Umm, Ooops! Yeah, that wasn't planned. Caught the ATV on fire back in July out in Kougarok. Was driving it back to camp. It had been kind of overheating a bit and so anyway, I look down and the flames are licking at my left boot! Slammed on the breaks, killed the engine and ran away from the four wheeler waiting for the hollywood explosion. Nothing happened the four wheeler just continued to smoulder so I ran back for my backpack. Well, I had like a hundred bungee cords attached so it was a bit of a clown act as I struggled to get it free. Get the thing free, run back away from the fourwheeler... it still hasn't blown up yet. I go back for my gps. Still hasn't blown up. Now I'm feeling a bit more confident. I remember I've got a bit of water in my nalgene. So, I pull the seat off and douse the flame. And so that's pretty much the state you see here. I had to walk back to camp (like a quarter mile, not to bad) and so thought I should grab a picture for posterity. I walk quickly back to camp and everyone is cooking dinner. They were happy to see me until I was like um hah ha haa, you're never going to believe this ha ha haa. but the fourwheeler is on fire! So, Larry, Rena, or Anna I'm sure can relate that part better than me but in any case, we high tail it out of the cabin, they leave the cook stove on, and pile into the truck. We're in the truck and I was like uh, did you leave the stove on? Larry runs back into the cabin. I was like shoot, we'll see him later. So, I peel out in reverse. Just set to take off when he comes charging back. Hops in the truck and off we go. We dump our cleaning water on the smoking atv and that's pretty much the end of it. Larry tried to drive it back to the air strip but the hot oil light came on... Awesome gesture though. As it turned out there was an oil leak combined with cottongrass and a hot engine. Pretty nutty way to kick off our July trip.
The July trip was awesome. The impetus was pretty much to get some great data on the area around Cape Espenberg (the northern lump of the Seward Peninsula between Shishmaref and Kotzebue). Here's a common sign of permafrost, patterned ground:


On my permafrost distribution map I show a great deal of thawing up there on the northern part of the peninsula that we're kind of suspicious of (as it turns out there really is a lot of permafrost degradation up there so maybe we were righter than we thought) but the purpose of this trip was to helicopter around up there for a couple days and get soil thermal properties information with a spiffy new sensor that goes for about 5 grand. Here's the view along Shishmaref inlet:


So, after everything was set up, Anna and I collected data and Larry and Rena dug holes for us. A pretty awesome set up. So, we visited like eight sites over two days up there and got a ton of great stuff. The bugs were pretty rough. Here's a favorite picture or Rena that Larry took:


Here I am out with Anna. Just a few minutes later I would notice that I had my hip waders on backwards. Not the first time that's ever happened (notably back on my second river trip I put Rob's boots on and thought my feet had swollen dramatically overnight till Rob got up and was wearing super big boots for his feet).


So how awesome is this, a working gold dredge, perhaps the only one still operating in north america:

Can you believe with the price of oil and all that it's still profitable to run that thing? Totally nuts!

So, we had to get Larry back to Nome for a presentation. But, we also had more work to do at some other sites. Anna ended up driving Larry in to town. With Rena and I out at the Kuzitrin River site we did some gaging of the river with our toy boat and then sat in the sun. After sitting in the sun got boring I busted out my fishing stuff. I just started learning to fly fish this summer. I've been out a few times with Luke but out at the Kuzitrin was the first by myself. Check out some grayling:

Here's a typical fish I caught out there. I pretty much did catch and release till I got bored. It was rad:

So, an awesome trip all in all!