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With the drill crew on the night shift, Jason, Kristin, Turner and I tried to keep things moving on the day shift. The morning began mostly by sorting through boxes, trying to organize stuff that had been disorganized by the move (or never organized in the first place). But by lunch time we were all headed up to the Upper Cirque. There we tried to do some ‘final’ sorting of gear for what needed to be left there to support Jason’s studies of internal accumulation and what should be brought to each of the 4 other caches we were now maintaining. The idea of camping near the drill sites seemed like a good one paper, and probably is the best option for the first two holes, but adds a lot of complication in terms of gear management, and therefore greatly reducing our productivity in terms of the other science we need to do. Once things were more or less sorted into piles, I began shuttling them to their destinations with the snow machine, while Kristin and Turner skied down to the Beaver cache to sort out another week’s worth of food.

With most of the gear sorting out of the way, Jason and I then hiked a few loads up to our old moraine camp and continued on up to the weather station on the mountain behind it. The issue here was that our telemetry was not working so well, and we needed to determine whether it was a problem on our end or at the receiving station in Kaktovik. It took more than a hour to climb up to it, picking our way between loose rocks and snow up to our knees, and by the time we got up there our nice sunny day had turned to fog and wind. But it was dry enough to work with electronics and begin troubleshooting the problems. The problem turned out to be something to do with the antenna, though we didn’t spend the time to determine the actual problem with it. This antenna is a radomed yagi, meaning that it’s a yagi style antenna placed in a fiberglass box to keep ice from building up on it. I had it placed on the edge of a cliff and rocked down, so that it had a clear view of the horizon but the wind couldn’t catch it. Probably it somehow filled with spindrift and was packed with ice now. In any case, we hooked up the spare, non-radomed, yagi that we had carried up and found a way to secure it pointing in the right direction, and headed back down the hill.

The trip down the hill went much more quickly, partly because we found some better snow patches to slide down and partly because we were cold and hungry at 9PM. We still had some more GPS work to do and some more gear shuttling between caches, but by 10PM we were back in camp and eating a nice dinner of pasta and meatballs, with the aural ambience provided by the 5 KW generator powering the drill.