A day in the field

What a long couple of days it has been!

I'll give you a quick rundown of our typical day...

8 AM - Breakfast in the main building. Load up on as much food as we can, and pack sandwiches for the day.

9 AM - Time to load up all the extra gear we'll need to carry to the field for our time here. Running back and forth between the garage and shed to gather all the necessary equip.

10 AM - We are ready for our commute to work. Everyone's backpacks are loaded w/ at least 30 lbs of goods (sometimes 50 or 6

0) with equipment, changes of clothes, rain/river wading boots, more extra layers, FOOD, etc. After a 45 min hike over rocks, through muck and streams, and up and down a couple of hills we arrive at the lake. A quick 15 minute boat ride on little 6 person zodiac's will take us to the south end of the lake where our little hut is!

By then it is usually past 11 and we disburse into groups. One day was spent recovering moorings with the help of some GPS coordinates and a little luck. Today was spent hiking an extra hour each way up to another lake to run some samples (more on that later). Another task also including finding a rock in a stream with probes attached to it. This probe tracks time and takes temperature readings every half an hour. Combining this data with the time lapse camera we can chart the melting of the melt water stream. Below is Alice and Chris excited after a fifteen minute search for the rock!

With lunch snuck in there somewhere, we finally round everyone up by 5 or 530 to start the commute home.

Once again, hopping in the boats, securing them at the other side of the lake, and a 45 minute hike gets us back just in time for dinner @ 7 PM.

After dinner we usually have plenty of data to go through, and before you know it it's almost 11:30 (the time of this post) and it's time for bed so we can repeat! I have found that it is useless trying to figure out which day of the week it is, because you only have so many days out in the field you have to make the most of it, so every day is a work day!

The weather has been fair. Almost reaching 50 a couple of days! Yesterday it rained, which combined with spending much of the time leaning over a boat and pulling up sediment traps that were overflowing with water everywhere made for a wet day to say the least.

That is all for now, I think I need to catch some sleep. Hopefully will get more pictures up in the coming days and have good news to report after coring my lake!