Survivor Ellesmere

This is my fifth trip to the Arctic, and though I still experience a sense of amazement at the landscape, I sometimes forget exactly how far away from everything I really am. And how dangerous it can actually be to be here. Yesterday I was reminded of this. Another couple of firsts for me - the first time the truck has gone off the road, the first time we've had to call to the station to get towed, and my first real Eureka-style blizzard.

The station manager called up to the lab yesterday afternoon to tell us a storm was coming in, and that if we wanted to get to the station, we should leave soon. Pierre, who had been at the station with one of the trucks, was on his way up to get us. While he was fighting the drifting snow back up, we packed up and Oleg tried to get the other truck started. (There are ten of us up here this year, so we need to take two trucks every day.) Unfortunately, that truck is a bit temperamental, and since it hadn't had its 8 hour cooling off period, refused to start. Meaning that Pierre would have to do two runs to get us all down from the lab. It wasn't blowing all that hard yet, so we thought it would be alright. I managed to weasel my way into the first truck load of seven people. Driving down, the winds had gotten stronger. In some places we couldn't see the tracks the truck had made just a few minutes earlier. Since the road gets pretty unidentifiable in conditions like these, there are marker posts every few feet with shiny tape on them, so you can tell where the road is. Some of these posts are missing, and Pierre and I were commenting on how that wasn't really a good thing. Karma being the bitch that it is, about half way down to the station, in a place with a few missing posts, and one badly placed post, one of our wheels went off the road and into a ditch. Another one followed. It was pretty warm out - minus 15 - so the time we spent trying to dig, push, and pray our way out was not terrible from that standpoint. It was a bit frustrating that the testosterone levels shot up, and suddenly I was stuck on the side of a road at 80 degrees North with three men who were experts on getting a truck out of a ditch in the Arctic. And who wouldn't admit that we were STUCK. There was a two foot drop off from the road to the bottom of the ditch. At one point we had the left side wheels in the ditch and the right side wheels nicely displaying the concept of conservation of angular momentum, as they were a few inches off the ground. Ten minutes in, Kaley and I were pretty sure we weren't going anywhere without help. One hour in, the front end loader was on its way to pull us out. We broke a rope, and then on the second rope it pulled us up and out of the ditch, and we made it back to the station just in time for the winds to really pick up. By the time the loader got back, we couldn't see across to the old building (about 10 metres). If we had waited much longer to call for a tow, they couldn't have come out in the weather and we would have been stuck, seven in a truck, waiting for the winds to die down. Which would have been overnight. Oh yeah, I'm in the Arctic.

Luckily, we did get back home, leaving only a few people up at the lab overnight. (Which is well equipped with food, a computer projector, movies, and beds, just for such an occasion.) The rest of us hunkered down to listen and watch the winds getting worse and worse. The new building shakes. I was watching a couple of lights out the window, one 10 metres away, one 15, to gage the visibility. For about an hour, the furthest one was out of sight, and the closest one was blowing in and out of the snow. The building they were attached to was not at all visible. The windows in the rec room that were receiving the full wind gusts were visibly moving. This was the strongest storm they've had in the new building (open since September) and I'm happy to say it withstood the winds. And in case any of you were worried, the satellite TV held out through Survivor, only going out a few times, and only for a few seconds. Then the winds picked up and the satellite dish was moving so much it couldn't hold the signal.

This morning we woke up to winds that had died down significantly. It's still blowing out there, but nothing near last night. A plane is meant to come in today, bringing new people and taking away old, and last I heard they were planning to leave Yellowknife as scheduled. This means the front end loader has to be used to clear the road to the airport and the runway, so can't clear the road up to the lab. So we're stuck at the station, and they're stuck at the lab, and I'm just glad I didn't have to spend a night in a truck off the side of the road at 80 degrees North in a blizzard with six of my closest friends.