I was just pushpolled by some organization pushing Tammie Wilson for Mayor. I guess Fairbanks has gone national politics-wise. At this point, pretty well trained to receive push polls after Alaska got all the attention with Young and Stevens last year plus the Palin crew but pretty wacky that the people with the money care so much about the mayoral race in Fairbanks.

Cleaning house and came across this ditty from a couple years back.

Just a test from the crackberry. One picture is us in Sitka up on Harbor mountain last weekend and the other is some house in downtown Fairbanks. No good reason for the house but I thought maybe the sled on the roof could use a bit more exposure.

Hmm, still getting the hang of this…. so, not sure really what this gallery thing is going to look like but here are some pictures from the trip to the SP late last month. The fox there was signing all around the site and also eating sensors. Then the little bugger followed us on our hike back about a half mile or so. It was pretty cool. The rime picture shows how much ice there was on one of our repeaters back in September… it hasn’t been heard from in a while. Finally, we kick it off with a picture of Jessie after she slayed the first driveway grouse of the season. It’s been a slow year for the birds at the house but maybe now that we’ve gotten a good snow that will change.

Hi Everybody,

New site, hopefully more often updates.  Got caught in a mess of stupid computer things with the ol’ blog.  Seemed easier just to start semi-fresh.  So, now here we are with word press, an updated layout and who knows what else.  So, apologies if anything is breaking.  More to come in a bit.  In the meanwhile, check out our semi-instrumented house:
House ground temps and air temperature

More to come once we’re in Fairbanks. Yes we were this close (no cropping here)!
Also, if that wasn’t boring enough for you, there are more pictures here:
My WERC site
I just never got around to posting this stuff on rbusey.org….

So, we’re briefly back in Fairbanks. A fire is just over the hill from the house but looks like it’s not going to hit our place so we’re off for Canada in the morning for a conference. Here’s a couple rare working pictures from out on the SP:

The big event:

And… a bunch of animals that we saw. Hopefully we get some polar bear pictures in Canada (cross fingers!!).

Emailable magazine ads would be rad in real-time. Or, perhaps its for the best but what do you think of this one, satire or sadly real? Jessie found it.

There's also this scruffy dude from ketchikan who's a mechanic for ak air that they've done a bio on. Real name is Royle Snodderly. Love it. Current claim to fame is the sole remaining mechanic with the company in ketchikan. They play that up like it's a good thing but if I was that mofo I'd worry about job security. If there's only one of you there could easily be zero of you.

In the car section there's this picture of a new groundbreaking nissan. The revolutionary thing is that it's even boxier and uglier than the honda element and that scion car. A quick tip of the hat to the engineers. No surprise to learn its named the cube, right.

Another super highlight is the rollout of the marketing dept. Latest pitch: north of expected. Cute story for this magazine is about the twenty-five eagles that were transported on alaska air from kodiak to anchorage to a raptor center after an incident involving fish oil and a dumptruck. The magazine plays up the ones that made it but there another twenty-five that kicked the bucket. In addition, the takehome quote is the hurl worthy "when they were unable to fly, you served as their wings". That to me is north of expected. I think that's what I really appreciate about good marketing. It's so bold, 25 eagles dying is one of the selling points of the ad and we still come away happy.

So not much going on up here. You may have noticed this the first trip with the blackberry. For better for worse, I don't know. Probably worse for everyone I'm writing for the hour and a half that we're in the air. Because really, what could be even more awful than an in-flight airplane magazine?? The clif notes version without all the awesome computer generated real estate ads probably.

Hello everyone. Or however few of ya’ll are still around. Just mmmaybe getting back in the swing of things here after a longish break. I can kind of believe it’s been over a year. We’ve been pretty busy. This break roughly coincides with us getting a house. You’ve probably seen the we just made an offer on it picture, here’s the before and after on one of the rooms in the inside:

So, this house has totally been dominating our lives. This remodel is done but then there’s been the foundation to worry about. We’re on permafrost and with a year under our belts I can see we need to be a bit more aggressive keeping it frozen. So, at the tail end of last summer we changed the drainage on the house by putting in rain gutters. I added garbage cans soon after to catch all that extra water but it wasn’t really until this summer that I put together mad scientist style old pvc pipe that came with the place. So now all the water is going to the east side of the property and hopefully in a year or two our permafrost will be in better shape and the house won’t go through quite as big of a freeze-thaw heave and subsidence annually. So, that’s one big thing going on. Kind of the biggest.

Popped in up north in January. Completely not notable although on the drive south we did see these tourists about 100 miles north of Fairbanks perhaps sledding for the first time:

Good show! Also got up north this spring for a pretty rad trip. We were measuring discharge in some of the rivers between Prudhoe Bay and ANWR. The original plan was to take out a robot and drive the robot back and forth across the river since it’d be so dangerous with all the ice coming down. Here’s me driving the robot (closest I could come up with for a captains hat…):

And of course the robot its glorious self:

Well, so much for that plan. Jury is still out with some people on the robots. I’m happier to be out on the river myself. So, robots haven’t replaced humans yet in this context. We totally couldn’t get the darn thing to work. So, we went out into the business our selves instead (Although obscured we’ve got life jackets and dry suits on):

That second picture is us at full throttle. The current was so strong and the ice was coming down so quickly we decided to get on out of there in a hurry. You can’t tell it from the picture but with the ADCP in the water and short a blade on the prop we were only bbbbarely making headway up river. The current was pulsing the velocities were so high and so when there would be a pulse we’d stay in the same spot at full throttle and then when it would let up we’d move upstream a little. So, it was sketch city at the start of the trip but by the middle to late the temperatures were finally getting a bit above freezing and we had marginally more time for stuff. So, of course I brought an old favorite out:

Yes, Dr. Discharge himself. Here’s that lesser known superhero in action making a measurement of the right bank of the river to kick off a transect with the ADCP:

So, eventually the rivers dropped and we found ourselves wading instead of in the inflatables. On one of these days I accidentally dropped the line while moving downriver. Slow motion emergency! We ran down river after it. The thing was quite a few grand so not really the thing to let head down the river for the ocean:

It was pretty nice to get back to civilization after that extended deal. Pretty cool though, on the drive south we went from all brown at Prudhoe Bay to green starting to happen to buds popping out to flowers and then on to full summer and temps in the 70s once we got home. It ruled. So then the fam came up and we had a pretty good time with all them. Here’s us getting ready to do the upper chena:

And this is pretty much the last rainy day of the summer:

So, things are pretty good. This is the last weekend of summer (sad isn’t it!). We’re off to Nome for bunch of fieldwork and then… getting married. So, that should be pretty fun. Probably expect if we can pull it off some destination blogging but no promises.

After that we’re off to Baffin Island in Canada for a meeting which then puts us back in Fairbanks in mid August (the rainy season). So, summer’s over. Well, now that I’ve got this thing fired up again hopefully the updates will happen a little sooner…

Had an awesome time in 2006 doing the April end of winter Snow surveys and so this year I got a chance to come back up and participate again. Just like last time there was some amazing sites to see. To kick it off, here’s a picture of me before heading out snowmachining the first time in my giant Sorel boots. Kind of reminds me of this picture of Kanye and Daft Punk from back in the winter.

I think the oddest thing I did this trip was surveying off a cliff. Here’s a view from the top:

Once again there were lots of caribou around. We were surrounded on one day. Here they are near the newly christened butt mountain.

A kind of cool rack out near Slope Mountain:

And some other ones in the neighborhood of the Imnavait basin:

Not all the time was spent snowmachining. Here’s a look at the lack of snow in a katabatic valley in ANWR.

But, not much time was spent in the helicopter. Here’s how degraded conditions were shortly after we dropped the helicopter near an Alyeska gate due to weather and then ended up parking it there overnight since conditions didn’t improve.

Ken and I had a pretty good run in with a couple bears, too. Just after we got to one of our sites these guys popped over the edge of the hill. The interaction was totally textbook though. The wind was blowing the wrong way and when they saw us they couldn’t figure out what we might be so they kept standing up on two legs and coming closer. I pulled out a large actionpacker lid and waved it over my head and eventually they figured out we were pretty big and not to be messed with. So, since we were in their way they did a semi-circle around us. Pretty cool.

When they came to our snowmachine tracks they totally booked it on out of there:

So that was totally rad. Kind of a good way to start off the last part of the trip. I think that’s it for now. Maybe now that I’m caught up it’ll be easier to stay that way. Daily updates on the house etc. of course. Also, getting a helicopter weather day when you’re all caught up rules.