The Beginnings of Field Site Setup
Justin and Josh disconnect our outhouse from our Pisten Bully out at our candidate field site. (photo: Peter Kimball)
A few of us went our to our first-choice candidate field site today. We’ll need to do some exploring under the ice with Sunfish before we can call it our “for sure” field site. The plan today was to watch the drillers put in a 48″ access hole, position a fish hut over the hole, and then deploy Sunfish. It was quite cold again today, though, and the drill couldn’t be started. So instead, we accomplished a small chore and dragged our outhouse out to the site. Our expedition’s string of amazing natural phenomena continued today with a beautiful sun dog.
After dropping off the outhouse, we went south of our field site to check on the status of a crack in the ice we saw there during site selection. It’s the tiniest thing on the surface, but it’s a bit scary under the snow. The crack is still small enough to be crossed by our Pisten Bullies, but wouldn’t be crossable (at this location) by snow machines. We’ll have to keep an eye on this when we start doing surface tracking of ARTEMIS later in the season.
Reporting by Peter Kimball