Hi Everyone!
We landed in Barrow two nights ago and started to hit it pretty hard. We landed at 7pm and by 10pm we already had a set of wheels, found our lodging rooms, grabbed unleaded and diesel for the expedition, ate bimimbop at Osakas, and packed two sleds. The next morning we woke up at 7am and headed for Subway (of all places). We got a footlong breakfast and lunch sub a piece and then headed to Northern Air Cargo to grab our seven food totes. At 9am we did our UIC orientations and arranged the two snogo rentals and packed the third sled. We hit the tundra by 1pm for Teshekpuk. We almost made record time getting to the cabin, a few minutes over 5 hours riding. It was -10c the entire ride but the winds strengthened throughout the day, blowing about 30 mph the further east we traveled. Which unfortunately was the direction of the wind too, making our parkas a bit balloon-like. The cabin was in good order when we arrived. A few hours after we arrived we had the cabin up to 10c at the ceiling and about 0c on the floor. Tonight its' a comfy 20c throughout. The winds continued to rage on a bit last night and into the morning but it calmed throughout the day today. We made some bomber breakfast sandwiches this morning, then organized fuel and gear for a couple of hours and then headed up to the coast. We headed NE from the cabin to Pt Mcleod and then worked our way westward to Drew Point checking out the bits and pieces of exposed bluff we could find and also looking for fresh polar bear tracks. Interestingly we can report a few to zero along 10km stretch of coast. We got to our DP-1 coring site by 2:30. We got everything unpacked from the sled, setup, and started coring. We cored and described until about 6:00pm. We retrieved just shy of 4m in 3.5 hours and also fit in a small late lunch break. We think we got into taberal sediments in the last 20 cms and were excited to core deeper but decided to call it and go fiddle with one of the remote camera stations. We got back to the cabin by 8:00pm and made a jambalaya dinner. Good good first 48 hours on the tundra. We're thinking it will only go up from here. Update you all more tomorrow and the next days. We're planning on coring all day tomorrow with the SIPRE system. If we get to 6m that will be good and then we'll switch systems to go deeper the following day. Here's a few photos from the trip so far:
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Teshekpuk Lake Observatory
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