Survivor Ellesmere

In shuffleboard, the most number of points you can score with one puck is 5, if it lands hanging off the corner of the board. This is very hard to do. Last night I threw such a puck, only to have it maliciously knocked off the board by Tobias. (You only get points after both people have thrown 4 pucks each.) I am the shuffleboard queen. (And despite Tobias being the meanest person ever, the fluffy pink bunnies continued their domination of shuffleboard in the High Arctic.)

A few days ago I lamented the hot weather we've been experiencing here, and I have been rewarded with the temperatures falling to a reasonable -37C at the lab, which is actually a bit cooler than the station which is at -34C. This is nice in that I no longer overheat when I go outside, but bad in that the lab is now *freezing*. I am glad to be wearing so many layers today. I have also been forced to drink hot chocolate made out of the super-pasteurized milk that takes forever to go bad. That stuff is nasty, but the station has run out of the good milk, and I am COLD. The cold and wind has yet to bring the Sun, although it did tease us this morning with a clear sky that completely clouded over just as the Sun rose above the horizon. Think sunny thoughts for us.

Only CANDAC operators can drive the trucks up here, and one of those two people has Sundays off. So we had to have a smaller group of people at the lab yesterday. Since my instrument is automatic, I spent the day at the station, sleeping in and catching up on some work that needs to get done soon. Since it was Sunday, the Sun decided to make its second appearance of the campaign and its first appearance at the station since October. (We see it a day or so earlier at the lab since we're 600 m above sea level.) And so here's the first sunrise at Eureka in 2007. You probably won't be able to make it out, but this is taken from the beach of Slidre Fjord. (After years of showing pictures of the Arctic I know that it takes a special eye to be able to determine where the frozen water stops and where the ground starts.) (Melissa had been invaluable in sitting through hundreds of pictures of white while I learned this fact.)

While we were out sunabathing, we were visited by a very fast moving bunny, who we watched run at us from the station and then past us out on the fjord. Whenever I see Arctic hare run, I think they look funny, since they're not hopping like other bunnies. They look like horses when they run. Except when you look at their tracks, they are perfectly bunny-like. So maybe I'm just not capable of identifying hopping. We we also hunted by a fox, who circled us a couple of times, and then cautiously headed downwind, where he seemed to be deciding if he should attack us, or if we were going to attack him. The foxes are such adorable balls of foxy fluff. And the one that lives at the station is so fat and roly-poly it's even more adorable. I'll try to get better pictures.

Today we awoke to stronger winds, gusting pretty heavily, but made our way to the lab anyways. Halfway through the morning it was decided that we would head home for lunch, since the snow was blowing pretty heavily and that can blow in the road. The problem when it blows isn't so much visibility (though that can certainly be reduced to zero) but the small little snow flakes that get blown around and packed really hard. When this happens on the road, you end up with what is sometimes an impassible drift. Then you have to wait for the front end loader to come out and plow the road. And that (a) can take a long time, and (b) costs a lot of money. Of course, once we made the decision to come down, the weather got a bit better, and all the people that need direct Sun to do measurements spent the afternoon looking longingly at the slivers of the Sun that we could make out on the webcam images from up at the lab. Hopefully we'll start to get better weather soon, and I can go out and take pictures of vaguely different colours of white for you all to enjoy.

Temperatures have been a bit warm since we got here - instead of the usual -42 we've been experiencing -30 to -25 down at the station and up to -9 (!!!!!!!!!!!!) at the lab. (Which is located 600 m higher up than the weather station, and we generally enjoy a temperature inversion - when the temperature goes up as you go higher in the atmosphere, as opposed to down.) It's all well and good that it's a bit warmer, except for two things:
(1) We still need to wear our Arctic gear everywhere, since the weather can change so quickly, and so we're all over heating.
(2) It's cloudy. Super cloudy. The first picture is about the clearest it's been. We need the clouds to go away so that we can get good measurements. (My instrument works regardless, but many others need to see the Sun.)
The next picture is the first solar spectrum taken with my traveling instrument this campaign. (The one that lives at PEARL had its first spectrum a week before I arrived. No one thought to take a picture.) My instruments have been working super-well this campaign. (Now that I've said this they're both going to be broken tomorrow.) And their data agrees super-well too, which is good, since they're essentially the same instrument. (Though the new one starts taking spectra when it's still REALLY dark out - we're all fairly impressed.)
This last picture is one that I took by accident but I really like it. I had my camera in my pocket anticipating the ozonesonde launch this evening. (The balloon in the background - it carries a small instrument that measures the ozone in the atmosphere as the balloon travels up.) When I took it out to start taking a video, I moved the knob that determines what kind of settings to use. I ended up with some odd setting and this ghostly picture. I am going to call it art, and pretend that I did this on purpose. Science art is the best kind of art.

I haven't really taken any pictures yet - the Sun is barely scraping the horizon (and even then, only because the atmosphere is bending the light), and I know that the good pictures are a couple of days away. So don't worry, I haven't become so accustomed to the scenery up here that I have stopped photographing. Many photos of different kinds of white objects will be coming your way soon.

I've had a productive couple of days at the lab. Yesterday I was able to convince the french instrument that it was at 86W, not 86E, and today I was able to get my traveling instrument up in its hatch just in time for it to be too dark to get any solar measurements. (The instrument I was here to install in the summer has been back on for about a week now, and is working perfectly. So far.) Hopefully tomorrow it will start taking spectra and I can fall into my data analysis routine. And I will most likely not discuss spectroscopic measurements of any kind again.

It always surprises me how bright it can be when the Sun is below the horizon. I'll look outside and think the Sun must be close to rising and then I'll do some calculations and find out that it's still a few degrees below the horizon. It's certainly not bright enough to cast shadows, so it can be hard to make out the subtle topography of the place. I love that in a few days I'll look back on this post and wonder how I could have thought it was so bright. I find it odd that my previous experience up here teaches me that I'll think I'm crazy in a few days, but somehow not that it isn't very bright out at all.

Another thing that I hope is only a few days away is the return of wildlife. I've spotted bunny and wolf tracks, but no bunnies, wolves, or foxes. Apparently there were some musk ox at the runway a couple of days before we got here, so I'm also hoping they come back to visit. And, as a gift to me on this last trip up here, shouldn't I get to see a polar bear? From afar? VERY afar?

It's been an eventful few days. I can though announce that I am once again in Eureka, and once again absolutely in love with the place. Let me tell you how I got here.

Our travel plan this year was a relatively early flight to Edmonton, a three hour layover until our flight to Yellowknife, which was to get us there in time for dinner and a good night's sleep before our charter flight to Eureka at 7 am. I was sharing a taxi with the three downtown members of the campaign team, and when we were about 5 minutes away we got a phone call from one of the other members at the airport. Our flight was cancelled. When we got to the airport we were directed to the ticket counter where we were told that they'd do their best to get us on another flight to Edmonton that day, but since it was Sunday (and the start of reading week) they couldn't book us on a flight until Tuesday. Our travel agent kind of sucked, and didn't link our tickets to Edmonton and to Yellowknife together, even though that's what travel agents are meant to do, so Air Canada had no knowledge of our connecting flight and therefore we were placed a little lower on the priority list for standby. We checked in, and luckily the woman who did this was able to guarantee our bags would make the next Edmonton flight, and we went to wait to hopefully be called on standby. The check in woman also told us that most of the flights were overbooked that day, and the one that would get us to Edmonton in time to get our connection actually had 18 oversold people, and 27 on the standby list. We remained optimistic.

After we were not called for the flight our bags got on, we talked to the ticket agent who reiterated that the Edmonton flights were all oversold, and that we probably wouldn't make it to Edmonton at all that day.

So we got on the phone to Canadian North to do something with our tickets.

And went to stand in line for customer service. Which had 3 people working. And a line about 10 people long. This wonderful Air Canada woman who was coming off shift at this desk saw us waiting in line and told us we'd be better off calling Air Canada, because it could take hours to get to the head of the line. So while others were dealing with our Yellowknife plans, I picked up a white courtesy phone and essentially pledged my life to the man who answered the phone. It turns out that they had actually booked us all on flights connecting to Edmonton to arrive at various times that day. It's just that no one had bothered to tell us. One of our members was booked on a flight the next day, but he was able to change her reservation to get her on a flight to Winnipeg leaving in about 45 minutes. I ran back across the airport to get her on her flight, and told the rest of the team we were all routed through Vancouver on two different flights. Mine left without a hitch, but the other flight ended up being cancelled, and that same nice Air Canada woman saw that part of the team in line AGAIN, HOURS later, and pulled some sort of strings to get them on the next flight to Edmonton. So in total we were delayed 4-10 hours leaving Toronto, but all felt very glad to be in Edmonton Sunday night. With all of our bags, that had arrived roughly eight hours earlier.

We were able to get on the first flight to Yellowknife the next morning, and our charter flight was delayed until we got there. Monday was much less hectic than Sunday.

If I never see Pearson Airport again I will be happy.

But at least I got a 7$ voucher for food on my flight to Vancouver.

More about Eureka next time.