the big blue

(Note from the editor:  the low bandwidth of the Iridium email system can have strange effects as it shuffles data from one satellite to another, then downlinks to servers which may choke up with messages, resulting in emails squirting out of buffers days after they were sent.  That’s what happened with this post, obviously prepared on New Years Day.)

We send a warm hello to all of our faithful blog followers. For most of you, this is a greeting from the future – and from here in the Miller Range, 2014 looks bright and hopeful. We are still without the rest of our field party, and we wait anxiously for good news on that front daily. Because of an already stressed flight schedule from agency cutbacks, plus unforseen aircraft mechanical issues and then bad weather on our 5 or 6 total hours of window for putting in last week, the odds were not in their favor for getting out. But now some other things have fallen into place, so we are crossing our fingers that we’ll be a complete team by this weekend or early next week.

(note from the editor: the field party was completed late yesterday;  this post was prepared 4 days ago.)

In the meantime, we’ve been traversing the wide, beautiful blue ice fields around camp to assess their productivity. Aside from the good fortune of being out in such amazing scenery, with huge swells of blue ice, capped with frothy white sastrugi contorted into unreal sculptures, and with high craggy mountains in the distance, we’ve also been able to find a fair number of meteorites. Some of these, especially out on the blue ice, are large, maybe up to 10 inches or more, and we have found at least one achondrite (from a large planetary body). We have to carefully flag them in case we can’t get back to collect them this year, because we are missing two other key pieces of equipment – our collection kits and the solar panels for charging electronics. So we await the rest of our team to be fully operational here. We fired up our emergency generator last night so that we could send a blog, since it’s been awhile – thanks for checking back. We’ve enjoyed being together very much, and have shared some yummy holiday meals, plus music, in our tents. One nightly ritual we love is to hear readings from Johnny each night. We hear poems by Robert Service about the early Yukon days, and he is reading the journals of Amundsen and Scott, compiled by Roland Huntford. Follow along, if you like. We hope to check back in again soon!

Many thanks to Ralph, Zac, Eric and Dad for the texts and to Amber and Summer for the presents!

A wild New Years Eve party

– posted by Jani  (dated 1 Jan 2014)