After Karl and I made it to the ice divide on May 15th, we finished the final drill site selection within about 24 hours and were ready for the rest of the crew and equipment to come in via helicopter.  Unfortunately, Mother Nature had different plans.  Over the next two days, May 16-17th we received about 2-3 feet of fresh snow with winds ranging between 20-30 miles per hour and gusts we think up to 50 mph.  Weather reports that we received via satellite phone from NOAA which are specifically designed for Denali near and above 14,000 also called for temperatures dropping to about -25 F at night.  By the end of the 18th equipment was entirely buried by at least a foot of snow which took us half a day to clear away.  The 18th and 19th were sunny and clear but high winds remained which made it unsafe for Andy to attempt bringing the rest of the team or sling loads of gear by helicopter up to the drill site.  

    During the storm and while waiting for the rest of the team and science equipment to arrive we were either tent bound or had plenty of time on our hands with nothing much to do besides dig out every morning and evening, melt snow for water and make food in the vestibule of the tent, read, write and sleep. We did mange to take a couple of nice ski runs on a safe hill to the south on what we call the middle peak of Mount Hunter.  It is about 450’ high and provides beautiful views of the drill site, Mt Foraker, the main peak of Mount Hunter, and Denali in the background.   

    Since the beginning of this trip I have read five books: Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jeckel and Mr. Hyde, Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and The Great Equations (a book about the most famous mathematical equations in the world).  I think I am ahead of the others in reading because of my several days with Karl waiting out the storms and weather at the ice divide.  The others tell me they have read the following books so far:

    Dawn of Prophecy (Dom), Foundations Edge (Dom), Foundation Earth (Dom), Bradford Washburn: Last of his Kind (Dave), Fahrenheit 451 (Tim), Mountains Beyond Mountains (Tim), The Runners Guide to the Meaning of Life (Tim), The complete Sherlock Holmes (Brad), TONS of SCIENCE PAPERS!!! (Brad), Thousand Cranes (Mike)

    A couple years ago I decided to start trying to work my way through some classics during my field seasons, particularly considering it seems I spend about 4-6 months per year in the field on various projects and there is always down time due to poor weather or other delays.  Ironically in the sciences we read a lot but they are generally scientific papers or textbooks, rather than in the literary or classical genre.  I am starting off gently (no Odyssey or War and Peace)!  In 2011-2012 I worked my way through the Lord of the Rings series and The Hobbit while waiting out storms in Antarctica.  My wife and I finally took a honeymoon last year (a year and a half late) to Costa Rica and of course my nerdy book to read while sitting by the beach enjoying the sun was Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne.  We are already to the point where book trading is beginning so I’m sure I will read some of the others listed above.  

    It’s been beautiful weather over the last two days so I can catch everyone up on what we have accomplished so far. We have set up the entire camp which includes a personal tent for each person. This includes North Face VE-25 or Mountain 25 tents, a kitchen tent which is an Arctic Oven, the drill tent which is a huge Mountain Hardwear Space Station (look it up online; you could have a dance party in this thing, but it fits the drill set up perfectly!) and a bathroom tent in case of poor weather which is a Mountain Hardwear SatelliteAn object placed in orbit around the earth to collect or transmit information. tent.  We have also placed snow fences in front of the tents to catch the prevailing wind and minimize snow drifting in camp.  The goal is to build up big snow drifts around our camp to act as wind blocks.  

    For science we have been making amazing progress.  We have already installed most of the meteorology (MET) station which will record temperature, humidity, pressure, wind speed and direction, snow accumulation, solar radiation, and it even has a camera which will take a picture of the surrounding plateau once a day over the next year.  Tim will write a blog later about the MET station and how we plan to use all this data.  Dom placed out 22 ablation/accumulation stakes across the entire divide, Dave and I added another 8 and have recorded the 30 stake locations using high precision GPSA Global Positioning System (GPS) is a satellite-based navigation system used to track the location or position of objects on the Earth’s surface..  We use these stakes to get an estimate of snow accumulation thickness variance all over the ice divide which will be helpful to some of our future science goals.  The stakes are also used to measure short term (over the next 30 days) ice flow velocities.  We will re-measure the location of each stake about 30 days from now and the difference from the first to second measurement gives us a general idea of ice flow velocity.  More about ice flow and how glaciers flow later.

    MET Station
    The team is working here setting up the meteorological station that will remain on the Mount Hunter Ice Divide until next year. It will be very interesting indeed to see if it makes it for that long. We hope so. Photo Credit: Seth Campbell

    The core drill team has been very successful to start.  Mike, Dom, and Brad have already drilled 48 meters of core at the 200 meter deep ice divide so with luck they will have a full core within a week.  The ultimate goal is 2 full cores, but equipment can break, and lots of challenges can come up which can slow progress.  This said it has been a heck of a successful start.  Cam and Karl left via helicopter today and are officially headed home.  Erich is now at base camp as our contact person in case anything goes wrong and we need something from town for equipment or for any other reason.  We check in with Erich daily as a safety check to let him know all is well.  I sent pictures and videos out with Karl and he is sending them via mail to the PolarTREC folks and Ken so hopefully they can create some good content. We hope all is well back in civilization!  More in a day or two!

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