cw-as-fieldresearch

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Where did the time go?!

Hi everyone!

Where did the time go?! Somehow we’re already done the Trail Valley 2017 field season – it went by in a blur, particularly these last few weeks! The time clearly got away from us (hence the abandonment of the blog) and poor weather taking the internet out didn’t help that out. So, let’s catch you all up!

The last stretch was pretty jam-packed. After many hours of brainstorming trying to figure out the best approach for Cory’s shrub tree-ring project, a few failed attempts that brought as back to the chalkboard, and several excavated shrubs, we wrapped the project up successfully! The weather certainly hasn’t supported this project; it has been cold and rainy for days and days and days. The good news is that we could do the sampling in moderate levels of rain. The bad news is that we could do the sampling in rain, and let’s face it – as much as Cory and I both love fieldwork, no one actually wants to be outside digging up shrubs when it’s raining and cold. We persevered though!

Amidst the poor weather, there were still some pretty spectacular fall days on the tundra! It didn’t take long after we arrived for the fall colours to start popping out, creating a mosaicked blanket of reds, oranges, and yellows. There were a couple of beautiful sunsets that turned into some awesome northern lights shows – definitely a bonus of being here at this time of year!

For the last stretch of our time in camp, Cory and I finally got some company again. First we were joined by some of Phil Marsh’s group, then had a short visit from Phil himself and Rob Gordon, the VP of Research at Laurier, and also had some of the remote sensing gang from Aaron Berg’s group + a guest from the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena.  

Cory and I (plus Phil Marsh’s group) got out of camp with no hitches on Tuesday (and had a gorgeous day for a helicopter flight over the tundra), and were greeted by none other than my sister, who had made it up to Inuvik on her cross-Canada trip! We also got to meet relatives who have been living in Inuvik all this time that I have been coming up here for research – what a small world.

Once we got most of our equipment and samples packed up and ready to ship, we took advantage of Katy and her minivan (which thinks it’s a monster truck – did the whole Dempster with no flats), and went out collecting some cones from black spruce and tamarack. We’re getting her all trained up on NWT tree ID, and Skye (her dog) was enjoying life as a bear guard … though I think her priorities were more along the lines of tracking rabbit scent.

Today is our last full day in Inuvik, so we’re going to tie up loose ends, and then try to get out fishing for a bit. Tomorrow, Cory is going to start travelling south with Katy and Skye – he’ll go with them as far as Edmonton and fly back to Ontario from there. I’m going to be flying to Yellowknife, and on Monday heading in to a community monitoring on-the-land event with the Marian Lake Stewardship Program until September 15. We’ve all got some exciting experiences in the plans for the next week, and if all goes well Cory, Katy, and I will all be back home in Ontario by next weekend.

Trail Valley field season report, signing off!

-Ana and Cory

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Here we go again!

I guess I never mentioned on here that we left in July, but here we are back at Trail Valley again! Although we had a few weeks back in Ontario, and then a bit over a week in Oregon for the Ecological Society of America (ESA) conference, it feels a bit like we never left Trail Valley Creek. Things in camp hardly changed while we were gone – aside from one stop-in while we were gone during July, nobody has been living here since Cory and I left. We had (and still have) a bit to do to get things up and running again. It took me most of the day to get the main heater in the weather haven running (today was cool enough that it was needed). Fuel wasn’t getting to it the way it should, but with a bit of disassembly and some tinkering, I got it heating again! We also can only get the smaller and more efficient generator (which powers the incinerating toilet) to start occasionally. This is why we have back-ups of everything in camp though!  There was a bit of wind damage while we were gone too – the iconic caribou skull on the TVC population sign blew off, and the NWT flag got shredded. Both repairable and/or replaceable, but just not high on our priority list.

The tundra was super green when we got here, with all the flowers having passed their prime (and no lack of rain, as indicated by the HUGE puddles and high water levels everywhere). As beautiful as the flowers were, it is pretty darn awesome to have the abundant blueberries that ripen up at this time of year! Even since arriving, we’ve seen some of the willow shrubs start to change colour – autumn comes fast on the tundra! The sun is setting a bit at night, which is a welcome change from before we left. It’s still not getting truly dark out, but that’ll happen soon enough, and with that means the return of northern lights!

We had an awesome encounter with our little friend from the spring, Monty the fox on our first night back in camp. Just as we were going to bed he was hanging around near our tent, and I’m pretty sure the little guy started playing a game with us. Any time I would talk to him, he would start running full-tilt and bouncing around all over the place (like a really excited puppy), sometimes coming really close before turning away fast. He kept on doing this for quite awhile, and I got a video of it that I’ll try to post when not on camp-quality internet. It was pretty hilarious to watch.

On the science front, things haven’t been super exciting. The snow fence seedlings that we were super excited about look to perhaps be the wrong species, now that they have matured a bit and had some true leaves emerge – quite a bummer. It’s insane how many of them still have only cotyledons though – we did not expect them to look as much as new germinants as they do! We’re also trying to re-work a shrub seedling/sapling dendrochronology (tree-ring) project of Cory’s, as we realized that there were some flaws in the original sampling plans. Not totally a surprise that this happened – I don’t think I’ve ever had a project actually go through with the original sampling plans once getting out to the field! It’s just the way things seem to go with field ecology. Until we figure that out, we’ve been counting seedlings at the locations where Cory had deployed seed traps that we collected in the spring. That way, he can pair seed counts with seedling counts. Yesterday while doing this, we made a detour to finally walk across the Trail Valley Creek bridge that’s a part of the Inuvik-Tuktoyaktuk “highway” that’ll be opening in the fall. It’s a pretty impressive bridge, for the middle of nowhere! We also came across evidence that the highway has served as a caribou freeway – many many tracks along the entire kilometer of road that we walked!

Today we rebuilt the snow fence so it’s ready for another winter (we took it down so it wouldn’t cause shading effects over the summer months). It was cool enough to keep the bugs relatively at bay which was good, because it was very still and overcast – two thirds of the bug horror trifecta! I also found two caribou antlers while walking to and from the snow fence site. One of them was the most decomposed I’ve ever seen an antler up here get – when I pulled it out of the moss, it fractured across the broadest part! That one didn’t make the trip back to camp, but I’ve at least got one more “tundra trophy” in my collection.

I think that’s all the news for now. Pretty quiet around here with just Cory and I, but not as weird when it started off with a bunch of people and then dwindled down to two. This time, we get to look forward to more people joining us, starting in just over a week!

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It isn’t always sunshine and rainbows

While doing fieldwork up here at Trail Valley, we get some pretty spectacular experiences; we’ve seen the sun transition from usual daylight/darkness routines to not seeing the sun ever set, we have had incredible animal encounter with local foxes, caribou (even a calf!), and snowy owls, there has been weeks of beautiful sunny, bug-free days while the tundra lit up with purple blankets of blooming flowers … and then there are stretches like the past few days.

It started off with thunderstorms rolling through a few nights ago. There were a few storms that passed by, and although we didn’t get much rain there was enough thunder nearby to keep us up for a good chunk of the night. We then had a pretty early morning (relative to our usual routine) due to the fact that we were pretty much cooking in the tent. Even early, it was a really hot day. I know that all of you reading in southern Ontario (or even southern NWT) will probably roll your eyes when we say that we are cooking up here at 24 degrees Celsius, but let me make a few things clear; we’ve been tenting here since it was -30 degrees Celsius, so for a long time we found the range between -5 and +5 degrees to be quite ideal temperatures, making 24 degrees pretty darn hot relative to our “comfort zone”. The other thing is that 24 degrees on the tundra on a windless day has no relief – you can’t get out of the sun if you’re out working! One day that Cory and I were doing our big walkaround day of measurements we found one scraggly white spruce tree on the route that is just big enough to cast a shadow, and what a relief it was! It’s a new favourite stopping point. And one last thing about the hot days – the bugs come out.

Well to add to the joys (sarcasm) of this super hot day, I managed to pinch a nerve in my neck/shoulder in a pretty bad way while walking to the furthest site that we work at. After finding that our work that day was, in true fieldwork fashion, going much much slower than we anticipated, we called it quits rather than prolonging our overheating and my worsening shoulder pain. Plus, we had our 9+ hour fieldwork day the next day, so we wanted to make sure we were still alive for that.

We made the effort to rest up for a fresh start, but this time our sleep was disturbed by what seemed like a hurricane blowing through camp. Despite the fact that we’ve become quite accustomed to the sound of our tent flapping in tundra-force winds, the wind was strong enough that we were both kept awake for much of the night. As it turns out, it looked like a hurricane blew through when we emerged from the tent in the morning. Chairs were toppled off of platforms, one of the big canvas tents had been shifted leaving only part of the frame standing (despite all four corners of the tent cover being tethered down), the seacan was blown open, a birdhouse on the shitter got rotated upside down, things were knocked off of shelves in the weather haven from the sides of it heaving so much, and a piece of cardboard hit the bear fence with such force that it pulled the corner post right up out of the permafrost. I’m surprised we managed to get any sleep at all considering the way things looked in the morning!

We did survive our science that day, and had a visit from a few folks in town who were just in camp for the afternoon (they brought me Shreddies, which made me super happy – we’ve been suffering from some pretty extreme camp cravings these days). We got some pretty amazing swag from our friendly neighbourhood helicopter pilot too, which was an exciting find at the end of a long day. And the shrubs have finally fully leafed out – we’ve been waiting weeks for that to happen!

Just when we thought that we were tired enough to sleep through anything, last night we had bucketloads of rainfall on several occasions. The rain was much needed – it has been incredibly dry and the fire risk in this region has been quite high. It would have been really nice if it had just been steady all night long though instead of raging torrents … I find steady rainfall on a tent to be quite soothing, but when it seems like the rain is coming down like bullets out of the sky, it just isn’t as relaxing, and definitely isn’t conducive to sleep.

It has stayed pretty weathery all day here today – a bunch of storms rumbling around us, some drizzle on and off, but we got the little bit of fieldwork on the schedule for today done with and only lost a small portion of our blood volume to mosquitoes before giving in and applying some deet. The fieldwork blues are definitely a thing and we definitely went through a few cycles of it in this last short stretch. In good news, we have our departure date finalized, so we’ll be leaving camp on July 4th and back in Ontario July 7th. Pushing through these less-than-pleasant days is much easier with an end date in sight!

Anyway, that just goes to show that it isn’t all sunshine and rainbows up here. We have some spectacular National Geographic-style experiences, but there’s a lot of blood, sweat, and tears (though mostly blood and sweat) that aren’t the Kodak moments that people often see. That being said, through the swarms of bugs, cold and wet days, uncomfortably hot shade-less days, sleepness nights due to weather being all over the place, and crap that we have to deal with (sometimes literally dealing with crap), we keep coming back. Why’s that?

-          we learn more than you ever could from reading any book or paper

-          we get to meet and pick the brains of a diverse group of researchers from different disciplines

-          we discover cool things (I might have come across the northernmost northern tent caterpillar nest the other day)

-          nobody cares what we wear or look like

-          you can hear the quietest quiet imaginable when the wind is still and the bugs aren’t out

-          you can live on an entirely different schedule from the rest of the world because it doesn’t affect anyone and the sun is always out anyway, so work when you want as long as it gets done

-          wildflowers and wildlife are everywhere

-          sunshine and rainbows!

For all of the “why am I doing this to myself?!” moments, there are countless “how did I get so lucky to be here doing this?!” moments, and we wouldn’t trade it all for anything (unless it was all the same, except maybe less bugs).

Until next time,

-Ana and Cory

p.s. my shoulder has regained some functionality with regular doses of Robax. Bonus!

[cw-as-fieldresearch]

A non-research proposal

Hi everyone! Short update this time. There are a lot of Trail Valley proposals – proposals are the way that we fund what we do here. We had a different kind of proposal over the weekend though – Cory, in true Cory fashion knowing that I would never actually wear a ring, made an engagement ring out of a willow twig and a pebble from the Husky Lakes and proposed over the weekend. It’s also a good thing that I wasn’t planning on wearing it, because the pebble fell off before I got it on – but it’s the thought that counts! Also, because my family watched “The Pebble and the Penguin” a lot when we were kids, this whole pebble thing was particularly entertaining.

In other big news from camp, we actually found alder shrubs that were getting serious about leafing out, and we found a bunch more baby shrubs popping up at the snow fence – some of which look like they are actually alder!!!

Pretty exciting stuff all around.

Until next time,

-Cory and Ana

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And then there were two ...

I realized that it’s been nearly two weeks since an update – sometimes time really flies by up here! We’ve been keeping pretty busy. It’s been pretty steadily hanging around the 0-5 degree C range, which means that we’ve seen little action from the plants, or the ground thaw too for that matter. There was a bit of excitement at Cory’s snowfence recently though – we found little shrub babies starting to grow from seed! Unfortunately at this point they are still too small to discern whether they are birch shrubs (boo) or alder shrubs (what Cory has planted and wants to germinate), but it’s good to seed that some things are starting to pop up despite the very slow spring! The temperatures finally got up into the mid to upper teens today and are supposedly staying that way for awhile, so we’re expecting to soon start seeing the mature alder shrubs leaf out. It’s been crazy how long they have been holding out after just barely breaking bud – we have photos from two weeks ago showing buds that have just burst open a little, and they look almost identical to the ones we took today! Apparently they can change their mind about leafing out even after they broke bud. The plus side to all this? Still no bugs! I don’t imagine that it’s going to stay that way for long, but it’s been awfully nice while it lasted … midday tundra naps are even better when there aren’t mosquitoes buzzing in your ear or blackflies trying to crawl into your sleeves and eat you.

The four of us who were left here decided to see if we could redeem ourselves after our previous unsuccessful ice fishing adventures at the Husky Lakes and hiked the two hours (which was record time) to the nearest shore for some not ice fishing. Unfortunately, there is still A LOT of ice on them. And the wind coming off those big icy lakes was COLD! We found some open water right by the Trail Valley Creek outlet, but between the bitter wind, failing fishing gear, and zero signs of fish, we didn’t stick around too long. The big bonus we got from this adventure was a pretty close encounter with a handsome bull caribou! We watched him for quite awhile, got some really great pictures, and then got just about as excited to find some really weird ice formations. Right after crossing a creek, we found these HUGE chunks of ice. Doesn’t sound very exciting, right? Well it is, because 1) we were with hydrologists and 2) upon the huge chunks of ice were huge chunks of soil that were actually growing things! We still don’t know exactly what we saw, but it looked like the ice-richest permafrost we had ever come across. The only problem with our “permafrost” theory is that it really looks like it is somewhere that you would expect it to melt over the summer. If Tumblr liked posting pictures for me I would post some. For now, you all just have to sit around and let the suspense build over this until I get better internet to post pictures of this.

Cory and I had an exceptionally awesome encounter yesterday – this time with a caribou cow and calf! It was basically the cutest thing I’ve seen since my cat Oliver (and he is VERY cute – ask anyone who has ever heard me talk about him). We were doing a really big field science day, so unfortunately I only had our little field camera and didn’t get phenomenal pictures. They were close enough that I could still a couple of half decent shots of them, but nothing as awesome as seeing them in person. It has been crazy how many caribou that we have seen this year! Cory and I figure we’ve seen around 12 at various distances.

Both Cory and I have been busy with “stay-at-home” science on our off days (enough that it seems to have kept me from blogging). Otherwise, nothing too exciting going on. As of today, it’s just Cory and I in camp until two people come in on Sunday. It is crazy how quiet it is with just two people here, and definitely feels a lot more isolated! You never realize how much just one or two extra pairs of feet occasionally shuffling across the weatherhaven floor makes a difference.

That’s all for now – I’ve got some not-blog writing that I should get back to work on!

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Is it springtime yet?

It’s been a busy stretch since the last blog post. Our 3-day cycle of doing our big hike-abouts to measure changes in frost table has been fairly steady, with the occasional delay by a day due to inclement weather (some of the instruments that we need don’t work effectively in the rain). We have found a few cool things on our ventures though! We are up to four antlers in the collection now, and a balloon! Yes … I found a deflated balloon on the tundra, with a shiny curly silver ribbon, and yes, I kept it (some backpack bling)! The closest community is 50 km away, so the balloon went for a decent trip, therefore making it a cool enough find to tote around. Others in camp agree – it is a rarer find than the antlers that we collect in camp!

We saw caribou again too! Cory’s one site is a hotspot for distant caribou viewing. This time I actually thought they were just a lingering snowbank, but then they moved! The snowbank eventually became six caribou, which was pretty neat. I dragged Cory a little bit off our route to get a good enough view that I could actually confirm that there were six – it’s hard to tell from over a kilometer away!

Some of the other projects are coming along well too. Last year, Cory built a snowfence and planted alder seeds around it to see if snow accumulation influences germination and survival of alder seedlings (it’s part of a big snow-shrub hypothesis that the shrub researchers in these parts are interested in – which came first, the snow drift or the shrub patch?). The snow fence did a great job of catching snow, and in the last week we saw the last of it melt. Still no baby shrubs growing, but there’s still time to see that happen. We took the fencing down for the summer (so any shading from it wouldn’t influence the results) and also downloaded temperature data from the sensors that he had deployed out there.

The other project that we have been trying to work on is collecting seed traps that Cory set out last summer. He laid out trays with astroturf in them that catch seed as it falls from the shrubs, so he can see what parts of the patch accumulate the most seed (there are some hypotheses about whether there are more seed downslope than upslope in the shrub patches). We were hoping to have all of these collected by now, but the snow at these sites has been taking its dear sweet time melting, so we’re still waiting on that. We got one of the three patches done, but the other two are only half snow-free. I think that we might just go ahead and gather up what is exposed anyway, and deal with what’s still below the snow after.

The weather hasn’t been rushing the snowmelt along very fast. We had one really warm day (by really warm, I mean 17 degrees Celsius) which of course landed on the day that Cory and I were hiking all over the place, but otherwise it’s been fairly cool, hanging around 5 degrees during the day and below freezing overnight. In fact, we’ve had flurries, ice pellets, or light snow for several nights in a row now. All of this cool weather has made for little change to the plant world over the past week or so – buds looks ready to go, but they seem to know better than to leaf out until it gets a little warmer! The hydrologist team is also anxiously awaiting their lakes to thaw – still nearly two feet of us on the little lakes!

Camp life is pretty quiet – we’re down to a population of four from now until whenever we leave. We had a little celebration in camp last night for a campmate who landed an awesome award, so we had cake and I even shared my beloved Cognac for the occasion. We’re still eating pretty well, though we are out of non-canned meat and we also just finished our last pack of cheese (which I suppose means that pizza nights are over – sad day). The good news is we can still make cinnamon sticks with the pizza dough recipe! And we still have a fairly abundant supply of chips, cookies, and chocolate bars �� can’t complain about that!

Until next time from the land of the midnight sun,

-Ana and Cory

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A big day in the field (on foot)

Yesterday was our first long day out on foot of the year. We have easily put in 10+ hour days doing snow surveys before the melt began, but now we’ve done one of those days without a ski-doo to carry our tired selves around.

The main project that we’re working on right now is monitoring seven shrub patches and adjacent shrub-free areas to see how frost table (the depth to frozen soil) changes over the transition from spring to summer. We’ve been keeping an eye on a bunch of things – we measured snow depths, and now we’re tracking snow off dates, soil moisture, incoming solar radiation, bud break of shrubs (their shading might affect thaw when leaves come out), and incoming solar radiation. This means that every third day when we have to do these measurements, we’ve got a lot of walking and a lot of measurements to take! It’s also important to note that walking on the tundra is no easy feat – walking on the “flat” parts is a comparable workout to walking up stairs made of sand. Let’s not even talk about walking up hills …

Anyway, we started to get our tundra legs back and got all the measurements done in about 10 hours. We’re starting to see some of the plant life greening up and budding, despite there still being considerable deposits of snow in some areas. It’ll be interesting to see the patterns of how things start to grow in the next couple of weeks!  I’m particularly excited to see things start to flower – unlike Cory who has seen the tundra in full bloom, I have yet to experience that.

We did get some pretty amazing non-plant sightings yesterday. The first part of our day was narrated by an angry swarm of whimbrels that were dive-bombing any raven that flew by. Things got way cooler after that – midway through the day, I spotted a couple of caribou wandering across the tundra! They were pretty far away, so there are no good pictures since I only had the little field camera, but we watched them for quite awhile.  I was surprised to see that they’re still wearing their white winter coats – they stood out like a sore thumb against the tundra right now! At first I thought it was a couple of white ski-doos driving across the snow-free tundra.

On the walk to the next patch I found a small mammalian skull that looked like it had been there awhile. My guess is that it is a siksik, but googling “siksik skull” camp up with some weird stuff so no confirmation on that. Our next cool sighting was a snowy owl that was hunting along the creek! Obviously due to our 24 hour daylight that started a few days ago, these owls have no choice but to hunt in daylight, which makes it great for us to actually see the owls. Just as we were about to make it back inside the bear fence at camp, we had a close call with a more common critter around here – a ptarmigan nearly pooped on me and just about flew right into my head! There was a bit of a show of “who’s the more manly bird” going on and apparently us being there didn’t matter. These birds are ridiculous and about as smart as a rock. They also like to very ungracefully land on tents in the middle of the night – not cool, Ptarmi. The last sighting of the day was a beautiful little fox that found some edibles at our slop bucket drain hole. Our last fox, Monty, hasn’t been seen since we spooked him off with a bear banger. This one seems a little less concerned about the bear bangers, but hopefully if I keep running after it like a lunatic it’ll stay away. It’s very pretty though – a little more compact than Monty, and a really soft greyish orange.

That about wraps up the big day. In other news around camp, it’s been pretty cold and we’ve had some somewhat unpleasant weather – drizzle and freezing rain, and some thick fog at times. This morning there was a little dusting of snow. I brought back my first tundra trophy (caribou/reindeer antler) of the year – we have an antler yard in camp of our findings. We’ve also got water pumping from the creek now, and our sink which formerly drained into a bucket now drains directly to the slop station outside camp (so thankful to not have to haul a full bucket of nasty water across the tundra). I also set up a shower (!!!) in camp – a nice little outhouse shaped tent with propane burner-heated water! Granted, I haven’t used it yet, but a couple others have and the reviews are good. I’m just waiting for a warm enough day that I’ll be warm enough being wet. Tomorrow we sling out the ski-doos from camp, lose one person, and gain one person, keeping our TVC population steady at 5. We’ve started getting into the board games now, playing Settlers of Catan and Coup (both of which I have been dominating at). In other entertainment, the entire camp is playing various versions of Pokemon on emulators which is kind of hilarious. Gotta catch ‘em all, you know!

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The Weird Ways of Camp Life

One of the things that you learn doing fieldwork is that you pick up some weird habits. You know, things that we accept as normal that might seem outrageous to the rest of the world. For some insight into the oddities of living in a remote camp in the arctic, I have compiled a list of some of these things. Enjoy, and don’t judge too hard – I swear we can actually be “normal” people when immersed in the real world!

Tundra Time is its own time zone.

While in the real world people have commitments to jobs, responsibilities to others, social events, and in most places in the world have daylight to give cues to what you should be doing with your life, we lack most of these time triggers up here. Granted, we have jobs to do, but who really cares what time of day they happen as long as they get done? Cory and I have basically given up on watches out here. Firstly because they both were very sluggish when it was cold, so they weren’t doing much good anyway. But it also works out great whether you’ve got a tonne of work to do in a day, or just a few things; when we’re putting in long days, as long as the sun is out and there are lots of snacks in your bag, it’s really easy to put in a 10 hour workday without realizing it (knowing the time just makes it worse). When there isn’t much to do, it’s pretty obvious – there’s no need to rush. And we basically only had a few days where there was actual darkness since we’ve been here, so the sun certainly isn’t helping keep any sort of normal circadian rhythm. In a typical day, we wake up around a very bright 10 am (maybe later lately since we’re just working from camp), have some breakfast, work until mid to late afternoon, have lunch around 5 pm, work more, have dinner around 10 pm (though often later depending on how frozen dinner ingredients still are), and go bed by around 1:30 am (still very much light out).  

Bathing is optional, and rare. Especially in the winter.

While in the summer it’s possible to grab a bucket of water and give yourself a sponge bath, or brave the icy cold waters for a dunk in the creek to freshen up, things get a bit tougher during the winter. It’s cold. Being wet is cold. Clean is just not worth it. In the month that we’ve been here, there was a day not too long ago that I decided that I could survive having wet hair and not freeze too much, so I washed my hair in a bucket. The biodegradable body soaps that we have don’t really cut the grease anyway, so I basically still looked like a dirtbag (but smelled faintly of peppermint). Did some laundry too though, so at least if I didn’t look clean, I had clean underwear. Despite the fact that I am one of the most-bathed people in camp at a rate of one hair wash per month, things are surprisingly not smelly. Either we haven’t been working hard enough, or we’ve all just slowly acclimatized to the smell, it isn’t too bad. We do occasionally take advantage of baby wipes and powder to “freshen up”, so that probably helps too.

In the summer, camp food is limited to non-perishables. In the winter, we eat like kings!

Who would have thought that the dinner menu would involve steak, chicken parmesan, roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, and frequent burrito nights? Not me, given that in the summer most dinner is based around various types of canned things (some less appetizing than others) and whatever onions/carrots/garlic that haven’t gone too moldy. Or pasta. Between the cold temperatures allowing us to bring in meat and keep it from spoiling, and the epic stove/oven that we now have (goodbye days of Coleman stoves!), we’re cooking up a storm here! I’m exploring my inner chef and making some pretty darn tasty meals with all that we’ve got here, and some decent baked goodies too (my peach crumble was amazing, if I do say so myself). We’ve had some weird things … like pork neck bone. Didn’t know that was a thing that people ate, but it came in our bulk bundle of meats so I made something of it. Pretty darn tasty in the end – just a bit of WTF?! upon finding it. Now that things are warming up quite rapidly, we’re on a high protein diet trying to get through all of the meat before things spoil. It’s a pretty tough life having to go through two packs of bacon a day between five people …  :P

Your bowel movements become scheduled to the times when the generator is running

We got new incinerating toilets this year, which is awesome because the former “Ecojohn” was crap (pun intended), but they’re pretty big power hogs and our solar array can’t handle the load (pun intended again). Running a generator all day just to power a toilet isn’t the most efficient, and you’d be surprised how quickly one’s bowels become triggered by the sound of a generator starting. Okay, that might’ve been TMI, but you don’t get how exciting it is to have a working incinerating toilet! Thank you Incinolet, for your fool-proof, auger-less “inshitterator” design!

The internet quality changes with the weather

Do you know what happens when you have satellite internet for which the satellite sits upon a platform that seasonally sinks into the thawing ground? Crappy internet when things warm up! Today we had to readjust the satellite for the first time this season due to its platform dropping and losing signal entirely for most of the day. But, we’re back online! This is going to be a common occurrence as the summer progresses – there are good days, and bad days, and sometimes you just have to re-angle the dish. Still worth it to be able to have internet in the middle of the tundra!

The local helicopter pilot is the camp hero

When you’re in a camp like ours, when once things melt the only option to get anything in or out is helicopter, everyone worships the bringer of the goods! We’re especially lucky that our local pilot, Chuck, is a superstar – we couldn’t ask for someone better to be the one in charge of getting us and all of our stuff in and out safely! So Chuck has gained some pretty high status among camp residents – he brings us food, power, shelter, and sometimes he brings us the only new face that we’ve seen for weeks on end! We might come across as a *little* obsessed, but rightfully so – Chuck and co. treat us pretty darn well up here at Trail Valley, and we’re super grateful for it (and really deprived of human contact). Also, the sound of a helicopter is super exciting, even if it isn’t coming for us. There is usually an exclamation of “CHUCK!!!!” (even though it could be any of the pilots) and a feeling like we aren’t all alone in the world out here.

Anyway, I’m sure that there are more things that I’ve forgotten, but that’s all I can come up with for now.  If I think of more camp-isms, I will be sure to share!

Until next time, from the half-thawed tundra,

Ana and Cory

[cw-as-fieldresearch]

Three weeks in - here’s what’s happening at TVC!

Hi everyone!

Well, I make no promises about a consistent blog, but how about periodic updates? The first stretch here was pretty busy – the problem with doing work in the snow is that you never know when it is going to disappear, so there was a lot of rushing to get our snow work done! A few weeks later and it has still barely melted … hence, we have time for things like a big update on what we’ve been up to. Let’s start at the beginning!

We had a beautiful trip up here – an overnight in Vancouver, which was sunny and beautiful and blooming – it almost made me not want to head north to winter again! There we got to catch up with a whole bunch of Cory’s friends at an amazing potluck, and I got my all-time favourite espresso beverage, the Spanish Latte. The next day brought us to one of my favourite cities, Whitehorse. Cory has only had really brief stopovers in the city, so we spent the afternoon wandering around the awesome trails along the Yukon River, and admiring all of the sights of pretty frozen rivers and snow-topped mountains in balmy 8 degree (Celsius) weather. The next day was an early morning start to take the milk run to Inuvik. We jumped aboard the good old reliable Air North Hawker Siddley, and hopped from Inuvik -> Dawson City -> Old Crow -> Inuvik. We lost the spring weather pretty quickly en route – still in the -20 degree (Celsius) range once we landed in Inuvik!

We had a few days in Inuvik to get organized, and on April 19th we hit the trails with a couple ski-doos dragging toboggans full of our gear for a 3 hour trip into camp (midway between Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk)! Cory started off with a bang – before we even left the boundaries of town, Cory launched his ski-doo and toboggan over a snow bank and caught at least 4 feet of air, and still managed to stick the landing. Apparently the large bump pushed him into the throttle. A very dramatic start to his snowmobiling career! Things were much less exciting for the remainder of the trip – just a lot of really beautiful sights as we travelled from the north edge of the boreal forest into the tundra!

We’ve been kept well through the worst of the cold and it’s just going to get warmer from here (we hope). Cory and I have been very grateful for our army surplus purchased sleeping bags – so toasty every night, no matter how cold it has been! The first few nights in camp we had some darkness, and with darkness in the north comes auroras! There were some pretty spectacular auroras that only lasted for a maybe a minute one night, but in that minute we saw greens, reds, and purples dancing right across the sky! Not long after that night and complete darkness became a thing of the past – no more dark for the tundra until August.

Science progressed slowly but surely, and the very slow snowmelt worked in our favour. We had three main projects that we wanted to get done before snowmelt:

1)      Take a bunch snow cores from shrub patches to count seed in the snow (green alder drops its seed over the winter, so that’s the best place to find its seed)

2)      Snow survey (aka measure snow depth and density) across a bunch of shrub patches and Cory’s snow fence that he set up to test aspects of the snow-shrub hypothesis that is a pretty big deal in the tundra shrub world

3)      Measure the temperature at the snow-ground interface

As with most science, we had our fair share of hiccups – Cory and I came to hate the snow tube that we use to take snow cores. Sometimes the snow would get stuck in it and we would lose a bunch of time trying to get it out, or the “plug” of soil that it usually grabs would get stuck too and be impossible to get out, or we would just hit a thick layer of “wind slab” in the snow that was almost impenetrable by the corer and took ages to get through. And then there was the first snow pit that we dug to measure the temperature at the snow-ground interface – the darn thing was 160 cm deep! It takes awhile to dig that deep in snow! We aren’t talking light fluffy stuff either, it takes some serious chipping to get through some layers! This insanely dense snow is what makes igloos so much easier to build here than in more southern snow though – we pulled out some pretty awesome snow bricks.

I was really surprised at how different the snow is here from what I’ve seen at Scotty Creek (near Fort Simpson, NWT). There is so much more variability across the landscape on the tundra – some areas are hardly 15 cm deep, and other areas you get several meters! When there’s nothing but hills, low vegetation, and a whole lot of wind over the winter, you get some serious snow movement and drifting.  One of the other really neat things is the ice fog – beautiful, shimmering ice fog that leaves the most amazing frosty crystals on everything it touches! I can’t get enough of the intricacy of the crystals. We also have gotten some cool variability in the shape of the snowflakes that fall. Apparently the usual thing for up here are these tiny little snow columns that fall (they look like delicate little sprinkles), but when it got milder we got perfect little traditional snowflakes. Very pretty!

There’s been a little bit of wildlife around camp – we had a fox (“Monty”) who was a bit of a regular around camp, but we spooked it off with a bear banger when it started to get into garbage. He was quite the beautiful fella, and I got some awesome pictures of him. One morning he even posed for me in front of a stunning early morning sun dog! There are a ton of ptarmigans around, ladel-ladel-ladelling through the night, and the usual ravens occasionally flying over. The past week all of the migratory birds have started flocking back in mass though – Canadian geese, snow geese, sandhill cranes, and loons have all started making overhead appearances! I don’t know where they’re all going to go right now considering everything around us is still snow/ice covered, but it’s a welcome sign of “spring” anyway. There was a grizzly bear sighting a few kilometers away from camp, and some big grizzly tracks through the snow in Trail Valley Creek itself, but no major threats to camp.

We went out on a big ice fishing expedition awhile ago to the Husky Lakes – this is the place where I had hiked to last summer (a 3.5 hour hike) and caught lake trout and arctic grayling. The snowmobile trip was soooo much easier of course, but our fishing was not so successful – we only caught tiny little sea monsters (sculpin). It was still a very lovely relaxing day after Cory and I had been putting in some very long days of fieldwork for 10 days non-stop.

Life around camp has been great. There have been some great improvements to camp this year, like incinerating toilets that actually work effectively (thanks Incinolet!) and a stellar little propane stove/oven that has been well used. One of the perks of winter work is actually having meat in camp, so we’ve had meals featuring roast beef, chicken parmesan, steaks, and soooo much bacon for breakfast! We’ve done a fair bit of baking too – cookies, cakes, muffins, biscuits, peach crumble, quiche, and pizza! It’s a pretty awesome place to be all-around.

I think that covers all of the highlights of our fieldwork adventures so far. Now that we have down time while we’re waiting for the snow to melt, Cory and I are going to work on writing some papers that need our attention – much less exciting than playing in the snow, but it’s gotta happen!

Until next time!

-Ana and Cory