The airport in Kaktovik is not like those found in most cities. There is no TSA, there are no parking meters, and there’s not even a building to wait around in. It’s just a runway on a gravel spit between the ocean and the mainland, with an old hangar and a few shacks around it. When a plane come in, everyone drives their pickup trucks right up to it to get their cargo or passengers. Despite the lack of armed guards and xray machines, we’ve never had a problem with leaving our tons of expensive gear on the side of the runway, sometimes for weeks at a time. Today was a little windy, so we staged our gear in between a large snow berm and an old, unused hangar. We weighed all of our pieces on a bathroom scale and arranged it in a line in more or less the priority in needed to go in.
Bella, wondering how this entire container full of our gear was ever going to make it onto the glacier.
BTIGEAR PANO (coming soon)
Our stuff, sitting on the side of the runway.
Dirk arrived as scheduled, and we lost little time in loading our first flight. Terry and I went in first, figuring that between us we could both set up camp and the coring drill, in case we got stuck in there for an extended period on our own. The flight in was uneventful and soon we were standing on the glacier, where it was warm and calm – perfect weather for sorting gear and getting camp setup. Once Dirk took off, we began sorting through the piles of cargo that we had deposited several weeks earlier and digging out what we needed first.
The first order of business was getting the snow machine running. We have never used a snow machine here before, but without a helicopter to place our loads exactly where we needed them, we needed some mechanized way to transport the tons of material we had. It started up fine, and I drove it several kilometers away to first camp site to set a route and check the conditions. Everything seemed fine, so I returned for a load to haul up there. This time, however, the machine seemed to lose power on the way up, such that I had to dump part of the load. I returned back to our cache and changed the spark plug, which seemed to help, so I tried it again. This time I again lost so much power that I couldn’t even drive it downhill. Considering the amount of gear we had to move, and that we had no backup for the snowmachine, I began to feel a mild panic. I changed to my final spark plug and made it back to the cache. This time I pulled off the carburetor and changed to a smaller jet. This seemed to have solved the problem thankfully. It seems the thinner air was making the mixture too rich and fouling the plugs. I think it continued to run a little rich and lacked full power, but we were operating at 7000 feet so I guess some loss of power is to be expected, and for the most part it continued to perform well throughout the day.
We got five loads in total with the Beaver on the first day of the put-in. Each load carried about a thousand pounds, and typically we ran them with one person in the front seat and the rear of the plane loaded with gear up to the roof. Beaver’s have a surprisingly high internal volume, and we were able to make fairly efficient use of the space. On the last flight of the day, the remaining crew in Kaktovik sent in five cheeseburgers from Waldo’s for us to snack on, which was greatly appreciated. By midnight we had a number of tents setup, dug some essential gear out of our over-winter cache, and had a fairly functional and secure camp.
Burgers, mmmm….
The weather held out the next day, and we got our final two flights in by 11AM. Now all of our gear and personnel were on the glacier, which was a great relief and a remarkable achievement. There were rumours of a change in weather coming, so the priority now was to get all of our camp gear and drilling gear up to our camp site.
The major issue with transporting gear from our ski-way to our camp site is that there were several steep hills to climb to get the gear in place, and changing snow conditions throughout the day made this more or less difficult. Taking smaller loads in the sled was easy solution (though requiring more loads), but this was not a possibility for our winch sled which weighed 550 pounds as a single piece. I tried moving this early in the morning while the snow was still hard on the well packed trail, but could not make it up the final hill. Not being able to get that winch up the final hill was a fairly major cause of concern, since it is absolutely required for running the coring drill, which was the purpose of this part of the expedition. In the end, it took 4 people pulling with ropes along with the snow machine to make it up the final hill. I “drove” the machine, which basically meant I held the throttle wide open while putting my weight as far forward as I could to keep the skis on the ground, then bounced up and down to add traction to the drive track without letting it bury itself. Everyone else pulled (and occasionally ran when we made progress), but mostly tried to keep from getting run over. We took frequent rests. But with that done, the crux of the move had been past, and by that evening we had the drill more or less set-up and camp pretty cozy.
Taking a break from hauling the winch sled up the last hill.