I’ve seen a lot of animals at Huinay, a plethora of birds, daily dolphins, the occasional sea lion. But one animal I never saw was the penguin. When I first got to Huinay, I confided my secret ambition to my peers and they scoffed, “Why do you care so much about seeing penguins, there are penguins here all the time!” But in the two months I was there, I didn’t see a penguin, not even once. After a couple of a weeks, I no longer ran outside to scan the sea every time that someone said they thought they saw a shadow of dolphin fin. I saw a pudu, a small deerlike animal so rare that when it was spotted at the water’s edge hiding from a puma, the whole camp went to see it. I saw sea lions sunning themselves on the salmon farm bouys, and I learned how to tell the difference between a juvenile and mature night heron, a male and female chucau. I saw hawks and great white egrets, and hummingbirds. But that one animal that apparently was so commonly seen around Huinay that I was mercilessly teased wanting to see at all? That’s right… not one measly little penguin.
So when I started to plan my trip I knew that I had to fit penguins in there somewhere. My biggest concern was that the summer is not only the high season for tourists, but also for penguins. Starting at the end of February, the penguins leave their colonies for the sea, only to return in September. Knowing this I wanted to maximize my chances of seeing penguins. And this is how I ended up in Punta Arenas, with my first imperative to see penguins before they left forever and I would be left with a sad penguinless space in my heart. I arrived in Punta Arenas yesterday afternoon, and went straight to the lovely Hospedaje Magallanes. According to my research there were two penguin colonies, a small one at Seno Otway, and the large one of Magallenic penguins at Isla Magdalena. The only problem was that I had been informed that after the summer no more ferries go to Isla Magdalena. After dropping my bag down I immediately cornered the hostess Marisol to ask about the availability of penguin tours. Without blinking she said that she could reserve a spot for me on a tour to Isla Magdalena. Fantastic! I later got to talking to several of the other people at the staying at the hostel and apparently they were waiting to take the tour as well. It had been canceled two days In a row because of high winds. Nooooo.
I was very worried up until I got to the Solo Expiditions store front this morning. It was drizzling sightly, but the many Chilean flags around the city were hanging limply. I inquired if the boat was leaving that day and happily it was. A half hour later, 12 of us were piled into a van that took us 20 minutes away from the center of town. We went down the lime green dock where a small white motor boat was waiting for us. The ride to Isla Magdelena was a about 30 minutes over calm seas. It’s very cliché, but as soon as we stepped off the boat onto the island, the drizzling stopped and the sun tried to peak out between the clouds. Apparently, only half the colony was left, the rest had gone to sea, but I didn’t care; there were penguins, penguins everywhere. And to think that in Huinay I would have settled for seeing one lonely little penguin. But after 2500km I got to see tens of thousands… WORTH IT!!
Me with the only penguins in HuinayLive penguins. FINALLYYYYY!
I love good food. Do I even have to state it? I love good food. I like to say it’s my Frenchness coming out, but I think that the importance of good quality and taste in food is something that every culture values and every person can appreciate. I was told that I would love the food in Chile (“You will eat a lot of meat and a lot of fish.”). I say, yum!I love good food because of its intrinsic value (i.e. I love good food because eating yummy things makes my stomach happy), but also because eating is an experience that is best when shared with other people. I can think of so many good memories that are centered around sharing or cooking a meal with special people, and I would like to share two Huinay food moments that stand out in my mind among many great meals over the past four weeks. The first one happened shortly after I had arrived at Huinay, and the second one happened a few days ago, but both show how important food has been in making me feel like part of this community.
Termas y curanto
My second evening at Huinay,I was invited to go to the Porcelana termas, which are thermal pools on the other side of the fjord, about 20 minutes away. I was both excited to be going as I had never been to thermal pools before, and nervous about going because no other English speaking person was going and it was only my second day and everything was still super new to me. But I went anyways. The group consisted of me, Belen and Yessi, two students from Valdivía studying forestry engineering, Dennis and Veronica who are the kitchen masters, Reinhart who’s in charge of admistration, and Helena his daughter. We left after dinner, at 8:30ish. It was a 25 minutes boat ride to Porcelana, and we pulled up to a pasture-like hill. Veronica’s niece lives in Porcelana (it looked like this “village” was about as big as Huinay; a collection of two or three houses tasked with the upkeep of the termas), so there was happy chatter all around. After a 15 minute walk through the forest we arrived at the much-awaited bunch of natural pools. These pools are filled with heated water, courtesy of Nature, as a result of the geothermic activity in the area. Indeed, there are geysers nearby and many of the surrounding mountains are in fact inactive (hopefully) volcanoes. Reinhart never tires of telling the story about how he was hiking around Huinay 4 years ago and was the first person to spot El Chaiten exploding.
My first terma experience was very enjoyable. You sit in a pool of silky water that is a little muddy, but in a good way. At first you can’t stand the heat of the water, but then it becomes pleasant, and you can sit back and relax and take deep breaths of air that smell of mulch and sulfur. And when you get too hot you’re supposed to take a plunge into the freezing river, just a few steps away beyond the trees. I wasn’t too keen on this part but everyone insisted that I do it because it’s part of the experience, so I let Dennis hold my glasses as I quickly submerged my head and all. It was SO cold! We moved between pools of different temperature, my nerves and shyness dissolving in the hot water as everyone attempted to speak with me, and Belen repeated sentences slowly when she sensed I had lost the thread of the conversation. We stayed there for hours, the sun set, and from the pools we could see that small patch of sky above changing from pale blue to navy, so gradually and slowly that it was barely noticeable, and the first stars came out while the sky still felt light. It was a night without moon, and I was able to sit back, listen to the buzz of Chileno, and see our Milky Way galaxy splashed against the trees.
At around midnight we gathered our things to leave. Others with more foresight than me had brought flashlights with them, and we stumbled along the path until once again we came out onto the pasture-like hill. Yessi, Belen, and I lied down on the grass to look at the stars while Veronica went to speak with her family. The three of squealed in delight as shooting stars blazed overhead. Veronica came back and we got up to go. She was holding a huge plate in her hand, which was covered by another one. I realized that I was very hungry. Dennis, Yessi, Belen and I gathered around her, and she uncovered the plate of curanto and the most amazing smoky smell reached my nose. Curanto is an important dish that is typically Chileno, typically Chilote (from the island of Chiloé). Helena explained to me that it is cooked in a hole in the ground, where shellfish and meat are piled in layers underneath huge leaves from the narca plant. Later when we came back to Huinay she pointed out the plant that looks like an enormous land lilly pad. Veronica told us to go head and dig in. Yessi and Belen and Dennis all grabbed one of the mussels. Veronica motioned to me to do the same. They were enormous, about the length of my hand. I took one gingerly with my fingertips; the outside was all slippery from the juices. The mussel was delicious, juicy, seafoody, and smoky, the best one I had ever had. I learned that ¡Que rico! Is the appropriate thing to say when enjoying good food, and I said it many times. Everyone exclaimed how good it was, and I was handed more mussels, more meat, which were accompanied with approving nods and smiles when they saw how much I liked it. We walked down the hill, back to the boat, Yessi steering me away from the cowpats, our fingers sticky from being licked. I felt full, happy, and we silently watched the stars from the boat on the way back. I noticed that the shapes of the mountains were darker than the sky.
Los Haivas
After a few weeks I had made it habit to visit the kitchen and say hi to Dennis, Veronica and Camila before sitting down to eat. I spend most of the day with my fellow science staff and it is nice to catch up with the others; exchange a few words and see what delicious food I was about to eat, and maybe nibble at something around the corners. I can think of many a day when upon entering the kitchen Veronica handed me a pancito (mini bread) fresh from the oven because she knows that I love them and that I’m always hungry.
One day, about two weeks ago, a group of “VIPs” from Endesa (the electricity super-company that built Huinay, remember?) were here to use the facilities as a summer retreat. This meant that the kitchen was working doubly hard to produce a gourmet meal for them on top of our food. I was early and didn’t know where Katie, Annika, and Uo were, so I went to the kitchen to see what was going on there. I chatted with Dennis for a few minutes, peeking around, trying to see what we were going to eat today. Dennis knew what I was after and showed me this huge pot on the stove, filled with these enormous crabs, easily twice the size of the crabs we had in Baltimore where crab is considered a local delicacy. They were for the VIPs though. He broke off one of the enormous forelegs with the pincer on it, smashed the shell with the heel of a carving knife, and handed the meat to me. I ate it, it was steaming and sweet, so delicious and there was so much of it. Veronica and Camila came back upstairs from the store room, and they huddled with us around the kitchen table. I asked what the Spanish word for crab is (jaiba) as Veronica cut up a couple of green lemons to squeeze over the meat and showed me how to sip the briny juice that is left in the crab leg once the meat is removed.
The four of us happily smashed the crabs with the heels of the knives, without a care about the noise, spilling juice all over the cutting boards and metal table-top. It was a simple treat; but an impromptu, almost illicit one, which is partly what made it taste so good. Over the growing pile of empty shells and smiles at each other’s enthusiasm about the task at hand, I felt a great fondness for all of them. As others started to stream in the dining room I left the kitchen, and sat at the table, already a little full but undaunted by the prospect of a second delicious meal.
Last week I left the 200m radius of Huinay for the first time since I got here four weeks ago. Along with a couple of other camp fever victims and visiting scientists we hiked about 800m up the mountain to a refugio. The relatively well maintained path wound itself through mulchy mud and over enormous rocks and tree trunks. Though it was a dry day and the sun was shining, everything was wet and my clothes soon became soaked due to enormous ferns showering me as I battled my way through this temporal rainforest. Besides the occasional cobweb there was a marked absence of insects and the silence was only pierced by the high pitched whoop whoop whoop of the chucao bird or the more raspy and startling call of the woodpecker.
This is the forest where the alerce, a tree steeped in mythology, once reigned supreme in the Andean evergreen forest before experiencing decimation through industry. The wood of the alerce grows so densely that it lasts virtually forever. On the island of Chiloe one of the biggest attractions are its wooden churches, 16 of which have been declared UNESCO world heritage sites, and the “palafitos”, wooden houses built on stilts which were the traditional dwellings of fishermen in the South of Chile. These structures are made of alerce and have successfully withstood the wear of centuries and inclement weather. The alerce is one of the longest lived trees on Earth. In one of the offices in Huinay, we have a piece of wood from an alerce tree that was 4000 years old when it died around 50 BC. It stood for almost 2000 years until it was chopped down about 250 years ago. I am told that seeing an alerce in its venerable age and enormous height and girth is a mind boggling. Unfortunately, because of all the colonists who wanted to have alerce shingled roof this mountainside has long been cleared of the alerce giants.
But the mountain did not need the mystical trees to blow me away. Many of the trees were enormous ulmos whose white flowers make the fjord across from Huinay look like it had been coverd a patchy dusting of snow. For most of the hike it seemed like every available space on standing and fallen tree trunks was covered in moss and lichens. Now, I’ve never been much of a moss person. It’s not that they’re undeserving of my attention, it’s just that they’re not something that I usually notice while taking a garden stroll. What I mean to say is, the variety of moss back home is slightly underwhelming. But man did they have my attention now! I had never seen such moss and lichens before, they were growing in beautiful patterns of filaments and huge disclike structures, reminding more of a crystal aggregation than a plant. On the way back down I stopped to catch my breath and examine the green stuff covering one of the tree trunks in front of my nose. I wondered how many undocumented species of lichen was growing on the single branch I had stopped to look at. Is this the excitement that Charles Darwin felt when he scrutinized the same (maybe?) plants? I’d like to think so. A chucao landed at my feet and looked at me with an expression that said, what the hell are you doing stuffing pieces of moss in your pockets? I didn’t deign to answer and continued to slide down the mountain, feeling very lucky to be in this amazing and rarely visited spot as well as a little smug that the cheeky bird had no idea that my other pocket was filled with (super cool) rocks I had collected earlier, higher up the mountain.
It’s been almost a week since I arrived at Fundacion Huinay. Huinay is research station in Northern Patagonia, Chile. My first reaction upon arriving was one of wonder and awe. I had been in a few research stations before, but in none of them were the facilities so luxurious or whimsical. Huinay is in the fjord region of Patagonia which means that the landscape is entirely made up of mountains starting several hundred meters below the water’s edge and running uninterruptedly to the crest several hundred meters above us. Because of this, the station couldn’t be built on flat terrain, and indeed, the houses are built on raised wooden platforms that rest half-way on the mountainside, half on wooden stilts. Another remarkable fact about Huinay is that it is built almost entirely of wood and an effort had been made to disrupt the trees as little as possible to the point of including them in the building design. Indeed one of the first things I noticed that the decks of the houses and labs had been built leaving spaces for treetrunks and the effervescent verdure seemed to singlemindedly want to poke through every crack in the wooden slats. All of these details sprang out to me at once while Katie was giving me the grand tour and I thought, “I’m living in a treehouse.”
My new home!
Huinay is the product of a very strange partnership: The University Catholica of Valiparaiso and the Chilean elecitricity giant Endesa. What I understand is that the university owned 34000 acres in Northern Patagonia and proposed to Endesa to foot the bill for the first and only state of the art research station in all of Patagonia. Endesa agreed to do so because building an ecological research station is in line with conservation goals, and this would look pretty good coming from a not-so-green supercompany. I feel that the station lives up to its somewhat conflicted ideological roots. On the one hand there are hippy-dippy sustainability initiatives at this station, such as growing our own vegetables, keeping a beehive, and sorting the trash between biodegradable and non-biodegradable. On the other hand, there seems to be no initiative to implement some water or electricity saving rules. Whatever the motives, Huinay was opened for business in 2001 and great science was had by all!
The story of its conception gave me the answer to the question of why Huinay was so swanky: it had been funded by one of the richest companies in South America! Everything was very, VERY, nice. When I first arrived at Huinay Katie led me up an immaculate flagstone path through overhanging leaves and vines towards a wooden (tree)house. I was to live in the scientists’ house which had a large common room complete with couches, table and chairs, and a kitchenette. I am sharing a room with the other intern, Annika. And what a room! Complete with a desk, enormous shelf space, an en-suite bathroom, and sliding glass doors that lead to a balcony. Delightful! Equal to the quality of the room is the quality of the view. Out on the balcony I can look over the treetops and the blue ocean right to the forested cloud-laced fjord on the other side. Not too shabby right?
View from Huinay
I feel like I should have mentioned this before, but here goes, Huinay is very isolated. There are no roads that lead to it; it is only possible to get here by boat. The only thing here other than the research station is a “village”, and I put village in quotes because it is comprised of two houses and a school. School is out right now, but during the year it has about 15 students, mostly the children of salmon farmers who have the option of living at the school during the year if it’s more convenient. On the station there are another handful of people. On the science side we have Ulo and Katie as the research coordinators and David the GIS guy. Sole and Reinhardt have lived on the station since the beginning and they take care of the administrative side along with Lola. Dennis and Veronica cook, Marco, Hernan, and Meli are boat captains/ maintenance workers. And then people come and go. One of the purposes of the station is to receive groups of visiting scientists. A couple of groups will be arriving in the next weeks so it is about to feel very crowded compared to the deserted island vibe we have right now.
So that was the story of how Huinay came to be here which explains why I am typing on my computer in a treehouse on what feels like a deserted island, but is actually on a fjord firmly attached to the Chilean coast. I’m about to go pick a bowl of blueberries from the garden patch which I will eat with some yoghurt that we keep in the fridge in the common room, because we have a fridge in the common room! Though this kind of opulence may feel wrong in this lush deserted island setting, I’m not complaining, it’s nice to have the best of both worlds.
Yesterday, we had our last scheduled sampling session of the season. It was with a great sense of satisfaction that I pushed the tea-colored water from Imnavait weir through the cation filter, drop by drop, until at last, my arms trembling from exertion, I could cap that green taped 60mL CATS bottle for what I can only assume is the billionth time. And this time was the last time. I optimistically think, “Great! My days of lugging water from lake to lake are over!” I throw my arms up to the sky in celebration of the end of my filtering days, and that’s when Jason starts piling long pieces of plastic poles in my empty palms. Yep, no more water to lug, I’ll just be hauling equipment instead.
I have one week left, and though it will be free of sampling, it will not be lacking in things to do. As the final five remaining members of the lab, its our great pleasure to handle the herculean task of shutdown. The Arctic is lovely and hunky-dory now, but in a matter of weeks, conditions will harshen, and the population of camp will go from thirty to three. Thus our task until the end of the season is to prepare the lab space for a successful hibernation. Some things, like plastic nalgene bottles, syringes, and serum vials, are hardy enough to rough it through winter stacked in cardboard boxes on a shelf in the lab. Other things, like expensive electronics, pipettes, and certain chemicals, are a bit more high maintenance and need to be bundled up and packed in warm storage. The first stage of this process is to pull the equipment from the field back into the lab and sort everything by prospective storage area. The second stage involves cleaning, labeling, and inventorying… EVERYTHING. There are five of us responsible for shutting down the projects of four PIs, whose stuff is sprawled over three labs plus two storage areas. Oh, and all the stuff in the field.
Jason climbed up on the top shelf to get at a couple hard to reach boxes… and to take a nap break
Though we have been trying hard to stay organized, I cannot help but feel slightly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of stuff we have to deal with. Over a couple of days, we brought in the four Isco auto-samplers, which take water samples spaced between preset time intervals. You may remember what an Isco looks like from my pictures of the July 4th Star Wars skit (hint: a spare Isco starred as R2D2). They have now taken over the Lab 4 floor space. I have also very happily spent an afternoon dumping all the nutrient samples and after which I very carefully placed the bags full of empty 125 mL bottles on top of the Iscos so as to keep a narrow corridor free of stuff for walking purposes. There’s stuff everywhere, under the lab, outside the door, and ever since Jason and I spent three hours Thursday afternoon beginning the daunting task of organizing the Conex storage shed, there’s a great mound of stuff piled outside the Conex which has now grown to such epic proportions that it merged with the pile outside Lab 4. And there’s more stuff coming in from the field every day.
Iscos taking over the lab! We pack up the Isco heads in warm storage and leave the rest in the Conex for winter.
On Monday we sampled lakes E5 and E6 jointly with the lakes group, and while we were there we took down the meteorological station and the drippers, which are pumps set on anchored floats that fertilize the lakes with a fortifying stew of nitrates. We spent the morning pulling up buckets of rocks and cement that served as anchors for the stations, and then towed them back to shore from the row boat, the stations floating along like large pets on the end of a leash. Aside from the couple of minutes it took for us to realize that the E5 dripper had a third anchor that we hadn’t noticed nor pulled up, which we subsequently realized was the explanation for why we weren’t getting any closer to shore despite Jason’s frantic rowing, the morning went by quite smoothly. We successfully got all the equipment on shore, stripped them of electronics, car batteries, and solar panels, and left the rest on the tundra for the winter.
So this next week will not be the relaxing time I had envisioned upon learning that we finish sampling a week before our departure date. But at least I can say with firm conviction that I have filtered my last* bottle! What joy!
*Correction: next-to-last bottle. Katie has just informed me that she needs to sample the Sag river on Wednesday. I should never have spoken with such conviction.
Taking the meteorological station apartDumping the rest of the fertilizer from the drippers in the lake. Yum!Sebastien and Ben left a Dew out on the rack for us! How thoughtful 🙂
“Oh you’re going to love it in August, it’s my favorite time of the summer”, says Dustin on my second day at Toolik, “Its beautiful, Fall comes really quickly and the tundra changes color almost overnight. It looks like skittles.”
“Skittles?”
“Yeah, bright red, skittle color. You’ll love it.”
He was right.
Seasons of the ArcticSkittles!
W canoed across Toolik lake and hiked up Jade Mountain. You can see the camp in the upper left corner of the lake, and the road behind it. When we got the the top, we ran into a herd of caribou. They didn’t seem scared of us and hung around for a while. This is the closest I’ve gotten to the caribou yet!
Some people at Toolik upon the eve of their departure get to throw up their hands in mock despair and say, “Its going to be so weird going back home where it gets dark! I’ve totally forgotten what that’s like!”. To my great dismay, I will not be able to say that and really mean it, because every day I spend a couple of hours in… the DARK ROOM.
The dark room is the only place in camp where no light shines 24/7. We run two analyses in there, OPA for ammonia, and chlorophyll. A fluorometer works by shining a light on an object and detecting how much of the light the object reemits via flurescence. To do this, it needs to be in the dark. On top of that, the reagent for OPA is light sensitive, and chlorophyll needs to be kept in the dark all the time, both of which reinforce the unfortunate necessity of the dark room being, well, dark. As the newest member of the Kling team, I got the exciting assignment of running OPA. As Sara so nicely first described the process to me so as not to discourage me, “Its a little long… but you get to spend a lot of time in the dark room by yourself which is kinda nice”. What she really meant is, its mind-numbing drudgery that takes forever, and you get to spend most of it sitting by yourself in the dark listening to other people in the lab having fun. I’m exaggerating, its really not that bad, and getting some time alone is nice… at least that’s what I tell myself when I’m in the dark squinting at the fluorometer.
So what do you need to run OPA? First off you need the following, sample, working reagent, buffer solution, and standards. The buffer solution is a weaker version of the working reagent, and standards are solutions of known ammonia concentration. We use these to make a standard curve which is essential to calculate the concentration of ammonia in the samples. The principle is as follows. There no way to directly test for ammonia, so what we do is add a reagent called OPA to the samples, let the mix react for 16 to 24 hours, and then read the fluorescence off the fluorometer. Except that in addition to the samples that have straight working reagent added to them, we have two more sets of samples that are spiked with two volumes of highly concentrated standard, and another row of tubes to which is not added working reagent but buffer, which is a weaker solution of the working reagent. We do this for calculation reasons involving matrices. Feel confused? Me too.
Though I haven’t tried to understand the math surrounding the production of the actual values of ammonia, what I do understand is that OPA quadruples the time I have to spend with the fluorometer, because if I’m running a medium run of 30 samples, I actually have 120 tubes to rinse, pipette, shoot up, and read; plus 12 more for the standards. Its an ordeal. After returning from the field on Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays, I’ll start the long process of preparing my tubes for OPA. In the dark room I rinse them with DI water and then buffer (~ 45 minutes), then I pipette my samples and standards in the common area of the lab (~ 90 minutes) then back to the dark room to shoot up, i.e. add OPA or buffer to the tubes (~ 45 minutes). Then the next day back to the dark room to read the samples (~ 2 hours).
I have spent so much time with the fluorometer I feel as though it is another person, a very needy and fickle person. It was not enough that three labs were battling over the precious time slots to spend at its side, it just HAD to break down half way through the summer. We yelled at it, threatened to throw it on the ground, but it didn’t listen. I guess it finally got its attention fix after a week and a half of being fawned over, taken apart, and settings readjusted, before finally deciding to work again. Of course at that point, our backlogs had accumulated so quickly that it didn’t even have to try to give us good data, we took whatever shoddy numbers it threw at us. What an unappreciative piece of equipment.
Sometimes Jason goes all misty eyed and says, “Well you know back in 08 when I ran OPA, we had to pipette the samples in the dark room on top of everything else. That was the woooooorst.” Very soon, I’ll be able to join that exclusive club of ex-OPAers. Sometimes when I’m alone squinting at the ever fluctuating values of the fluorometer I dream about the last time I’ll exit the dark room, stumbling around for a few seconds while my eyes get used to the brightness, and look back upon OPA as Jason does; with a wistful fondness and a sense of accomplishment from having gone a whole summer without throwing the fluorometer on the ground. Even once.
There are a lot of things at Toolik that I do that I don’t do at home. Its all part of this experience of being in a small community in a remote field station. We spend so much time together that we end up developing communal habits and rituals that everyone participates in. These rituals, no matter how strange they seem when you stop and think about them, are very important for group bonding and have become an integral part of my Toolik experience.
An example of something that I do here and that I would not do at home is drink Mountain Dew. Regularly. I haven’t had a cup of coffee since the first day I got here, instead, I’m drinking at least a can a day, probably even two. Back home, I don’t drink the stuff, I rarely drink soda at all. And out of all the sodas out there, why would I ever choose to drink Mountain Dew? It’s so sugary and has the worst after-taste ever. Its third ingredient (after sugar) is orange juice from concentrate (the next one being corn syrup… which apparently is different from sugar), and it contains brominated vegetable oil. That can’t be good. It has about as many calories as a meal. So for all those reasons, when I was first offered a Dew on my second day, I politely declined. We had just stepped into our red truck after a morning of sampling the weir at Imnavait. That can of Dew was the last thing I wanted, and Dustin retracted his offer with a knowing smile. I was new, I didn’t know what the next couple of weeks was going to offer, but Dustin knew what I did not: I was about to get hooked on Dews.
The next day, the Dews popped out again. I wasn’t so quick to refuse this time, they couldn’t be so bad right? Wrong! The taste couple with the sticky sweetness was overwhelming, I could only take a couple of sips. But then my palette started to change, and I found myself beginning to crave the gag reflex triggering taste. They would pop out at odd and dependable times, usually around lunch in the field, or back in the truck after finishing sampling. Sometimes, on difficult days, we’d even have to resort to drinking a Dew before hoisting our packs. We always drink them together, and delight in the ickyness of what we were doing. After drinking a Dew, we’d always be more revved up and ready to go back to work even though we’re sleep deprived, sore, and cold. Our rituals surrounding Dews continued to escalate as June turned into July. We brought three Dews per person with us, just in case. We started chugging them. We’d hide them in the glove compartments and stash them under seats. Twice, we drove up to Imnavait where some of our lab was sampling and left some surprise Dews on the dashboard.
As I said, I developed a taste for them. But I guess it wasn’t a taste for the flavor, but it was more a taste for the feelings of community that they inspire. After a long day of trudging through the tundra in the rain with a few liters of water on your back, the Dew at the end of the tunnel is one way we keep our spirits up. Its so weird that something as icky as Mountain Dew is one of the cornerstones upon which my experience at Toolik has been built upon, but there’s nothing like doing something silly such as sharing a couple of dews with a couple of friends to remind myself that this place is very, VERY, far from home.
Lake NE14! Can you spot all the Dews in this picture?Dustin is so impatient to have his Dew he’s drinking through the netGetting psyched!
Bug season is in full swing now, which means that depending on the unfathomable forces of nature, even a thirty second walk from the lab to the dining hall means attracting a cloud of bloodsucking mozzies. It is barely tolerable for that thirty second period, so naturally when out in the field a bit more protection is desired. Most people opt for bug shirts; a tan or kakhi smock-like shirt sporting netting in select areas (underarms/sides) for ventilation purposes. The large hood with a zipperable black mesh screen that covers the face completes the image of someone who is ready to fend off something a lot more dangerous than mosquitoes. Such as aliens. I hear they are quite ineffective against bears though. Not quite sure how they would stand against aliens.
The sun never sets
I don’t think that I’ve broached this subject yet, which is strange because I feel like it is central to this place: the sun never sets. Ever. Its such a strange thing because it completely destroys any sense of time passing. My time here feels like one long day, which it essentially is; one long day that never ends. Even though it is quite dark in the weatherports, the light streaming in through the cracks between pieces of tarp is a constant reminder that night does not exist up here. It also makes going outside to get to the bathroom in the middle of the night a very confusing experience.
The local flora and fauna
So I know that I’ve already gushed about how awesomely weird the tundra is and how its nothing like I’ve ever seen before, but I must go on. I went on an awesome hike last Sunday up this mountain called Molar (because… it looks like a molar?) which was my first experience hiking in the Arctic. I had been warned by people who actually know what they’re talking about that hiking up here is not like hiking elsewhere, and though you may think you’re a good hiker elsewhere, the terrain (your choice between squishy tundra or loose boulders) and lack of hiking infrastructure (ie paths) make it slightly more difficult. Luckily, this hike was an “easy” one.
When my mind wasn’t being distracted by thoughts of the mountain collapsing on top of me or of being mauled by that yonder herd of Dall sheep, I actually found it very enjoyable to scope out the next bend the slope and see if it was climbable. Sometimes it was. Sometimes others thought that I have the unnatural talent to find the worst way to get from point A to point B.
One of my most memorable moments of the hike was when we were scrambling up a seemingly unending very vertical channel of stair-like moss covered boulders. The moss was so thick and springy that it was easy to climb, and I was comforted by the thought that if I fell it would be the best cushioning material ever. As I would take a break every couple of meters by resting my face on the thick spongy moss, I thought to myself, this has got to be the weirdest place in the world.
Molar Mountain, with a view of the majestic pipelineDall sheepMade it to the tippy top!I can’t believe this place is real
On Sunday, I went with 5 of my labmates on a road trip to the Prudhoe Bay and the Arctic Ocean. I was very excited to dip my toes in this ocean that so few people have been to. Even the insistence of the Prudhoe Bay veterans that touching the water at Prudhoe was not something that I wanted to do, could not dampen my spirits. Why do you not really want to get the Arctic water on or near you? Because Prudhoe Bay is the largest oil and gas producer in the United States, and you have to pass through miles of oil wells and refineries to get to the ocean. Needless to say, the waters lapping up on these shores of industrial activity are not the cleanest. To even see the ocean, you have to take a tour of the oil fields. There’s only one road, and it goes to Prudhoe, there is physically no other way to even see the ocean without taking tour. So we signed up to take the tour.
On the road to Prudhoe. You can see Franklin Bluffs in the first picture on the right.
The trip up was about 2 hours and a half of dirt road and rolling tundra. The road follows the Sag river, short for Sagavarnirktok (I had to double check the spelling), through a very uniform landscape of flat green tundra. About half an hour before getting to Prudhoe, we pass the Franklin Bluffs, a long series of cliffs that were names for John Franklin, an explorer who apparently spotted the cliffs all the way from the ocean. We pass a mileage sign to Deadhorse. So I’m a little bit confused about our final destination, is it Prudhoe or Deadhorse? Deadhorse is the name of the “town” in Prudhoe bay. I put “town” in quotation marks, because it isn’t really a town. No one actually lives there permanently. But it has housing and facilities for the 3000+ seasonal workers that come to work in the oil fields. As we approached Deadhorse we could see the industrial facilities stretching out in a line on the horizon. It was enormous. Easy to understand that Prudhoe bay and Deadhorse blur into one big mass.
The end of the road…
As we were a little early for our tour, we first drove around to see what Deadhorse has to offer. As we soon discovered, it was not a whole lot. There is a general store, where we stopped to browse the selection of souvenirs that shamelessly take advantage of the ridiculousness of the town’s name. There is a dining hall. And, as a spectacular bonus, there’s a tanning salon. And that’s basically all the entertainment that Deadhorse has to offer. What it did have in abundance were a lot of prefrabicated boxy buildings, the purpose of which were hard to discover. I guess housing possibly? It was definitely a very weird place to be. It looked like a settlement on an alien planet. All these buildings were very colorful, but covered in a thick layer of dust. That and the lack of people milling about gave it a very ghost town feel. After buying our souvenirs, we walked around a little bit, trying unsuccessfully to find signs of life. I got the feeling that this would not be a very fun place to live, especially in the winter during 24 hour darkness. There’s really only so much tanning you can do.
We finally found Deadhorse Camp, a two-story derelict mustard building which served as housing for tourists, and waited for our tour to begin while watching a band of caribou frolic next to Dalton Highway. About 10 minutes after the tour was supposed to begin, a man in a blue jumpsuit presents himself as our tour guide and invites us to board a dust-covered minibus. Our final destination was the east docks, about 45 minutes away. The tour was quite interesting, the guide pointed out the functions of different buildings, told us about life working at Prudhoe (you get two weeks of daily 12 hour shifts then two weeks off, and you get paid a ridiculously high salary), and some tidbits about the hardships of working in the winter. I just couldn’t get over how vast the oil fields were. The west docks were so far away that rather than using the airport at Deadhorse, it is more economical for them to have their own airport. Crazy. It just went on and on and on.
After 45 minutes of driving past refineries and oil wells and gravel pits, we finally made it to a little spit of gravel that jutted out into the Arctic Ocean. I saw immediately that the warnings of my friends about the unsanitary nature of the water were not exaggerated. There were rusted barrels jutting out and who knows what else hidden in the water. But who cares, I was at the Arctic Ocean, a whole ocean that I had never seen before!! Pretty incredible. Once we were done admiring the view of the water and the refineries-dotted coastline, we piled back into the bus and headed back to Deadhorse. It was getting late, and we had seen what Prudhoe had to offer. Time to go back to Toolik.
While we were on the road, I thought about the oil fields and how revolting they were in their industrial opulence. But the ironic thing is, the road that made it possible for me to get to Toolik only exists because it is necessary for trucks to make the haul between Prudhoe and Fairbanks. Without the oil fields, there would be no reason to have such an extraordinarily high-maintenance road, and without the road, there is no way that Toolik could exist. A strange connection to have, but enabling awesome science slightly redeems Prudhoe in my eyes, even though it was unintentionally done.
Oolala, entering the restricted area!
Spotted in Deadhorse: Refineries and caribou chopping next gas pipelinesWe made it to the Arctic Ocean!
Lauren is most purposefully taking a detour* 