Day 5
10/31/04
10:13 PM
Olympus Range, Mt. Boreas
So we’re in the field. This is day 5. I finally got a chance to warm this thing up. I guess it's Halloween. I wrote about the first few days by hand. I am starting to fall into the routine. Wake up at 8, eat breakfast, get warm, go out in the field, eat lunch, work until 7 or 8, eat dinner, go to bed.
I’m in the tent right now after a pretty good day. We now have a stove in our tent to help dry our wet clothes and warm things up before bed. It is a luxury. Those first few nights were brutal. The stove makes a huge difference. It is probably 70 or 80° at the top of our tent, while the floor is still at -5° F. We don’t have a tent floor. Our tents came from Marble Point, which is a small refueling and storage camp and apparently they forgot to check the tents for floors. So there is just snow and rocks beneath our cots with the tent sleeve between them as a floor. It’s actually not too bad.
The mornings are definitely the worst. It is so hard to get out of a warm sleeping bag to a freezing cold tent. There is frost everywhere inside – on the walls, on hanging socks, on sleeping bags, on pillows. But again, I’m getting used to it. So far I am satisfied. The cold sucks at times, but other times I don’t even notice it. I’m definitely getting tougher, both mentally and physically. Mentally is more important here. It actually feels pretty good. I feel as though I am doing something healthy for myself.
As ar as the science goes, things have been going slow. Yesterday, Adam and I found a continuous layer of fossil mosses in some lake deposits near our camp. He things they are over 14 million years old and indicate that there was a time period before then when climate conditions in the Dry Valleys were warm enough to allow the mosses to grow. We have been digging pits and trenches into hillsides to find the stuff and search for ash layers to obtain dates or glacial tills to obtain stratigraphic information. The first pit I dug yesterday had the mosses. We stopped immediately and sampled them. We started carefully brushing like archaeologists around the mosses and realized that they were continuous. We became less and less careful as our pit extended for over 20 meters. It was pretty incredible and very exciting. This is all unknown. I love science.
The digging part sucks, but at the same time, I am enjoying it. It makes me feel satisfied with myself, like I’m doing real work for a change. I am getting stronger at the same time.
Also getting pretty dirty with all of this digging. It’s been 6 days so far. I’m starting to smell, especially after the mountain climbing session the other day. Hair is pretty greasy.
Today was a relatively easy day. It was windy and there is still a lot of snow on the ground, so we couldn’t get much done out in the field. I dug a few trenches and then Adam sent me off to look for more lake deposits. I didn’t find any, but got a chance to walk a few miles away around the valley. It is beautiful out here. It was especially cold in the morning, considering the wind chill. It’s all relative at this point. No matter what the wind is doing, it is fucking cold. Dinner tonight was spanish rice. We ate early, like around 7. We had a few beers (after cooking them on the stove) and laughed a lot. Kate was drinking screwdrivers and Adam said something about Kate rubbing spanish rice all over her busom. It became a theme for the night. We decided that rice was way down on the list of things to rub on breasts. I said gravy was #4. They joked that my top 10 would all involve some sort of butter or butter product. We listened to Kenny Rogers and then I got my iPod for some James Brown. High spirits. And another day over. I’m getting pretty cold. It is amazing how much colder it gets when the sun goes down. Every night at about 10 PM it dips behind Mt. Boreas, each day a few minutes later. It looks like the battery on this thing will do better than I had imagined, so I will probably be able to write when I’m not too tired. Unfortunately, the solar power charging system isn’t working, so once I run out of juice, I’ll have to wait until we’ve got generators in Beacon Valley. It is going to be weird with 4 new people out here. Especially since two of them are Jim and Dave. I give it a week and then it will be just like it is with the four of us now. Maybe with a little less crudeness.
Camp. The tent in the foreground is the cooktent and the others are for sleeping. The pinkish one is mine (and Doug's). The mountain in the background is Mt. Aureas (sp). It is deceptively far away. The wooden boxes in front of the tent are the food/rock boxes.
I really like this picture of Mt. Boreas. The contrast with the blue sky is so crisp. It just towers over our camp.
10:13 PM
Olympus Range, Mt. Boreas
So we’re in the field. This is day 5. I finally got a chance to warm this thing up. I guess it's Halloween. I wrote about the first few days by hand. I am starting to fall into the routine. Wake up at 8, eat breakfast, get warm, go out in the field, eat lunch, work until 7 or 8, eat dinner, go to bed.
I’m in the tent right now after a pretty good day. We now have a stove in our tent to help dry our wet clothes and warm things up before bed. It is a luxury. Those first few nights were brutal. The stove makes a huge difference. It is probably 70 or 80° at the top of our tent, while the floor is still at -5° F. We don’t have a tent floor. Our tents came from Marble Point, which is a small refueling and storage camp and apparently they forgot to check the tents for floors. So there is just snow and rocks beneath our cots with the tent sleeve between them as a floor. It’s actually not too bad.
The mornings are definitely the worst. It is so hard to get out of a warm sleeping bag to a freezing cold tent. There is frost everywhere inside – on the walls, on hanging socks, on sleeping bags, on pillows. But again, I’m getting used to it. So far I am satisfied. The cold sucks at times, but other times I don’t even notice it. I’m definitely getting tougher, both mentally and physically. Mentally is more important here. It actually feels pretty good. I feel as though I am doing something healthy for myself.
As ar as the science goes, things have been going slow. Yesterday, Adam and I found a continuous layer of fossil mosses in some lake deposits near our camp. He things they are over 14 million years old and indicate that there was a time period before then when climate conditions in the Dry Valleys were warm enough to allow the mosses to grow. We have been digging pits and trenches into hillsides to find the stuff and search for ash layers to obtain dates or glacial tills to obtain stratigraphic information. The first pit I dug yesterday had the mosses. We stopped immediately and sampled them. We started carefully brushing like archaeologists around the mosses and realized that they were continuous. We became less and less careful as our pit extended for over 20 meters. It was pretty incredible and very exciting. This is all unknown. I love science.
The digging part sucks, but at the same time, I am enjoying it. It makes me feel satisfied with myself, like I’m doing real work for a change. I am getting stronger at the same time.
Also getting pretty dirty with all of this digging. It’s been 6 days so far. I’m starting to smell, especially after the mountain climbing session the other day. Hair is pretty greasy.
Today was a relatively easy day. It was windy and there is still a lot of snow on the ground, so we couldn’t get much done out in the field. I dug a few trenches and then Adam sent me off to look for more lake deposits. I didn’t find any, but got a chance to walk a few miles away around the valley. It is beautiful out here. It was especially cold in the morning, considering the wind chill. It’s all relative at this point. No matter what the wind is doing, it is fucking cold. Dinner tonight was spanish rice. We ate early, like around 7. We had a few beers (after cooking them on the stove) and laughed a lot. Kate was drinking screwdrivers and Adam said something about Kate rubbing spanish rice all over her busom. It became a theme for the night. We decided that rice was way down on the list of things to rub on breasts. I said gravy was #4. They joked that my top 10 would all involve some sort of butter or butter product. We listened to Kenny Rogers and then I got my iPod for some James Brown. High spirits. And another day over. I’m getting pretty cold. It is amazing how much colder it gets when the sun goes down. Every night at about 10 PM it dips behind Mt. Boreas, each day a few minutes later. It looks like the battery on this thing will do better than I had imagined, so I will probably be able to write when I’m not too tired. Unfortunately, the solar power charging system isn’t working, so once I run out of juice, I’ll have to wait until we’ve got generators in Beacon Valley. It is going to be weird with 4 new people out here. Especially since two of them are Jim and Dave. I give it a week and then it will be just like it is with the four of us now. Maybe with a little less crudeness.
Camp. The tent in the foreground is the cooktent and the others are for sleeping. The pinkish one is mine (and Doug's). The mountain in the background is Mt. Aureas (sp). It is deceptively far away. The wooden boxes in front of the tent are the food/rock boxes.
I really like this picture of Mt. Boreas. The contrast with the blue sky is so crisp. It just towers over our camp.
posted by LankyPoobah at 10:13 PM
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