Drilling progress slowed substantially with an improvement in the weather, then stopped completely as we focused on staying alive during a storm. The past few days had been overcast, with no direct sun. With the sun out in full force yesterday, snow began melting on the core barrel and then re-freezing again once it was lowered back in the hole where it was colder. This is problematic because when the core barrel gets stuck in the outer section, the core can be damaged when trying to extract it. So we decided to stop work in the early afternoon and start again at 5AM before the sun came up. At dinner time, the wind had picked up a bit, and continued to grow stronger through the evening. By 3AM, it had intensified quite a bit, and I began to be concerned about the integrity of our tents. At 4AM, I was outside trying to secure boxes that had tumbled over in the 40 knot gusts I was measuring on my handheld anemometer. Once I gathered up things that we’re blowing around, I added some additional guy lines to our large cooktent to keep it in place before turning my attention to our outhouse tent. This tent was “designed” for ice fishing, so was tall enough to stand in but not very wide and had no floor to facilitate fishing (and other things…). So it was great at catching the wind, but had little reinforcement for tying down to the ground. This tent was provided by NSF’s logistical contractor and I had never taken a close look at it until this storm, but was somewhat shocked to see it was only held down by four pieces of string. I began piling some boxes on the upwind side of it to divert the wind long enough that I could find some additional rope, but as my back was turned I heard the high pitched snap of the strings in an extra strong gust, and by the time I turned my head the tent was already 10 meters away. Within a few seconds it was probably 300 meters away, being blown up the slope of the glacier and over a ridge into the next cirque. It was at this point I realized that our entire supply of toilet paper, which had been stored in the same tent, was now sitting in the snow in front of me, exposed to the same wind that was now trying to knock me off my feet. I saw the foam toilet seat go first and made a running dive into the snow after it, trapping it under my body. The bags of paper came next, but fortunately I was already downwind of them and I was able to pin them against my body too. The wind was pretty gusty, with frequent periods of brief calm, and in one of these I gathered everything together and jammed it into the cooktent or under something heavy. With the main tents secured or blown away, I walked down to the other sleeping tents. Darek’s vestibule was already shredding with a broken pole, and Terry’s was about to do the same, and I got them out of bed to deal with it. About this time, the others were starting to emerge from their tents, as we had planned a 5AM wakeup for drilling, and we spent the rest of the morning building more snow walls and adding more tie-downs. I think we were all back in bed by about 8AM, and by noon it was calm and sunny, pleasant weather for digging camp out of the drifts.
Outside.
Inside.
Anything can be turned into a game, even the tent lifting off the ground in the wind.
Despite the somewhat desperate circumstance (and reminder to secure camp before going to bed), it’s storms like these that form the glacier into the shape that its in. I had never seen the wind come from this direction before (from the north east, though it may actually be coming from the west aloft and being turned around within this part of the valley) but it does seem to explain the distribution of snow that we are familiar with here, with thin to zero snowpacks on the eastern side of the cirque, thickening to the west. Snow drifting and wind packed snow are likely dominant mechanisms of accumulation on this tiny glacier (similar to avalanche accumulation along the edges). In May 2003 we noticed a similar phenomenon, where strong 60mph+ winds come from the south and scoured the eastern side of the main valley down to ice and deposited it on the western side. Many have noted this distribution of snow throughout the years here, and most attributed it to the shading of the large western wall. But to the four of us who spent 5 hours skiing up glacier into that wind watching this process, it became clear that wind redistribution of snow is an important process on McCall Glacier.
These tents were placed on the surface, but due to wind drifting during the storm you have to step down into them.
The drill got drifted in a bit too. Fortunately the drill hole was covered…
