beautiful spring weather for most of our adventure
So you might have thought that I disappeared, but I didn't. I have just been enjoying beautiful New Zealand. I spent a couple of days with Amanda and Shawn in Christchurch and then we went off in different directions. Amanda and Shawn went North towards the Kaikoura Peninsula and Matt and I went West towards Arthur's Pass. Check out our pictures and read about our adventures below.
Day 1: Collect our camper van (a van with a bed and kitchen in it ---so cool) in Christchurch and head across the south island towards the town of Greymouth. We stopped along the way to do some hiking in Arthur's Pass.
Day 2: Drive up North to Punakaiki to see the pancake rocks, the blowholes, and a fur seal colony. Then we drove back South to Franz Joseph to see the rainforest and glaciers there.
Day 3...
For the last couple of days I have been preparing to leave for Christchurch and then enjoying civilization once I got here. My journey home started with bag drag. Bag drag is when you drag all of your stuff up to Building 140 to be weighed and palleted for the plane the next day. I even had to get weighed in. I had to put on all my ECW (extreme cold weather) gear and hop up on the scale to be weighed with my carry-on. With all my gear and my carry-on I weighed 185 lbs. I am hoping that all that weight is from my gear and carry-on. If not, I must have gained a lot of weight here (it's all muscle, right?). At bag drag we also found out that the plane coming down to pick us up the next day would be a haz-mat flight and would take a little longer. Most flights out of McMurdo leave around 3 or...
One of the cool things that you can do while in McMurdo is that you can sign-up for Delta trips. Deltas are big wheeled buses that are used to transport people across the ice. I took one to happy camper school and they are fun because the wheels are huge and you are so far off the ground. They are really, really slow, however, and it takes a long time to get anywhere in one. The trip that I planned to go on was to a place called Cape Evans and it would take us 6 hours to get there and back.
So what is this Cape Evans place and why did I want to go there so bad? Cape Evans was the main headquarters for Robert Falcon Scott's terra nova expedition. The expedition lasted from 1910 - 1913 and Scott's team was trying to beat Roald Amundsen's team to the South Pole. Scott's team spent the...
For the past two weeks Amanda and Shawn have been busy in the lab prepping and conducting their experiments and today they would find out if they were successful. They left the field a couple of days ahead of us so that they could get a head start on cleaning, melting, and filtering almost 300lbs of the ice that we collected. It was all in an effort to extract the microorganisms out of the ice so that they could isolate the ATP, DNA, and RNA in their cells. Today Amanda would find out if she isolated the RNA and Shawn would find out if he had ATP.
Remember that two of the important questions that our research is meant to answer are: Are the microorganisms that we find in the glacial ice alive and are they metabolically active? For Amanda's experiment she is taking RNA out of the cells of...
After living in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica for more than three weeks I will admit that they are cold, but how cold are they? We set up a data logger on our front porch to take temperature, relative humidity, and dew point readings every 6 hours to see how cold it was outside. In the following activity students can use our actual data to graph the temperature readings for our first week and our last week to see how the temperatures changed by hour and by day.
Yesterday the boys (Brent, Mark, Scott, and Tim) made it out of McMurdo just in time. They were originally scheduled for an afternoon C-17 flight back to Christchurch, but the weather was forecasted to turn bad and they got switched to a morning flight on a C-130. I was sad that they were going to miss my webinar, but it was a good thing that they left when they did. About an hour after they left, the wind started and then the snow came.
Trying to Walk in the Wind Video
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In McMurdo there is a system that we use to rate the weather to tell us if it is safe to travel around McMurdo and the surrounding area. Condition One is when the visibility is less than 100 ft., or wind speed is greater than 55 knots (more than 60 mph), or wind chill is greater than -100°F (-38°C). During...
Even in Antarctica ice will melt. As the sun stays higher and higher in the sky as summer progresses, the warm sun causes the ice to melt. The questions that we are going to ask in the following activity are: Does clean ice (no sediment) or dirty ice (has sediment mixed in it) melt faster? and Would the ice melt if all the sunlight was reflected away?
To complete the following activity, use the pictures below to complete the data tables on the student handouts and then graph away.
A Video Clip of the Glacier Melting
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Today was our last day in camp. We woke up early in the morning and started packing all of our personal belongings and taking down our tents. Scott and Tim would be on the first helicopter flight back to McMurdo at 9:30 in the morning. Brent, Mark and I would be on the second flight at 11:45 am. Before we could leave, we had to sling all of the rest of our gear together, take apart our kitchen, and seal up all of our waste barrels and buckets. There was a lot to do in a short amount of time and we were all running around like crazy. With some help from the helicopter pilots and technicians, we got it all done and were on our way.
The helicopter flight home, of course, was amazing. We flew over Lake Bonney and down the Taylor Valley. The mountains were still dusted with snow from the...
Yesterday we had about 3,500 lbs of gear shipped back from camp and today we had to put it all back where it belonged. We started out by laying everything out and then sorting it by what building it needed to be returned to. All of our camping gear needed to go back to the BFC (Byrd Field Center), all the mechanical equipment like our chainsaws needed to go back to the MEC (Mechanical Equipment Center), any communications equipment like our radios needed to go back to Comms, and some of the tools we borrowed needed to go back to the Carpentry Shop. It was quite the task, but we worked together and we finished in time to watch Monday Night Football at 2:30 pm on a Tuesday (this time change is crazy sometimes).
I think we are all a little stir crazy from being suddenly trapped inside...
Hooray Snow! I woke up early this morning because it was my turn to check in and I opened my tent and there was snow on the ground. It doesn't snow that often or that much in the Dry Valleys so I was excited to see the little flakes falling from the sky. By mid-morning all the mountains surrounding us were dusted with snow and it was so beautiful.
I could have watched the snow all day, but today was the last day in camp and we had a lot to do.
Our To Do List: 1. Sort and pack up all of our trash.2. Empty the endurance tent of all our camp gear and take down the tent3. Sort through the leftover food in our kitchen tent. Put aside food for the next couple of days and box up the rest. 4. Pack up all of our personal gear in our tents and in the blue polar haven. 5. Take down the weather...
Today was the last day that we took ice samples from the glacier. Tim and Scott are taking clean ice cores of the glacier to answer the questions; What is the age of the ice and What was going on when the ice formed? If they can better understand the glacial processes that were going on when the ice formed that we are sampling, it will help us better understand the microbiology and chemistry of the ice. Usually when you take cores you are on top of what you are drilling and you auger/drill downwards, but Tim and Scott are drilling upwards towards the top of the glacier from inside the glacier. As far as we know, no one has ever done that before and it was cool to see how excited they were when it worked. It was also fun to watch because all of the ice shavings fall on your head when you...
Today was kind of a bittersweet day. All of our sampling is done and today we had to pack everything up. It is great to be done and everyone is excited to go home, but the Dry Valleys are an amazing place and I will definitely be sad to go.
Yesterday the five of us moved and boxed up over 1200 lbs of ice and the helicopters came and picked it up. We were all pretty sore, but we still needed to go up to the tunnel site today and pack up the rest of the ice. We saved all of the big pieces and the ice cores for last. That was some heavy ice. Some of those pieces had to weigh at least 100 lbs. I am pretty sure that I am getting some big muscles. Between chainsawing, shoveling, carrying ice blocks, hiking up and down hills, and lifting and carrying lots of other things, I am going to be buff...
Everything is starting to come to an end around here. The sampling is almost complete and all we really have to do is take some core samples of clean ice. My helo (helicopter) flight back to McMurdo is scheduled for Monday or Tuesday, but between now and then there is a lot of work to be done. The first thing that needs to be done, is we need to send Amanda and Shawn back to McMurdo with all of their ice. They are going to begin their microbiology experiments in the lab back at McMurdo and the sooner they get started, the sooner that they can go home.
We have been storing all of the ice samples inside of the tunnel to keep them at a constant temperature. In order to get them back to McMurdo, we need to carry them out of the tunnel, package them in freezer boxes, sling the boxes together...
For this experiment we will be asking the question; Is there salt in a glacier? To do this, we are going to melt dirty ice (ice with lots of sediment/dirt in it) and clean ice (ice without sediment) from the Taylor Glacier. After we melt the ice, we are going to test the melt water for pH and conductivity and then determine how much salt is actually in our ice samples.
Below you will find a video that shows us doing the experiment. Use the student handouts and record the data that we collected and then answer the questions to see if there really is salt in a glacier.
Is There Salt in a Glacier Video
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The one question that I have been asked the most is how do I stay warm in Antarctica? Yes... it is cold here and yes... I do get cold. The coldest time of the day is when I am in my sleeping bag at night and when I am doing watch duty at the tunnel. Probably the lowest temperature that I have seen here is around a -40°F (wind chill) and the highest temperature that I have seen is probably around 25°F (in the sun). It has been colder than I expected it to be, but there are several things that I have been doing to prevent myself from getting too cold.
My first night here I thought that I was going to turn into a popsicle inside my sleeping bag. I wore three layers of fleece, a hat, mittens, and I had a nice fleece liner and sleeping bag. It is a long sleeping bag, so I inched all the way...
We tunneled nine meters into the glacier and then made a four by three meter room at the end of the tunnel and now we are ready to start sampling. Initially we thought that we would have to tunnel downwards at the end of tunnel to reach a sediment layer about a half meter under the tunnel, but we got lucky and found a sediment layer at the end of our tunnel. It is a perfect sediment layer because it is stratified and alternates between clean and dirty ice. This will work really well for both the microbiology and gas experiments. Even better is that it is a lot easier to take samples from a wall in front of you than cutting and digging samples out of a hole. We hope to take samples for about the next week or so and even start sending some samples back to McMurdo to be analyzed in a couple...
I had my doubts on how good the food was going to be, but it has been surprisingly good. The only drawback is that all of the food is expired. The bulk food supplies in McMurdo get resupplied once a year by a huge ice breaker that comes into the sound. It takes a long time for the ship to get here from the United States so by the time it gets here it is all expired. I haven't noticed a huge change in the taste and I haven't gotten sick yet, so I guess that it is okay. They only things that I have noticed that taste a lot different are the pop because it is flat and the granola bars are just gross. The most expired food that I have seen so far is a jar of jelly that expired in 2003. I thought that jelly was supposed to last for a long time, so I wonder when it was made.
We don't have a...
After several days of tunneling, we have definitely made some progress. After Day 1 we were 1.9 meters into the tunnel. After Day 2 we were 4.35 meters into the tunnel. After Day 3 we were 6 meters into the tunnel and currently we are at 8.5 meters. Now we are going to expand the end of the tunnel into a 3 by 3 meter room so that we can begin sampling. Once we finish the room (hopefully today), we get to sample the ice by carefully cutting out specific sized blocks in the dirt layer below the room and then taking cores of the clean ice above the room.
The tunneling has gotten more complex then when we first started. First we go in with chainsaws and cut the wall of ice that we want to cut out into blocks like a checkerboard. Then we pop the blocks of ice out of the wall with a...
This is going to be the first of hopefully four journals that will show easy experiments that can be done in the classroom or in the field. Each journal will have student handouts, video, and pictures. Feel free to watch the video and see us do the experiment or try to repeat the experiment at home with your own materials. For this first experiment we will be asking the question; Do microorganisms live in Antarctica? Antarctica has such a harsh climate that many organisms cannot live here all year around, but can microorganisms? The research team that I am with is looking at the ice in the Taylor Glacier to see if microorganisms are in the ice and if they are living. It's pretty cool stuff. In our experiment we are going to take ice from the glacier, ice from the lake, and then swab...
Selected areas in Antarctica are considered to be ASMA's (Antarctic Specially Managed Areas). The Dry Valleys are one of these areas so we are bound by law to follow specific procedures while we are camping and working here. One huge thing is that we can't leave any waste here. Everything we bring here, we have to bring back with us. This includes all of our trash, grey water, food waste, and human waste. All of our trash is separated into five different buckets; food waste, non-recyclables, glass, aluminum, and mixed paper. Once a bucket is full, we pack it up and put it into a huge box to be flown back to McMurdo. We also have liquid waste called grey water from washing dishes, cooking, brushing teeth, etc... We store the grey water in buckets and when a bucket gets too full, we pour it...
Yesterday the weather improved and helicopters were allowed to fly so we finally had our supplies delivered to the tunnel site. That meant that today would be chainsaw day. It's about time we got to work!
Step #1 - Locate a Good Spot: The Taylor Glacier is a huge glacier and we want to select a spot to put our tunnel that has the ice we want to analyze and is safe to be near. Glaciers are moving rivers of ice and we wouldn't want pieces of ice to break off (calve) and fall on us while we are working. Last week Mark and Brent went on a reconnaissance flight to find a suitable location and they found the perfect place.
Step #2 - Build Stairs: To get to the glacier we have to cross a moat where the melt water from the glacier flows during warm summer days (we haven't seen any of those yet...
I am finally in the Dry Valleys! Yeah! It is so beautiful here. Our camp is located on the shores of Lake Bonney in front of Blood Falls in the Taylor Glacier Valley. All you see when you look around is ice and rock. We got here on Monday by helicopter. It was my first time in a helicopter and it was awesome. We crossed the sea ice and then passed over mountain tops and glaciers. Words can't even describe what an incredible landscape it was.
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Our game plan for the next couple of days is to set up camp and organize all our supplies that we will need at the tunnel site so that a helicopter can come and pick them up and deliver them for us. However, we have hit a couple of road blocks. Weather was bad the last couple of weeks so the communications...
Today I visited the FEMC trade shop to see what type of jobs there are available here in the trades. FEMC stands for Facilities Engineering, Maintenance, and Construction and the shop houses all different types of trade workers. Their job is to make sure all of the buildings function here at McMurdo Station. Some of trades that were represented were sheet metal workers, power linemen, electricians, fire system technicians, welders, pipe fitters, plumbers, and UT's (utility technicians who maintain the buildings and boiler systems). In a separate building there are also carpenters and painters who help maintain the facilities here. Read below to meet some of tradesmen I met at the FEMC trade shop.
Mike Ebel - East Tawas, MI
I initially met Mike in the cafeteria when he noticed my...
Today I visited the heavy machine shop to visit with the mechanics and see what type of heavy machines they have here in McMurdo. Heavy machines are classified as any piece of machinery over 3000 lbs. In the heavy machine shop they have all the tools and materials needed to repair, fabricate, and design pieces of machinery used by the scientists or in support of the scientists. It was really cool to see all the different machines...some were gigantic. If you were a mechanical or electrical engineer it would be an incredible experience to work in the heavy machine shop. The engineers are asked to solve problems and design machinery that can be used in extremely cold temperatures. If you have ever watched the show on the History Channel called Modern Marvels their jobs are a lot like that....
snow in the morning...really cold in the afternoon
Yesterday we found out that our scheduled helicopter flights for today were pushed back until Monday. At first I was really disappointed because I wanted to get out to the Dry Valleys and get to work, however, I took advantage of the extra day and I explored McMurdo Station and met some really incredible people. When most people think of McMurdo and Antarctica, they think of the scientists and the science being done here. However, the scientists require a lot of support. They need places to stay, vehicles to drive, communication devices to keep in contact with each other and the base, food to eat, water to drink, computers and technology for their research, etc... The list goes on and on. McMurdo Station is like a little city and everything that a city has, McMurdo has. Therefore, there...
When we are in the field we will not have a cook or a cafeteria to go to. We will be in charge of making all of our own meals. To do this, we are going to need some food. Today we continued the packing process by visiting the food warehouse and freezers to collect, box, and weigh the food that we would need. One of the best things about camping in Antarctica is that there are no animals to get into your food and it is so cold that you can bring frozen food and it will stay frozen. All we have to do is store our food in or under our kitchen tent and it should be good for awhile. We are bringing a variety of food to eat in the field. We have lots of snacks and chocolate, frozen vegetables and meat, pasta, hot chocolate, tea, soups, and beef jerky. In the field we will have a propane camp...
An important part of preparing for going out in the field is knowing what to do if an emergency occurs. To learn all of these much needed skills, all new USAP participants are required to go to Happy Camper School before going out in the field. Happy Camper is a two-day training where you learn how to light stoves, build shelters, set-up tents, cook food, use radios, and recognize the signs of frostbite and hypothermia out on the ice shelf.
A big part of survival in the Antarctic is making a shelter to protect yourself from the snow, wind, and cold. We learned how to make four different shelters and we would have to choose one to spend the night in. Today was a relatively warm day, but at night the temperatures were going to drop to -25°F. Where I teach, school is canceled at -25°F...
It just occurred to me that I have been writing these journals about people you may or may not even know yet. Let me now take the opportunity to introduce you to the people that you will be hearing a lot about in the weeks to come.
From Montana State University (the other MSU)...
Dr. Mark Skidmore = Mark is a professor at Montana State University where he teaches Physical Geography and Geomicrobiology and researches life in cold environments on glaciers or in the lab where he makes his own ice. He is originally from England, but his career has taken him all over the world. He has taught in the US, Canada, and the UK and has conducted research in Greenland, Iceland, Yukon, Alaska, Norway, and Switzerland. I am definitely jealous. He has a British accent and he has an...
When I think of bad weather in Antarctica, I think of blowing snow, low visibility, high winds, and cold temperatures. Today I saw all of them. We knew what we were in for because last night's weather forecast said "something wicked this way comes". At first it made me laugh, but then it occurred to me that I had to go outside in that weather. The buildings at McMurdo Station are not connected, so to get from the science labs to the dorms to any other building you have to go outside. As we moved around today and started packing for the dry valleys we walked from building to building and I was laughing because I couldn't even walk in a straight line in 65 mph gusts of wind.
We are about to embark on quite the adventure. The seven of us will be living in the Dry Valleys of...
Before you can go out in the field or work in a lab, you have to go through several trainings. Since all the boys on my team have been to Antarctica before, they only have to do refreshers but Amanda and I have to go through all the full courses. On tap for today would be Crary Lab Orientation and Light Vehicle Training.
Crary Lab is a large building in McMurdo which holds all of the scientist's labs. Scientists can request to use a lab for their experiments while they are here in McMurdo. We have a small lab on the first floor with freezers for our ice, lab benches for performing experiments, and an office to keep track of everything going on in and out of the field. Crary Lab also has microscope rooms, meeting areas, offices, and even an aquarium. There weren't any marine organisms in...
Our first full day in New Zealand was spent preparing for our trip down to the ice. The most important thing is to have the right clothes. Fortunately I didn't have to buy all of my gear...that would be very expensive. Instead, the US Antarctic Program has a Clothing Distribution Center (CDC) where we can borrow warm clothes to take to the ice.
When we arrived at the CDC we watched an information video on what clothes we would need to pack and then we spent a good hour after that trying on clothes and packing them into specific bags. I had to divide up all my personal gear and the clothes on got at the CDC into 5 bags:
#1: Check-In Bag = This is the bag or bags of things that would be stored on pallets on the plane and I would not see them until I got to the ice.
#2: ECW Bag = This is...
Today was a crazy day, but the payoff was that I finally made it to Antarctica. Here is what my day looked like:
4:30 am = Wake-up and finish packing
5:15 am = Catch the shuttle to the USAP terminal
6:00 am = Arrive at the terminal, put on all my gear to prepare for the flight, and check my baggage through security (still missing one bag, so I had a little less to carry).
6:45 am = Grab some breakfast and wait for boarding.
7:20 am = Watch an intro to Antarctica movie and prepare to go through security with our carry-on luggage.
8:00 am = Start boarding the C-17 cargo plane from McChord Air Force base in Washington.
8:30 am = Plane takes off and we are headed to Antarctica. The plane was huge inside and it didn't have windows to look out through so the feeling of...
My day began in Detroit at 1:30 pm EST on Monday with my first flight to Chicago. My day ended in Christchurch, New Zealand at 1:30 pm Christchurch time on Wednesday. Where did the time go???
This week has been a whirlwind. I can't believe that I am leaving in a matter of hours and there is still so much to do. My week started out with a going away party with my friends and family. My entire family came over to my house for the occasion and they even wore their Polar TREC shirts.
This week was my last week at school for the next two months, so I spent a lot of time getting my students prepped for my expedition. We played with glacier goo to see how mountain glaciers and ice sheets move, we tried on extreme cold weather gear, and we watched some video clips on Antarctica so my students could see what Antarctica looks like.
To check out some cool labs on ice and to get the recipe for glacier goo go to: https://www.cresis.ku.edu/education/k-12.html
A great video on shrinking...
Don't worry PQ'ed isn't a bad thing. It means that I have been deemed physically qualified to travel to Antarctica. The United States Antarctic Program (USAP) has pretty strict guidelines for who can travel to Antarctica and you have to get cleared by both medical and dental. My end of July was spent seeing several doctors and a dentist to get all of my tests and paperwork together. To be cleared by medical, I had to fill out an 8-page medical history form, I had two different doctor examinations, and I had enough blood drawn to complete over 20 different tests (that was a lot of blood). I then got a flu shot, a tetanus vaccination, a urine test, and an EKG. The hardest part about the medical wasn't all the needles, it was the fasting 10 hours before the tests. I like food and I tend to...
Fellow polar treker Sarah Diers (Dissolved Organic Matter in Antarctica) and I had the awesome opportunity to meet our researchers and see their laboratories at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana. My first impression was that Bozeman is amazing. It is a beautiful town surrounded by mountains. I could definitely live here. My trip was more than just sightseeing so I was so excited when I got to meet part of my research team. My team is made up of a researcher, a PhD student, and an undergraduate student from Montana State University and a researcher, a PhD student, and an undergraduate student from Louisiana State University. The seven of us will soon become one big dysfunctional family in Antarctica this October.
I had three reasons for why I wanted to come and visit Montana...
I couldn't just travel across the United States and not have a little fun too. Before meeting our researchers follower polar trecer Sarah Diers (Dissolved Organic Matter in Antarctica) and I did some traveling around Idaho and Montana. It was absolutely amazing. It is so beautiful here and there is so much "outdoorsy" stuff to do. The first stop on our road trip was Island Park, Idaho to visit my friend Jennifer and her husband Jake. Jennifer is a biologist for the US Forest Service and she took us all over the place. I was definitely jealous of where she lived and worked. Here are a couple of pictures from Island Park.
After leaving Island Park we headed across Idaho to Hailey to see Sarah's aunt and uncle. On the way we passed through Craters of the Moon National Monument...
I am a huge sports fan. I grew up on Michigan State sports, the Detroit Red Wings, and the Detroit Tigers. For the last year I have been so excited about the NCAA Final Four coming to Detroit and when my Michigan State Spartans made it into the final four I was ecstatic. Even better was that UCONN didn't sell all of their tickets, so a couple of days before the game they offered them to the general public and we got tickets!
The semifinal game between Michigan State and UCONN was amazing. There were so many MSU fans in Ford Field that it seemed like a home game. The Spartans played great and the number one seeded huskies were no match for the speedy Spartans. I could not even believe that we were going to the National Championship Game on Monday.
Besides the basketball games there...
Talk about a crazy week in sports...in one week I went to the NCAA final four and the Tiger's season opener. I love going to tiger's games. There is something about baseball, hot dogs, and a sunny day that makes me think of summer. I live about ten minutes away from Comerica Park so we try to buy a ticket package every year and get to as many games as possible. Opening Day is one of the best games to go to and it is always a sellout (this year it had the 3rd highest attendance in park history). Even better, was that the weather was actually nice this year. I have been to several cold, rainy or snowy opening days and this year it was warm and sunny. Here are some pictures of some pregame fun.
Once we got into the park, we found our seats, which were in the upper deck right behind home...
This year at my school we decided to have our first annual Mosaic Day. Mosaic Day is when the teachers get to teach about their hobbies instead of their regular classes. The students get to pick a teacher that they want to hang out with for the day and they learn about that hobby. It is a great way to show the kids that we teachers do have lives outside of school. It is also a lot of fun too. Kids got to choose between cooking classes, aerobics, weight training, card games, dog training, hip hop dancing, and so many other fun activities. The hardest thing for me to do was to decide what type of class I was going to teach. I love nature and being outside, but my school is in the city and it would take too long to go somewhere. Then I thought of my survival training in Alaska. How fun would...
Today was a beautiful day to be out of the classroom. It was snowing big, fluffy snowflakes, just like we get in Michigan. It looked so beautiful with everything covered by a thick blanket of powdery snow. Today we had two destinations: The United States Army Cold Region Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) and the Trans Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS)
The Cold Region Research and Engineering Laboratory is actual a tunnel in the permafrost layer. Regular tourists don't get to go into the tunnel so it was pretty awesome that we got to go inside. However, after entering the tunnel I almost had to reconsider how awesome it was because it smells pretty bad. 20,000 year old decomposing organic matter will do that. It was also really dusty. When you held up a flashlight, you could see all...
Today was an action-packed day. We took a break from our training classes to go down to the river to see the finish of the Yukon Quest dog mushing race. I had been following the progress of the race online so I was really excited to get to see the finish. There were rumors that it would be a close race at the finish so we were all excited to get to see it.
Here is a little background on the Yukon Quest race. The race covers a distance of 1,000 miles between Whitehorse, Yukon and Fairbanks, Alaska and follows the historic Gold Rush and Mail Delivery dog sled routes. The start and finish of the race switches every year between Whitehorse and Fairbanks and this year it started in Whitehorse and ended in Fairbanks. The route that the dogs follow crosses over four mountain ranges and follows...
Hello Fairbanks!Yeah! I made it. I am 3,000 miles away from home in Fairbanks, Alaska! I barely made two of my flights, but I am here. There was a snow storm in Detroit the morning that I was trying to leave and the airport was crazy. After waiting an hour and a half to check in and go through security, I had to run to my plane. I guess that it was good exercise for me because I would be sitting in a crowded plane for the next nine hours. The highlight of my travel day was my Minneapolis to Anchorage leg. The clouds cleared just as we were traveling along the coast line of the Gulf of Alaska. It was beautiful. I saw snowcapped mountains, glaciers, the deep blue ocean, and even volcanoes! All I can say is AMAZING!
On the flight from Anchorage to Fairbanks the skies were still clear...