Thursday, November 11, 2004
Ivotuk Preview
So, Wednesday Margaret and Hagen escorted me as official volunteers for the university (so if something happened on the drive up I wouldn't be stuck by myself) up to Coldfoot from where we flew out on a Beaver with skis to a little place called Ivotuk south of Barrow and north of the brooks range a little bit. Hagen got some great pictures of me working (displaying the gear that recently allowed me to become the Fairbanks 2004 Carhartt man of the year). It was cold but not quite frigid, maybe -12 and a breeze of 5 - 10 mph. So, the task for the day was to 1) pull some batteries out to the station that was running out of power...
I'm dragging batteries on an abomination of a sled, it has two skis bolted to the bottom of it. Hillarious but for this hard packed snow it seemed to work well.
2) Figure out what's wrong at the station and wire the new batteries in.
The trip was great, our pilot was cool and he had a CD player built into the beaver so we flew listening to some old country CD.
The drive up and back was long, the middle 200 miles was all snow flurries and so the trip one way was about 7.5 hours. Oh well, it was totally worth it. The aurora was going like crazy up in Coldfoot. All in all a cool trip. I'll try to get more pictures up this weekend on the rest of the website.
I'm dragging batteries on an abomination of a sled, it has two skis bolted to the bottom of it. Hillarious but for this hard packed snow it seemed to work well.
2) Figure out what's wrong at the station and wire the new batteries in.
The trip was great, our pilot was cool and he had a CD player built into the beaver so we flew listening to some old country CD.
The drive up and back was long, the middle 200 miles was all snow flurries and so the trip one way was about 7.5 hours. Oh well, it was totally worth it. The aurora was going like crazy up in Coldfoot. All in all a cool trip. I'll try to get more pictures up this weekend on the rest of the website.
