I slept pretty well, having a somewhat fatalistic attitude about the longevity of the tents. I really dislike the cook tent and am looking forward to replacing it. I always seem to end up sitting on the windward side, which means my head continually gets bashed by the wildly flapping walls, and it's really a matter of time before it rips itself to shreds. This year I plan to replace it with a more serious tent which can be secured to a wooden floor and which we can trust to last during our wind events.

In any event, though it seemed there were some slack moments during the night, this morning's winds were no better than the day before. I got in there about 9AM and just sat for a while, watching the material and poles strain against the wind. Before long Mike and Keith came in, and we shared the experience for a while. I suited up for the sake of it and walked down the hill to check on the cache, walking straight into the wind, wearing my goggles and face mask, listening the pelting snow bounce off my gear. The cache and snow machines were drifted over, but all seemed in tact. The sleds were buried, so for lack of anything better to do I dug it out, only to discover a foot to my tripod that I had lost last year, so things seemed to be looking up. I fired up the machine and drove downglacier, curious to see how the winds were distributed. It was a little less breezy there, and I idly drove up to our camera station, which had stopped working in December. I cracked open the logger box enough to see if anything obvious was wrong but without letting too much snow drift into it. The light on the solar charger indicated that the voltage was fine, but the little light on the logger was not flashing at all, as if it was not getting any power, which was odd since the solar panels alone could have powered it. So I reached in and pushed on the power plug going into the logger, causing the light on the logger to flash and indicate that it was now working. I've had a lot of things go wrong on these stations, but that's the first time a loose power plug was the cause. But that was two good things in a row, so despite the weather it was turning out to be a good day.

The sleds had drifted over, but nothing had blown away.

The only thing remaining at our lower cache at the skiway was some plywood for the floor of our new cook tent, so I decided to see if I could haul it up in the fresh snow. I started with one 2'x8' sheet, making it no problem to our cache near camp, but stalling out on the way to the upper cirque, where I had hoped to use it as a core processing table. But two more loads got the rest of it up onto the rocks not far from camp, minimizing the distance we'd have to hump it by hand. I was able to make it up to the upper cirque without a load, to find that everything there seemed to survive as well.

By now it was noon, and while the winds seemed to have slowed a little they were still pretty strong. Mike and I worked on prepping some radar gear and other small projects to make use of the time. By mid-afternoon the winds had let up considerably and by late afternoon it had turned into another beautiful day. It was too late to start any work on the glacier without screwing up our schedules for the following days, so we enjoyed some photography and sightseeing while thawing out in the calm, sunny weather, interspersed with some sword fighting on the helipad. I found it remarkable, again, how a blinding white hell could turn into a beautiful afternoon so quickly. By 5PM it was time for cocktails and an early dinner and a movie.

It turned out to be a nice day.

Sword fighting on the helipad.

Turner "Please, just one more fight..."

Sword fighting on the helipad.

This photo is from the 1957 survey location that I try to take a panorama from each season. This one took me about 10 seconds to make, compared to the 45 minutes of acquisition and several hours of post-processing it normally does. Of course the resolution isnt much higher than seen here, compared to several gigapixels of the longer one.

PUT CAMP GIGAPANO HERE

We watched Thor. This was a recent movie version, leading up to Thor becoming part of the Avengers, along with the Hulk, Iron Man, and the others, in another movie due out this summer. It was a pleasant surprise as it went beyond just the surface and was the kind of movie that taps into the nature of men, and would make any father proud to have his son grow up to be Thor. I think the line that stuck with me most is when Thor brings one of his mortal friends home, passed out and slung over his shoulder, and a concerned friend fears the worst and asks what happens, Thor says with a smile, "We drank. We fought. We made our ancestors proud". In his world and with his skills, facing enemies carrying nasty weapons in overwhelming numbers is the challenge he seeks to define himself as a warrior, and part of him cant help but to seek such circumstances out. Standing in the late evening sun, looking out over the rugged mountain peaks and the glaciers that hang from them, miles from anywhere, separated from the elements by thin pieces of nylon and wool, piles of electronics strewn within our tents, with overwhelming odds of failure both logistically and scientifically, I realized that success in circumstances like these is what we seek to define ourselves as field scientists.

My little Avenger, having climbed over the snow drift that formed in our tent earlier in the day.

11 May 12 McCall Glacier

The next day we finished all of the drilling, though we didnt realize it at the time. The weather was great in the morning and we got an early start up the hill. We decided to start with the mechanical drill we had used in the past, as we knew that we could get all of our highest priority work done with it efficiently. All five of us fell into various roles getting ready, and soon we were drilling our first hole. Keith and Mike drilled, Kristin and I processed, and Turner labelled and oversaw activities. It only took just over an hour to finish our first hole, about 5 meters deep, just in time for lunch. At this point, Kristin and Turner took over processing. As I was kneeling in the snow, something went pop in my knee, making continued kneeling unpleasant and causing me to ponder how many more seasons of such work I really had left. The next hole was 8 meters deep, and took about 2 hours. By now it was about 3PM, and we decided to get the final hole done while the weather was still holding out, and even with the move to the next hole we were finished by 6PM and back to camp by 7.

The first core site. At each one, we have a datalogger recording temperatures at various depths below the surface. The measurements tell us when meltwater reaches each depth, because it warms up. Each year we core about 2m further upglacier than previously, so as not to core through previously disturbed ice, or disturb the thermistors.

In 2010, I added a new pole at each of the 2010 coring locations, so that we could actually run a tape measure from it to ensure we're going to the right spot the next year.

Keith helped Turner extract his own core for Show and Tell next fall.

Turner drilling.

Recovering the core.

Turner was very excited.

See?

Our second coring location. This one is off to the west side of the glacier where the firn is shallower.

Service with a smile.

Turner and Kristin, packaging Turner's core. The solar panel powers the battery that powers the vacuum sealer that we package the cores in.

Under the white tarp in the foreground are the extracted cores, inside their vacuum sealed bags, staying out of the sun.

The second coring location, with the white drilling platform still in place. We try to minimize the disturbed area uphill from the site so that we can use it next year. The thermistor string and the 2010 pole can be seen in front of the snow machine.

The third and final drilling location. Here the 2010 pole had gotten buried. Fortunately I had apparently anticipated this by adding a piece of bamboo pole last summer, but I had to dig down to see the pole to confirm.

Snow drifts can be pretty cool, though its amazing that any electronics can survive a winter here..

Extracting a core from the core barrel.

Drilling at our final hole.

A transition between firn (on the left) and ice. Our goal is to track and measure the process by which firn turns into ice.

Not the best processing surface, but it works.

Extracting and processing cores.

Core processor by day, Nintendo diva by night.

The general idea for the next day was to deepen one of the holes by another 30 meters or more. The purpose of the shallow cores, 5-8 meters, is to study the evolution of the firn, specifically how surface meltwater trickles down and refreezes there over the years. By coring in the same locations year after year, we can watch layers get denser and measure the rate of densification. The deeper core is for a different purpose. Here we are looking to duplicate the past 50 years of record from our 2008 core, where we see a sharp rise in industrial pollution, likely coming from increased coal burning in Asia. We're trying a thermal drill this year, to see if it might be something we can easily transport to other nearby glaciers in the future to quickly extract 30-40 meters of ice, as in a day trip. The general idea is that with other cores we need to get back to 1960 so that we can use the tritium layer from nuclear bomb testing as an absolute date reference. But on the other hand we want to do it in a day with lightweight equipment to minimize the logistical burden.

So far, our experience with the thermal drill wasn't that great, and it didnt get any better. The first challenge was getting the generator started. For whatever reason, it started fine a few days earlier but just would not kick over on this day. Fortunately we had brought a jet boil with us to the upper cirque so that we could make more drinking water. So we dug a little pit under the generator, put the stove in it, and covered the works with a tarp. While that was heating up, we began packaging the cores we had already taken to make them ready for transport and processing. I was amazed how long the stove ran, and by the time we had used up the core boxes leftover from last year the generator was warm and started right up.

Preheating the generator.

Now we were ready to drill. We had power we needed and the tripod was set up with the thermal drill centered over the existing 8 meter deep hole. So I flipped the switch, cranked up the heat, and the drill began melting its way down the hole, starting by going through the cuttings left in the hole by the mechanical drill. About 20 seconds later, it stopped. The thermal head had once again fried itself.


The control box.

We tried fiddling with what we could, but it soon became clear that there was nothing we could do to fix it, or even figure out what went wrong. The best I could determine is that in both cases when thermal head fried it was going through snow rather than ice. Perhaps in this case there is not enough heat conduction to carry heat away from the thermal head and it overheats and melts something internally. Seems like it should be robust enough to withstand its own heat, even in air, but there's a lot of things wrong with the world I wish would be different.

In any case, drilling for the season was now done and we switched into packing mode. There was only about 20 meters of core in total, so the packing went quickly with all of us. The general idea is that each core gets labelled as soon as it comes out of the hole, paying particular attention to which way is up. After each run when a piece of core is extracted, it gets slipped into a vacuum sealer bag, like the kind you would normally put food into. Then we write the core hole name, the run number, and which way is up directly on the bag with a permanent marker. Then we vacuum seal the bag and melt the ends to hold the vacuum. This helps protect the core, and if there are any broken parts or multiple pieces it keeps them locked together. Then we staple a label onto the end of the bag which has this same information, plus a bit more, including glacier name, date, the depth the core was extracted from, and the length of the core. This all goes into a field book as well. Usually we just store the core temporarily at this point so that we can keep up with the drilling. So the final step, which we were doing now, was placing the cores into long square tubes to protect them during shipping to Fairbanks and adding a duplicate label to the outside of the box so we can tell which is which without having to open the box up. To minimize the number of boxes and to keep the cores from sloshing around inside the boxes, we try to put several core pieces in each box.


Packaging the cores for transport.

Weighing and packing.

We got back to camp and toasted our success. Even though we did not extract a deep core, we did meet our primary coring objectives, and we did learn important information about the thermal drill, which was the main point of that exercise. I called Dirk and he said he would be ready to haul the cores out in the morning, weather depending, and I also called Ken who said he would be ready to transport them from the Fairbanks airport to the freezer at UAF, so it seemed like everything was on track.

The weather in the morning was great here and in Coldfoot, so Dirk loaded up the plane with our remaining gear in Coldfoot and headed this way. The rest of us mobilized to get the cores down from the upper cirque along with all of the drilling gear, which we hoped to send out now too. By the time Dirk got here it was getting a little gusty on the glacier, but still flyable. The issue is that taking off with a tailwind significantly degrades performance. So once the plane was unloaded and then reloaded, I stood off to the side with the radio to let him know when the wind died down. After a bit there was a lull, so I let him know and he started his take-off roll. By now it was noon, and the snow had started soften a bit. We watched him speed up and head down glacier, but soon he was out of sight, still on the surface going downhill past his normal rotation point. We all held our breath as we heard the engine echoing off the valley walls and before long we saw him airborne just off the surface down the valley. We traded some comments on the radio about setting a new record for the longest takeoff roll, and then wished him well on his way back to Fairbanks.

We dig a temporary snow pit at the skiway to keep the cores frozen while waiting for the plane.

Turner decided to stay in the tent, bundled in extra coats, while waiting.

Keith unloads the plane while Kristin gets the cores out of the pit.

Once the snow pit was empty, Turner took over digging tunnels.

Transporting ice cores from the freezer to the airplane. (Note that I sped this up 10x and it's still 6 minutes long)

Skiing back up.

So now, at least for us, the crux of the project had been past and it was time to turn attention to all of the other projects needing to be done. I decided to work first with the ice radar, as in the past two campaigns I let other priorities take precedence and never had the chance to fully sort it out. This year I constructed a new mounting system for the radar that does not require sleds to keep the electronics off the snow. This system is based on PVC plumbing that you can buy in Home Depot. The general idea is that the radar transmitter, battery, and antenna are all encased in PVC, such that the electronics are protected from weather and snow, the antennas are kept straight, and the whole works gets dragged through the snow and can roll without affecting anything. But I've never tried it and it was hastily constructed before leaving for the glacier, and I've never heard of anyone doing it like this, so I had some concerns that none of this would work out as planned.

As it turned out, it worked great. Besides the dragging method, I was also testing some shorter antennas and operating the radar from the snow machine. Shorter antennas lead to high frequency radar waves, which yield higher resolution information at the expense of not penetrating the ice as deeply. Shorter antennas are also easier to manage. These new ones are 20Mhz, which are each about 5 meters long. On the receiving end, most people leave the laptop and oscilliscope in a sled at the center of the receive antenna, which requires a stable sled and waterproofing to keep it all from getting destroyed. The alternative is to walk alongside the receive antenna holding the electronics in your hands. I decided to run a coax cable from the receive antenna to the snow machine, such that I could keep all of the electronics with me on the snow machine. So there were a lot of new things going on here, but basically once I hooked it all up and went for a test drive, everything performed as hoped, so I went for a run up into the lower cirque where the deepest ice is and where I know from prior work there is a transition within the ice that should be visible. I was done with this by 5PM, and walked up the hill in the sunshine looking forward to a full day of radar the next day.

In my system, the laptop and oscilliscope sit on the back of the snowmachine, connected to the receive antenna by the coax cable inside the green webbing.


The coax is snaked out one of the elbows, which I thought would help the pipes track better in the snow and minimize rolling, as well as provide a way to easily attached the hauling ropes.



The transmit antenna is in the rear, and the center section holds the transmitter and battery, with an on/off switch located in an elbow with a threaded cap for easy access. The antennas are attached to caps at either end of the assembly, so that they stay straight. All caps and segments are fastened by hose clamps.

Dragging the antennas.

After dinner that night I tried catching up on these notes. Unfortunately this fuckhead Mike keeps interupting me with questions about the meaning of life, so I'll have to put it aside for a while...

I became a graduate student essentially out of lack of anything better to do. I apparently couldnt bear to go the standard route of the real world, which eventually led me to Alaska. After a few years of bumming around, the lure of free money through student loans drew me into getting a master's degree in engineering at UAA, but I could still never bring myself to put on a suit and try to convince some stranger that I could solve his engineering problems and then be told what to do for the rest of my life. So I tagged along with a glacier research project in Juneau, met some faculty from Fairbanks there, and followed them back, both putting off student loan repayment and getting a living wage for being a student. After graduating that, I still had no plans to be a professor, but one thing led to another and here I am. So I'm the worst person to give career advice. If one looks at higher education objectively, it's a complete scam, largely perpetuated by politicians and the agressive, bottom-feeding online 'universities' they serve (and to which more than half of all federally-backed student loans apparently go to). Apparently even in most real universities (with UAF being an exception) graduate students are barely paid anything, so are forced into student loans, which they then must weigh economically -- is the cost of this education going to pay for itself through later job opportunities or should I just get a job now? The people running academic departments, like Keith, hear this noise are faced with the choice to either cater to it or crumble. Thus what remains uncrumbled is still called a University, but becomes part of the problem rather than the solution. The quality of education is weakened, if not due to lower actual standards or shittier professors than because of lower (or at least different) student expectation about what that education is for. And it is of course short sighted -- the more graduates there are, the fewer job opportunities there at that level, because someone still needs to pump the gas and dig the ditches, and thus the more debt students get into and, seems to me, the lower quality of life they will have. The purpose of education, in my mind, is not to learn how to make more money, but rather to learn how not to get shit on by the rest of society, and that doesnt necessarily mean making more money, just using your brain better. Beyond this, the dream of higher education, that which draws many into academia, is to educate well enough that students will figure out how to not get shit on without resorting to becoming the shit-slingers of the future. But I guess this is the dream of losers, because winners, in the short term, have no use for such democratic or socialistic notions. And when push comes to shove, the only people that care about the long term are those that feel they are losing in the short and just seeking some ideas like that to convince themselves that their position in the pecking order is the best place to be or is out of their control to change.

16 May 2012 McCall Glacier

The next day seemed like it was going to be beautiful again, so we all headed down the hill for our first foray down-glacier. I planned to do radar work today. In the past two trips, I left this as a lower priority to the core projects but then never had a chance to really work with it due to everything else taking longer than it should. This time I rigged up the antennas to drag behind the sled, so that Kristin and Turner could operate the laptop and ensure everything was functional as I drove. This was probably overly optimistic, as there always seems to be a lot of troubleshooting involved with keeping it working, but given my success of the day before I thought it worth going for. In general it worked well, but there were a number of hiccups. The main issue was that I tried to reduce some of the ringing in the signal by adding attenuators, but these seem to cause more trouble than they were worth. I also shortened the distance between the antennas from 7.5m to 4m, and this seemed to boost the signal well enough. Eventually we made our way down to JJMC, the main weather station on the lower glacier. Keith and Mike followed on the other snow machine so that they could decant the pollen trap there. The weather was still nice, but there was a cold wind that kept us awake. Turner decided to stay in the sled wrapped in mama's down jacket rather than help us download the several dataloggers there. The snow was really mushy, though quite thick, and I was a little nervous we would not make it back up the hill.

The main weather station in the ablation area.

The coupler between poles the sonic ranger was mounted on had been jacked out by ice inside the lower pole and was now just barely hanging on.

As the pollen crew finished up their work, I set a track on the west side of the glacier with their machine to make the radar towing easier and to check for sketchy snow over the many streams and small crevasses here. Everything seemed fine, so we got settled back into our towing arrangement as they hiked over to the east side to check out the old hut. Unfortunately the radar was not cooperating. I decided to switch over to my new field laptop, which I had only had for a few days before the trip, because it was having trouble communicating with the dataloggers and the radar laptop was not. So I wanted to save the radar laptop's battery for other dataloggers on the way back, but the radar software wasn't quite configured correctly on the new laptop either. In any event, after some delay we got underway again to map out new regions of the glacier's bed to improve our bedrock map and thus our numerical modeling of glacier flow. It worked well enough, and before long we were making our way back up glacier and catching some other dataloggers along the way.

Headed back up the hill with the radar, stopping at loggers along the way.

Members of the Ice Radar Operators Union, Local 6288.

All aboard the radar train.

All aboard again.

It was late afternoon by the time we got back to camp, but given the good weather I decided to go to the upper cirque and download all of the many dataloggers there. It was nice to have some time alone and fortunately the downloading went reasonably well. The dataloggers here mostly record firn and ice temperatures. The general idea is that we want to measure the change in temperature that occurs in spring, usually starting in early June, when snow melt begins there. The sun heats the surface snow, melting it, and then gravity causes it to drip into the snow beneath it. The snow here is still cold from the winter's impact, and the temperature gradient causes heat from the water to flow into the snow to the point where the water freezes again. The process releases so much heat that if only the upper 10 cm of snow melts and then refreezes below it can warm up the entire snow pack below to the melting point, much faster than conduction alone would do. So tracking subsurface temperature gives us a look independent of our coring to gage how much ice is accumulating there.

The technology we use for these measurements seem somewhat commonplace now, but it's still amazing that a few AA batteries in a tiny box can store a year's worth of 15 minute measurements of firn temperature at 8 different depths. To service them all takes a few hours to download the data, backup the data on a memory stick, change the batteries and relaunch the logger. It would be impossible to make these measurements by hand, not just because one would have to be doing it every 15 minutes at 5 different sites for the entire year, but also the process on making the measurements so frequently would destroy the snow pack. The upshot is that it only takes me a few hours after a long day's work to make this year's worth of measurements and still be back in time for happy hour in camp.

Our goal for the next day was to head to the terminus to decant the last pollen trap and deal with summer datalogging measurements there; unfortunately the weather was not cooperative. The main issue with going to the terminus on snow machine is that there are large ice hummocks in the direction of flow that can funnel you into places that you dont want to be, but the ice is so slippery that you cant escape it. So especially for the first trip down there, it's best to have good weather rather than a whiteout. Plus it's not much fun dealing with dataloggers in a blizzard. So we milled about camp in the morning, napped, or did odd jobs. Fortunately the winds in this storm were not as strong as the last one, and it was much warmer.

In the afternoon we hauled the rest of the new tent floor up to camp and began assembling it in the mild blizzard. The idea behind the new tent is that it should resist winds much better as it has a strong metal frame and fabric under tension. The downside is that it requires a level surface to attach to. In our location, there is barely enough room to set up a few sleeping tents, and even the cook tent is set up over some serious lumps and rocks. Because we are in a Wilderness area, we cannot erect traditional tent platforms, so we had to do some creative engineering to develop a modular flooring system that can be folded up when not in use, but still erected quickly. I looked into commercially-available systems like this, but the only ones I found still required level ground. So our floor is made from conventional lumber, but fastened only with screws and brackets, so that it all it takes is a screw gun and a wrench to put it together. Unfortunately I didnt have time to work through all of the details before having to ship it, so some further head scractching was required. Apparently the strain of such head scratching was so severe that we were in bed by 7PM. In many ways, weather days are more exhausting than active days on the glacier, though unless you experience it yourself this may be difficult to believe.

Keith, crude but effective.

Turner, taking advantage of short breaks in the weather.

Those are wings, not rackets. And that's fog, still choking the lower glacier.

The next morning I was up early, now starting to really feel the pinch of time and wanting to get the stream work out of the way. It was now Monday and our plan was to begin leaving on Thursday, and I still hadnt done any mass balance or GPS work. It seems I have an hour or two's work every morning just prepping gear for the rest of the day, so my mornings typically consist of pounding as much water as I can to offset the dehydration normally experienced during the day, while walking around assembling and packing piles of gear at camp or down on the glacier, usually starting an hour before the others are up. Though I appreciate help, the work for the most part can only be done by me, as only I know where everything is and where it needs to go, etc. Plus, given my experiences over the years, I found it easier to not have any expectations of help, and when I'm ready to go I just go and let everyone else catch up. On this day I was ready to go early and headed out ready to do all of the mass balance and GPS on the lower glacier on my way to the terminus stream to work there. Unfortunately once I headed around the curve I could see that the lower glacier was choked in fog again, so I decided to try to finish all of the same work on the upper glacier. Again because it's simply more efficient for me to do this on my own, this essentially gave everyone else the day off from glacier work.

Work went well, though it wasnt long before the fog and snow creeped its way to the top of the glacier and I was working in a blizzard again. Here the hazards of working in a white-out are much lower than the lower glacier, so it was more of an annoyance than anything. For example, writing in a field book becomes problematic when you have to keep wiping snow off of it while you are writing. As I headed into the upper cirque I knew conditions were worsening, so I deliberately skipped the pole at the head of the ice fall so that I could finish everything else first, so that if something unexpected happened at least I would be nearly finished with the work. By the time I had finished everything else, visibility was near zero and I navigated by feel and memory, approaching the ice fall from a direction I knew was safe and nearly ran into the pole. When I install this pole every two years, I do it deliberately before the large crevasses open up, so I know that if I'm standing next to the pole I'm safe, but as the poles migrate into the ice fall crevasses open up behind them, so there's always a chance there this has happened and is hidden beneath the snow. I've never had a crevasse form beneath the pole, and by virtue of the pole still standing I know there is ice there. The scarier part is turning around. Though the crevasses here are large, the snow machine can nearly span them and if a bridge broke I'm confident I could power or jump across it. But turning requires the snow machine to curve into the width of a crevasses where it could easily be swallowed up. Because I could barely make out the topography of the snow in the flat light, I opted to make use of the machine's reverse feature and just followed my track back out, which was a challenge in itself. In any case, I was back at camp in time for lunch.

All I can do is keep thinking to myself, "Ice is nice and good for you, snow makes glaciers grow."

Though camp was also in the fog and blizzard, it was warm and we spent the late afternoon deliberating on the location of our new tent. There were surprisingly many things to consider. Initially I had thought to put it were the cooktent now sits, but given that it is on the largest nearly-flat area for 10 miles in any direction, it seemed best to use this for sleeping tents in the future. Other considerations were asthetics, wind loading, drifting, visibility, proximity to the outhouse, and ease of access. In the end, we decided to put it where the Nolan's usually put our sleeping tent, which is a somewhat level area at the southern edge of the knoll we are on. Here we can clearly see down the trail to the glacier and we only lose this one sleeping tent spot, compared to other locations which chew up two. I know this was not a major consideration to the originators of this project in 1957 who camped on the snow in the accumulation area (which now no longer really exists), but I think McCall Glacier is one of the few glaciers in the Brooks Range where there is a site not too far from the ice to set up more than one tent. In our case, there are only a few such spots on this tiny knoll, but they are precious and are an essential component to our ability to conduct such comprehensive research here. By early evening the weather had improved substantially and we just picked up our tent, contents and all, and moved it to a more marginal site not far away, so that we could begin assembling the floor in situ.

After much deliberation, we set the new floor where our sleeping tent was minutes before. The posts and elevated beams allowed us to site this nearly anywhere without disturbing the ground beneath. The joists and beams and posts are all connected with Simpson brackets and screws.

Once again the lower glacier was choked in fog, this time visible from camp, so we decided to head to the upper glacier as a group and deal with several miscellaneous projects. My main task was to dig snow pits at each of our coring sites. The core has trouble capturing recent snow because it tends to just loosely fall out of the end of the core barrel as it is brought up. So in these pits I measure snow density by inserting a small cutting tool of known volume and weighing the snow. This was a heavy snow year, probably more than I've ever seen here. There were clearly a few big storms at some point that created hard, wind slab layers. While I was doing this, Mike and Keith cleaned up all of the remaining coring equipment, which we now store in the freezer box I built in 2008 to store our deep ice cores. This box was completely above snow level last summer and was now buried over its top. Once I was done with the first pit, Turner and Kristin took over and made tunnels in the loose hoar layer beneath the hard wind slab, while I dug the next pit. They joined me again on the third and final pit, and it was nice to see Turner having an interest in the work and picking up on some of its meaning.

At some point Mike was looking around and made the comment that he wished he could spend a week here hiking around and exploring. Kristin mentioned that I had been saying that for 10 years and never pulled it off. And it was true. I'm lucky to get a few hours to explore on any particular trip, and usually I use that to take some panoramas. Well, next time it will be different...

It was a beautiful day in the Upper Cirque.

So we headed out to work there.

I dug snow pits and measured density.

The snow was really deep this year.

Turner helped a bit, but I think it was just to get me to hurry up so he could dig tunnels in the hole.

Matt: "No really, pull my finger, it's for science"

In the meantime, Mike and Keith worked on another overdue project necessitated by the heavy snow. I put in a weather station here in 2005 that has a different design than all the others. Most of my stations are not attached to the ice, they simply have wide bases that ride on the melting ice. Becuase this station is in what is supposed to be an accumulation area, this design would potentially cause the station to get buried. So here I planted a large single pole such that I can keep adding new sections to the top of the pole and sliding the instruments upwards on to it. Since 2005 though, I've never had to raise it. This year the logger boxes were actually below the snow surface and the instruments themselves were nearly so. Thus raising the station was more complicated than I thought it would be because we first needed to dig a large pit to extract the logger boxes, but then there was no place to stand to raise them above snow level. Being the ingenious types, they managed to sort this problem out by creating some makeshift scaffolding that spanned the width of the pit, and by the time I got back there they had the job nearly done.

Keith and Mike dug out the spare mast poles. I hose clamped them to a nearby pole 7 years ago for easy access, but they since got buried.

Kristin and Turner used my snow pits as a start to their tunnel system.

Any for me?

The buried weather station.

Turner gets to feel tall.

I knew I brought that ladder for something.

Turner got a new toy.

Raising the station.

With the station now raised, I also conducted some long overdue maintainence. For whatever reason, this station has always been problematic, since the first season it was installed. I was never able to figure out why, but it always had power and instrument problems. So I ripped out most of the useless instruments, replaced most of the useful ones, and changed out the logger. I also added a new Onset logger with a Young anemometer. I would likely change all of my loggers to ones made by Onset, except that currently they do not have a snow depth sensor and I'm not sure they have a telemetry system that would work here. But in any case, I now use them as backups on all my Campbell stations. It was 5 PM by the time we finished with all of us this, but it was a productive, energizing day and we enjoyed happy hour at camp focussing another couple of hours on tent floor design and construction. We put off dinner as long as we could, but once started it was one of those nights that seemed to go on forever as we kept the bar open and swapped tall tales of previous adventures. It was our latest night yet, and we were in bed by 11PM.

The raised and revamped weather station.

I also added a silicon pyranometer to this one next to it, at top, to measure sunshine.

Mike tells his Brokeback Mountain story. Turner thanksfully stayed out of that one.

Keith: "Did you at least get a reach around?"

"A what?"

"Kids these days, cant even get a buggering right..."

"A three hour tour..."

Keith interfaces with missionaries.

Mike, blueberry picking.

Keith describes the origin of "boofheads".

This morning I was up extra early, determined to get to the terminus and finish up all of the remaining mass balance, GPS, and data logger work. I was also in a cranky mood. I was packed and headed down the hill just after 8, and spent another half hour or so there sorting more gear and making sure I had everything I needed for all of the different projects I was about to tackle. By the time I took off, Mike and Keith were making preparations to go too, but I started without them as I wanted to finish my glacier work before getting to the terminus. As I drove down the glacier, Turner came out to the edge of the knoll and waved to me. I felt bad that I left before he woke up and endeavored to improve my mood and focus on why we come out here together.

It was another beautiful day, with clear skies and almost no wind, and work proceeded well. I was still in shadow most of the way with the low morning sun being blocked by the steep valley walls. I surveyed the poles of the lower glacier and soon was at the main weather station trying to repair the sonic ranger there that measures snow and ice melt. The pole it was on had been jacked out of place by ice that had formed inside the pole itself. Fortunately a solution involving lots of hose clamps presented itself, and just about the time I was wrapping that up Mike and Keith arrived on their way to the terminus.

The fixed sonic ranger pole.

The drive to the terminus was one of the least sketchy I've had. There was more snow on the lower glacier than I had ever seen it. Typically, strong winds erode the snow down to bare ice, which makes the snow machining awkward under the best of circumstances. But with this much snow covering the obstacles, we could just take nearly a straight line in our intended direction. We stopped to survey the two remaining poles here and download the remaining dataloggers measuring ice and air temperature and soon were at the spot where we normally start to walk. With so much snow, it was tempting to take the machines all the way down the terminus, but because its so steep we cant really assess conditions there until its too late to turn around, so we opted to for caution rather than valor.

We all had heavy loads hiking down, and the soft snow caused us to posthole up to our knees or higher most of the way. Mike was carrying an enormous tool kit and other supplies for his pollen trap. Keith and I were carrying a lot of aluminum pipe to construct a structure we could place in the stream channel to keep our stream instruments safe and in the water. Plus Mike and I had laptops and assorted other gear. Despite the conditions, we made good progress to the stream channel and were in good spirits. The brisk morning air had turned hot and we were all overheating despite having shed most of our layers. We took a break once we arrived at my weather station there and enjoyed some snacks while enjoying the view.

Not a view I get often. Being in front that is.

We arrived at the weather station just in time to prevent a giant finger from crushing it.

It was snowy on the terminus and stream.

One of the reasons I dislike going to the terminus is that the dataloggers I have there are especially ornery to deal with. This is the only Campbell station I have that is not telemetered, so I have to manually download it. The issue with this is that these loggers only communicate via serial ports, and such ports are no longer available on laptops, making some adapters necessary. With the past several laptops I've used, it could take hours to download a logger, and require constant attention while doing so because the connection keeps dropping. I never figured out why. I noticed Mike had a laptop that he apparently stole from a museum that had a true serial port, so I asked him to bring it along, not realizing it was also apparently made of of lead. I was looking forward to a smooth download, but it was not to be, and I have no explanation why. So I gave up on that for a while to work on the other logger, a pendant from Onset. I've always had trouble communicating with this one too. After 30 or so frustrating minutes I determined the cause. These loggers communicate with an optical link, which means that the logger itself has no plugs for wires, you simply place the downloading device in contact with lights that shine through the housing of the logger. But this connection was always very flaky, I would have to hold the two devices at just the right angle to get them to communicate, but then the connection would drop. What was really wierd is that there seemed to be no shorts in the cable and the position required would vary widely. As it turns out, the issue was that sunlight was leaking through the seal between the two, and this bright light was enough to confuse the communication. So even though I held the two perfectly still when I went to press the button on the laptop to download, my shadow would change and affect the connection. With this mystery solved, downloading proceeded smoothly. With this success in hand, I attempted to connect to the Campbell station. Here I had a small lightweight netbook that I use for the radar and other than a short test after installing the software, I never actually used this computer to download a Campbell station. I wish I had, as it worked nearly flawlessly, downloading the entire memory back to 2008 with only one dropped connection. With the last of the logger hassles solved, I moved to next task with great optimism.

In the meantime Keith had been assembling the stream cage. This is essentially a 1 meter cube. I developed this design several years ago for use in the Jago and Hulahula Rivers, where it succesfully lasted the summers. I think subconsiously I got the idea from my floating weather stations, where a broad base keeps them stations upright. The issue in the river is that the fast flowing water wants to move anything that is standing still. These cages have a small cross section, such that water can easily flow around them, but have a wide base such that they are hard to roll. In my previous installations I put in some sort of floor and then weighted this down with rocks. I didnt do this for this installation, partly because I was installing it on snow and waiting for the snow to melt and the river to form, and partly because I ran out of time in preparing it back at home. In any case, Keith dug a pit down to an ice layer just above stream-bed level, and we dropped the cage into it and hoped for the best. The only instrument I hooked up to it was a pressure transducer, which measures the height of the water above it, but if it survives this summer, then I may add more sophisticated instruments in the future. I placed a small time-lapse camera on the bank looking at it, so hopefully we should see how well it fares.
About the time we were finished with this, Mike had finished with his pollen work. We took one last break in the heat of the sun to enjoy a snack and last of our water before the march back up the hill. I led the way up, lamenting that I had led the way down and had taken such large steps. Fortunately the others had followed in my footsteps, making the steps solid and eliminating the unknown of whether your next step would send you tumbling over because you sank two feet more than you anticipated. In any case, we made good time getting back to the snow machines, and the despite my fears the sun had made the soft snow sticky enough to grab in the snow machine teeth but not so mushy that it would bog down.

Diggin' snow.

Gutentite.

This little camera, $100 at Sam's Club, will hopefully take pictures of the stream throughout the summer.

Mike used the pit for pollen samples.

Again with the view. Scary that I'm king of the pussies...

I stopped for some last work at the main weather station while the others continued on. Here I dug one last snow pit for density and then attempted to communicate with our deep thermistor string that goes through the whole thickness of the ice. This string stopped communicating a year or more ago. I had hope that it would work forever, but it was not to be. The company that made it sent me a specialized logger that I could hook up to it for more direct troubleshooting. I fooled with this for a while with no luck, but wasnt really sure what I was doing. It being not quite 5PM, I use the sat phone to call the manufacturer, who confirmed that I was doing everything right, which was their oblique way of saying that their thermistor string was truly dead. Getting one more measurement out of that string would have been icing on the cake to a successful day of completing nearly all of our work, but that's just the way it goes sometimes.

Back at camp, it was still warm and sunny and we chipped away at floor design and construction some more before enjoying a nice mexican meal and margeritas, toasting Turner and his new lost tooth and the imminent arrival of the tooth fairy. Shortly before coming on this trip, I bought the complete first season of Gilligan's Island. After watching one at home, Turner expressed no interest in watching more, nominally because it was in black and white. But for whatever reasons, he starting watching them again yesterday and has become a total Gilligan's Island fiend, watching episode after episode with his headphones on during dinner, bursting out in laughter from time to time, completely incongruously with the conversation around him. He spent probably 30 minutes reliving his favorite scenes in our sleeping tent before crawling into his sleeping bag. His sleeping bag is now in my bivy sack inside the tent, where he buried his tooth in an attempt to catch the tooth fairy in the act of taking it.

Turner, in my bivy sack, inside our tent...

Turner in the bivy.

23 May 2012 Fairbanks

At this point we were done with the bulk of the science and our thoughts were turned towards leaving. It was a beautiful sunny day, and we decided to focus on the floor of the new tent. The general idea here is that we need a tent that we know can survive tough storms. All of the tents we have tried thus far have been marginal at best, and in storms we have to baby sit them to keep them from blowing apart. The major issue is that the ground here is rough and uneven, and there is no good way to anchor a standard tent to the rocky ground, short of drilling in rock anchors. So we thought that by having a modular floor that we can level, we could anchor the tent to that. The floor we are building is made from conventional lumber, but is built with screws, such that it should only take a few hours to break down into component parts, or to reassemble. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to fully build it in Fairbanks, so we’re having to spend more time now with assembly. At this point we had the location fixed and the supporting structure levelled, so it was just a matter of finishing the surface. Work proceeded well and by late afternoon we had the surface and supporting materials finished. Though we didn’t test it, I don’t think it would take more than 2 hours to disassemble. We created it high enough such that our totes of tools, bear barrels of food, and miscellaneous survey poles could fit underneath it, so that our entire footprint on the knoll while not there would be the size of the floor. This location also opened up for us the largest nearly-flat spot (where the cook tent currently is) for sleeping tents, and still leaves the next largest nearly-flat spot above for an emergency helipad.

We largely stopped using helicopters about 5 years ago to better conform to the values of the Wilderness area. Unfortunately, using fixed wing from the glacier surface created a new set of logistical issues, primarily that it is an hour’s walk from the ski strip to the knoll. With a helicopter, we can easily fly gear in and out to within several feet of where we need it, and when breaking down camp we always remain within a few feet of our gear. With fixed wing, it is a half-day process to transport our gear down the hill to the ice and shuttle it with snow machine to the landing strip, exposing us to a variety of hazards in between breaking down camp and actually leaving, not the least of which is that the weather can change substantially during this process anywhere along the two-hour flight route and require us to reverse the process and start over later. It’s all an optimization process between wilderness values, safety, wear and tear on our backs, and the level of work we can accomplish here. Our work requires a lot of expensive electronics, fairly heavy tools, lot’s of spare parts, and dealing with collaborators from different backgrounds and levels of experience. So on the one hand having a more substantial tent means leaving more on the glacier while we are not there, but on the other hand it allows us to avoid use of helicopters while still maintaining minimum human-safety levels and continuing to accomplish our research. It also opens up the possibility of more frequent but shorter trips throughout the year, including winter. Right now, we cant plan on anything less than a 2 week trip, due to weather delays and the several days it takes to establish and remove camp. With a tent that can withstand the weather and a safe place to leave some essential gear, we can shorten that time considerably, and open up the possibility of short winter trips when safety margins decrease substantially. I have been discussing these issues with Refuge staff for many years, and this seemed like a reasonable comprimise to all of us, so we’ll try it for a season or two and reassess whether this works as planned or not.

Kristin and Turner spent most of the day sorting gear. We had been accumulating stuff since the time we stopped using helicopters, largely due to the inconvenience. Until last year, we had never used fixed wing in summer, and so hiked out. We would try to stage retro gear then so that we could fly it out in spring, but this never worked particularly satisfactorily because of snow cover and logistical hassle. Last summer we were able to remove a lot of old scientific debris that we had been stockpiling when we found it on the surface, something like 500 pounds. Now we made a pile of about that same amount to send out this year, and I think this summer we will finally have cleared nearly all of the debris from prior expeditions and gotten our own gear down to bare essentials, which is a good feeling. I know there are wide varieties of opinions of what should and shouldn’t be done in this Refuge, and it’s difficult for me to gage where to draw that line due to my obvious bias. But I think I can proudly say that we are doing better by orders of magnitude than prior eras of research here, and regardless of the question of whether we or our gear should be here at all, at least we are leaving the place cleaner than it was and anything left between expeditions is all stored neatly and respectfully. And compared to the absolute shithole at 2nd Fish Hole that the Kaktovik locals ‘maintain’ (and not even on their inholding but Refuge lands proper), we are approaching godliness.

Turner got to use the hammer a lot, since we only used it for persuasion.

Dumb and Dumber screwed off all afternoon.

The floor found many uses, immediately.

Turner's lost tooth.

It remained a beautiful evening, so we decided to eat out on our new floor. Keith consecrated the project with a blessing, and we all enjoyed generous helpings of the ceremonial libations. Mike brought out some cigars he had transported in his special humidor and we sat there exchanging tall tales and enjoying the beauty of location until the sun set and temperatures finally lowered beyond comfortability, despite our attempts at antifreeze. It was a great pleasure to work with this team over past few weeks, and this night has to rank high on the list of great evenings in the field.

Mike breaks out the cigars.

Kristin critiques while Keith fails at circumsizing himself.

I try to get pizza delivered.

Turner: "I think that hat looks better on Keith"

This was the only spherical panorama I took on the whole trip, a first for me in 5 years. I was too lazy to take the nadir shots too.

Turner tells his Aspen story.

Reality set back in at 7AM the next morning when I talked to Dirk and he said he was fueled and ready to launch. The plan this day was to take me to Esetuk Glacier and then to fly Mike and a load of retro gear back to Coldfoot. In 2010 I installed a temporary weather station on Esetuk Glacier to assess the similarities of that glacier with McCall Glacier, as we have a long-term project on the Hulahula River (where Esetuk flows) and McCall Glacier (which flows into the Jago River). Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get to Esetuk last spring due to the trouble we had with landing on McCall, and the weather was never good enough to try in summer when we had time for it. I installed the station using a helicopter, which was our only helicopter use since 2007, as didn’t know what the conditions would be and we also had a lot of radar equipment we hoped to take to a number of smaller glaciers for measurements. I sited the station in the only location I thought we could land a fixed wing in winter or summer, but we’ve never tested it. So here was our opportunity, on another perfect flying day. I ran some loads down the hill and packed up my kit, meeting the plane about 10AM, and while we were gone the others continued doing the same.

Camp is on the skyline of this knoll. The glacier never reached our camp site, you can trace out where it was by the linear features going from right to left, and see how they curve down below the knoll.

Esetuk Glacier is only about 10 minutes away by air, so soon we were circling, looking for the station and assessing landing conditions. The snow surface looked about the same as McCall Glacier, which this year meant nearly perfect conditions for ski planes. The site is a bit higher than our strip on McCall Glacier, and also a bit flatter. I thought flatness was a good thing, but apparently for ski work a bit more slope is helpful in terms of not fighting gravity and getting air speed up more quickly. In any case, we landed, made the turn under power, and stopped within 20 meters of the station.

The station had a strong tilt to it, but the logger lights showed that it was still acquiring data. I used a new type of logger here that has rechargeable batteries and was glad to see the power was still high. Unfortunately, this logger has a different type of cable than my others (a standard usb cable), and only had one of them with me, and it apparently was broken, something I had never experienced before (though I always have spares of all my other download cables…). So we immediately went to Plan B, which was to take this logger home with us and replace it with another. Dirk worked on the mechanical connections while I rewired the electronics, and within half an hour we had finished the job. While there I also dug a snow pit and measured densities, and measured our single mass balance pole a few feet away from the station. In all, we were there only an hour, but we had proven that we could land here safely by fixed wing, and that the new logger system was robust.

The weather station at Esetuk, taken from the plane.

All the major pieces were still there.

Though there was a bit of tilting going on.

The single mass balance pole on the glacier. There is tape wrapped around it every 10 cm, so that a cheap timelapse camera could take pictures of it over time and watch snow depth increase or ice melt.

Coyote Air, a full service air taxi.

Downloaded, straightened, and ready to face another year.

On the way back we buzzed camp to let them know we about to land, and before long we had loaded up the plane with Mike and a bunch of gear. We watched them fly out of sight before heading back to the knoll, when we discovered that Mike had left his laptop case in the sled. When I called back later that evening to tell them, we discovered that his wallet was in there too. Mike had airline tickets for the next day and was hoping to actually fly home earlier by taking a commercial flight from Coldfoot, but now he was stuck, both not able to fly commercial without ID and having no money to do anything. Dirk lent him a few bucks for dinner at the Inn, but here he got carded! We all had a nice laugh at his expense, but it was short lived as we had a lot of work to do in the next 18 hours. It was now crunch time. I spent an hour or two on the glacier tying up some loose ends, trying to communicate without success to another deep thermistor string, and then returned to camp to pack it up and make the most of the good weather. It is so nice to have nice weather when packing up, as it makes it possible to sort and pack efficiently, as well as dry tents. We made great use of the new floor as a roof for our cached gear, arranging a tarp over it and down to the ground, and we took down the cook tent and dried it in the afternoon sun. It was 10PM by the time we finished, with little time for breaks, and a big contrast to the night before. We went to bed fairly exhausted, knowing the next morning would be very early and very busy.

The valleys did not have as much snow in them as the mountains.

Okpilak River Valley.

McCall Glacier, about as snowy as I've ever seen it.

Jago River Valley.

McCall Creek.

An empty cirque in McCall valley.

There's our knoll.

Mike, taking off with a load of gear.

That's Mike in the air. That's Mike's laptop bag with his wallet sticking up in the green sled.

Fortunately the weather held out one more day, and we began scrambling to pack our personal gear, finalize camp demob, and rushing out to the plane. Keith and I spent most of the time shuttling loads down the hill. On one of the last ones I lost some footing in the snow and tore something in near my calf, making me pretty cranky, and adding my own pressure to the limited amount of time we had left to do a lot of things. By 10AM we were finished on the knoll and began shuttling gear to the ski strip, and had everything there and weighed just in time to watch Dirk land. Kristin and Turner made the first trip to Peters lake with a load of gear while Keith and I put the snow machines to bed. This year I decided to leave one machine on a moraine that was forming on the glacier just across from our camp, rather than on the ice surface. The other we left near the ski strip, on a small bridge that we use to cross the large river that forms at the confluence of the cirques (which I drag off to the side when not in use). This keeps the snow machine track from freezing into the ice. Before we were done with that, Dirk had already returned for us, and in short order we were at the lake, refueling, repackaging, and rebelieving that the trip was actually nearly over.

It's a pretty place.

See you soon!

A moraine began emerging from the ice here about 7-8 years ago. This is the first time I've tried leaving a snow machine on it.

Spring had not yet come to the mountains, but it was close. On McCall Glacier, air temperatures were nearly at freezing the last few days, and the snow was definitely softening. The lake had slush beneath the snow. Many of the river valleys were already devoid of snow, likely through a combination of it being blown out by wind and sublimation and melt on the dark slopes and rocks. But the rivers did not yet seem to be open, except for some sheen on the aufeis here and there. For an hour or more of flying over the crest of the Brooks Range, the mountains were coated white, and it looked like full-on winter still. As we got further into the south side, there was less snow and more and more flowing water in the rivers. By the time were got to Coldfoot, we were well into spring, with only a few remaining snow drifts and big, open rivers, and mosquitos buzzing us. Dirk hopped into his car almost immediately with Mike, who was nervously wondering whether he would still make his plane. We got showers and dinner at the Inn before heading back, but by 11PM were back at home, having driven straight into summer.

Not much snow out here.

Turner found himself a hidey hole.

After Keith finished dry humping the landing gear, he unwound by pumping somthing wet.

It was summer here.

"I'd pay, but I lost my wallet again..."

Although only two weeks on the glacier, it was a long trip...

Overall it was a great trip. We had the opportunity to work within a great group, we accomplished nearly everything we set out to do, and returned successfully. There’s not much more one can ask for.

Keith spent a few days with us, probably wishing he hadnt. We tried to help Turner catch up on kid time, so our days were filled with playdates. But at least Keith got to see a different side to Fairbanks than he would have otherwise. He managed to lose his wallet briefly too, though we didnt tell Mike, who we assumed did catch his plane as he wasnt lingering here. We also managed to watch a solar eclipse and enjoy a brunch of the deck of Pikes. Keith logged into his email just long enough to find out how Lonnie fared with his heart transplant, which thankfully went well.

They charge us $10 more for a car wash.

This was our first time at Sunday Brunch at Pikes.

Turner and Sam got to play mini-golf, a new (and brilliant) feature at Pikes.

Dr. Larson explains orbital variations of the earth around the sun to interested onlookers.

Not sure which would blind you first...

And soon enough it was just the 3 of us again. Turner's school was now over, but camp not yet started, so he spent the week at home. I eventually logged into my email, downloading 6138 emails, only about 30 of which were from actual humans that I knew. I was somewhat discouraged to find that a proposal of mine did not get funded. Here I proposed 3 weeks salary to convene a workshop of 18 inter-disciplinary professionals, a third of which were out of state, attend that workshop, write a workshop report and study plan, and acquire new vertical imagery of our glaciers and process it into DEMs and orthophotos. I dont know what I was thinking when I proposed this, but clearly it was a service project that had no hope of actually covering my true time spent on it and where a lot of the primary value was going to support other interests rather than my own immediate ones. So seeing this not funded was unexpected. The stated hope for this program was that it was going to fill in the gaps between traditional funding sources and go after truly interdisciplinary projects that couldnt be accomodated there. But the signs are clear to me that this is not going to be, both due to its management-by-committee structure or its lack of funds to put money where their mouths are. And maybe that's how it should be, or rather maybe its best this way, that is with fewer strings attached. I put in a huge amount of effort trying to create this team, examine the issues from the top down, and did it with no funding. That should have been a sign, both that there is no money for it and that I dont need it anyway. There's always a lot of big talk about approaching problems in this way, but rarely is there big money. The dreams of Murie and Hubley were this grand, and there are many around who claim to follow those principles, I just dont see any of them around me actually doing it. And in the end I suppose that's why I do it, because it allows me to work in this backwater where I can escape the madness, because the madness doesnt seem have what it takes to survive here. In any case, I do feel like I've reached a turning point in the sense of I'm not going to write proposals and make written commitments to produce deliverables unless I get paid what it actually costs or more; anything I do for free is going to be because it tickles me.

I really tried hard this past week to finish the McCall demob before launching into preparing for the next set of projects. It was more challenging that I thought it would be. But I got everything backed up, most everything sorted and put away, and most everything dealt with, including this blog. It's going to be a busy summer, filled with aerial photography and stream gaging, before our next McCall Glacier trip, which is also going to be a busy one. But on we trudge, usually successful, often rewardless, occasionally failing, but never regretting the next battle scar.

We drank. We thought. We made our ancestors proud.

"Ah, buttfuck..."