Sublimity…

Today started bright and early for me (litterally) as we had a fire alarm at 4:15am, and with sunrise occuring at around 2:30am these days (sunset around 12:00am) it was truely bright and early. I thought my days of fire drills were behind me after I left rez, but apparently not. My first thought when I heard the buzzer was “Damn, that’s a fire alarm”, quickly followed by “nah, it’s just some stupid alarm clock” (it was more of a buzzing sound than most fire alarms I’ve heard). However, when it wouldn’t shut up, I grudgingly admitted that it likely was a fire alarm, so I threw on some clothes and ran out to the muster point. Everyone was there milling around, so it certainly was an alarm. we spent half an hour milling around trying to figure out exactly where we should be and who we needed to check in with (all those safety breifings allowed us to know generally what we were supposed to do, and where to go, but it turned out that the exact place we were supposed to meet had moved. An example of both the important and annoyance of those breifings). Eventually they let us back in, turned out to be an oversensitive sensor I think, and I managed to grab a few hours more sleep before breakfast. Trystan’s tip of putting a t-shirt over your eyes saved me, it was so bright out that I doubt I would have been able to fall asleep even with the blinds closed without the shirt.

451I spent the afternoon moseying along an esker that meandered over the tundra 50km north of Snap Lake. We spent the morning dismantling a POLARIS station at the site, but it only took us 2.5hrs to take everything down and get it ready for the chopper to sling it back to Snap Lake, but the chopper itself can only take 800lbs per load and can only do about 50km/hr when slinging gear before the load starts to sway too much, so getting all the gear back took 4 sling loads which meant a whole day of flying for the pilot. The problem is that someone has to be on the ground to attach the load to the chopper, and the chopper can’t take people while slinging gear, so it also boiled down to the fact that although we finished working at 12:30, we didn’t leave the site until 5:30. In the beginning I just waited around with the gear figuring I shouldn’t go too far from base (there are bears in the area apparently) but after awhile, the bugs really started to get to me (they were pretty bad, thank goodness for the bug jackets & gloves), and the urge to explore overcame any safety concerns, so I started to wander around. The result: I’ve decided that the barren lands were aptly named. I came up with the following little Haiku-esque poem to try and describe the place:

“Naught but bones of rock and beast
buzzing insects and the gentle breeze
the barren lands at peace”

425There actually were a few true trees in the area, but they were all shorter than I, but beyond that, there was little to break the horizon. The land was about 1/3rd water (lakes & rivers), 1/3rd grasses and low willows and the final 1/3rd was lichen encrusted rock. This stretched as far as the eye could see (which was pretty far), with some gently rolling hills to break up the horizon, but even they were small, and so the sky was huge. The esker ran right across this landscape like a big sandy river, but in truth was more like a road as it provided a nice easy walking tail across the otherwise rocky or swampy terrain. The views were amazing at first, but after awhile, you realized that the whole region pretty much looks the exact same, and so it lost some of it’s magic. Millions of square kilometers of barren lands, stretching from the tree line to the Arctic Ocean, from the MacKenzie River to Hudson Bay. It’s a bit scary just to think about it, let alone contemplaet what it would feel like to be out in it without a helicopter to come pick you up at the end of the day. I found a couple of caribou antlers and lots of smaller pieces of broken bones, but the most interesting part for me was the rocks (no surprise). 415They’re all pretty old, about 2.5 – 3 billion years old, and they show their age. Covered in lichens, highly foliated, jointed and altered, they truely look old and broken, and stick up out of the ground in sheets at old angles with sharply defined flat edges. Many are horizontally jointed and so are cut up into blocks, some still standing in tower/pyramid structures, while most have toppled to create vast areas of rockfield. Especially after finding the antlers, these rockfields brought to mind the word “bonefields”. If rocks could die, this is what it would look like. It was an awesome place and I’m really glad I was able to get out here and see it (it seemed somewhat surreal to consider the fact that I am in a very remote corner of the NWT, so far from everything I’m used to) however, as I said above, the land soon lost it’s beauty to homogenity, and the constant annoyance of the bugs reached a climax, so we were all very glad when the chopper finally came in one last time, buzzed us and then circled tight to pick us up. Another long day in the field done.

Tomorrow we will take down the third and final station in this area, though there are still a few more sites we need to visit for maintenance, and we need to spend some time packing all this gear we’ve brought in from the field, so I imagine we’ll be here in Snap Lake for another 3-4 days. Then it’s back to Yellowknife to catch a plane to another site that we need to take down, and may then need to spend a few more days doing maintenance on other sites before heading back to Ottawa. We seem to be on schedule, but I don’t really know what the schedule is (especially after Snap), so who knows. And never forget, just becuase the weather has cooperated wonderfully so far doesn’t mean it’s going to stay that way…

More to come later, for now I’m off to finish my book. Glad I brought two; while the camp here at Snap has everything you can expect for where it is, there still isn’t a whole lot of stuff to do in the evenings. This is now done

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 17th, 2005 at 8:14 pm and is filed under Arctic, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.