With over 150 meters of core sitting chilled in our freezer, it was time to start getting them back to civilization for eventual analysis. Moving this much ice, however, is no minor task. The basic plan was to have Dirk use his Beaver to shuttle loads directly to Fairbanks. Going directly to Fairbanks eliminates issues of the plane breaking down somewhere, but adds extra complication in that the fuel needed for the long flight eats into the available payload for ice. Given this and the uncertainties of snow conditions for taking off with heavy loads, we were planning on only 700-800 pounds per load, substantially less than what we were able to load on our put in flights. When packaged in their protected cardboard tubing, the total weight is about 2800 pounds, so we are looking at 4 flights. Each flight basically takes a full day, to go from Coldfoot to the glacier to Fairbanks and back to Coldfoot, so we are looking at four days minimum to transfer all of the ice, not including bad weather delays and false starts. Once in Fairbanks, where it is now T-shirt weather, the gets transferred from the plane to a pickup truck waiting with insulated boxes to an ice storage facility. This should be the easy part, but as it turns out it has been the most complicated and frustrating. Our logistics contractor had identified what they claimed was the only place in town that would store it, but since they refused to take any responsibility for its well-being over the summer, they made me pay for expenses to make clear they were limiting their liability. My business office, however, tried to set up payment for this for more than 3 weeks while we were coring with over a dozen voice mail and secretary contacts without getting a response from the owner of the facility. When our contractor finally got hold of him again, he said he hadn’t heard anything from UAF yet, at which point I decided this was not the type of guy I want to trust my ice to. So now having 150 meters of ice on ice here, we now had no place to bring it. But by the next day the highly competent INE business office had found a new location that gave everyone the necessary warm fuzzy feeling. So the transfer began about a week later than expected, but the plan seemed sound and we were ready for the transfer.

We began our first try on the 14th with a call to Dirk at 8AM to check weather. It was great here, but unfortunately seemed unstable to the south of us, according to weather satellites and reports. So we continued to make contact throughout the morning, but by 11:30AM we had to call it quits for the day because in civilization works stops around 5PM or so, and it would take at least 6 hours for Dirk to come here, load up the ice, and get back to Fairbanks, weather permitting. It had been a late night before, so we took it easy the rest of the day, staying around camp, and got ready to try it again in the morning.

The next morning it was our turn for bad weather. We had light snow and clouds most of the morning, but by 11AM it appeared to be clearing, and the weather seemed great elsewhere along the route, so we decided to go for it. This time I had also set up a backup plan for temporary storage at UAF in case it got too late for the real place. So Jason, Kristin, Turner and I headed up to our Beaver cache at the skiway to begin making preparations. The new snow made travel quite difficult, as it completely covered our trail, as it had fallen with no wind and coated everything uniformly. The issue here was that bare, slick ice was only a few centimeters below the surface, and the snow machine has no traction on this. So we got stuck frequently along the way. Heading up the final hill with an empty sled was made substantially more difficult by the new snow due to a loss of traction, and heading down with a sled full of 350 pounds of ice was a bit treacherous as the chains acting as a brake under the sled didn’t grab the new snow as well as it used to grab the snow underneath it. But in the end we transferred about 700 pounds to the skiway, were Jason and Kristin labeled it and made it ready for final transfer. Dirk arrived right on time, and we loaded him up. He had brought some rigid foam insulation to make a crude box out of, and I had some blankets to drape over it too. The new snow was a little sticky, and with a full load required a little push from me to get him moving, and we watched as he took off with the first load of ice cores off the glacier. And we watched some more, and some more, and finally he got airborne. The sticky snow made definitely added to the pucker factor. His timing, however, was perfect, as about 20 minutes later the weather came in and a small blizzard picked up and lasted through the evening, dumping 6-8 inches of snow on us before it was through.


We bring the cores down from the upper cirque using the snow machine. Here Kristin and Jason unload them while Dirk and Turner supervise.


Jason and Turner load some ice cores into the Beaver as Dirk pumps fuel.


Some core tubes in their makeshift cold box inside the plane.

That night about 2AM I decided to get up and check on the drilling activities. By now they had reached more than 120 meters, so it seemed they had found a groove. It was a beautiful, warm night and I took the opportunity to take a few panoramas. The midnight sun was lighting up the clouds with pretty pinks and purples, and sunshine was glinting off water on the coastal plain, indicating that breakup was already occurring there. About the time the sun was rising again and the light going flat, the drill came up slushy and the inner barrel froze inside of it, indicating that it was time to start thermal drilling, which was a project for tomorrow. In bed at 4AM, I was up again a few hours later to talk with Dirk about our next load.


One advantage of working the night shift is to see the midnight sun. (Click on the panorama and drag to look around, press Shift to zoom in, Command (Mac) or Control (PC) to zoom out.) Enlarge this panorama

The weather this morning, the 16th, was great everywhere, and Dirk arrived about 11:30AM. The time between making the decision to go for it and Dirk actually arriving is about two and half hours. This may seem like a lot, but it is a frantic frenzy of activity to get the ice ready in this amount of time, at least for just Jason and I, as everyone else is asleep this early. The thick fresh snow made getting up and down the big hill a big chore, and getting the ice out of the freezer singlehandedly without breaking it is also a frustrating affair. Fortunately Dirk came loaded on this trip with a bunch of resupply for us, so the time it took to unload gave Jason more time to package the cores up. The bulk of plane was filled up with equipment we will deploy in August. A group from the University of Southern Mississippi is coming to install a new weather station with traps that will collect pollen throughout the year. Some of the pollen that blows onto the glacier from elsewhere gets trapped in the snow and eventually becomes part of the ice, such that we can use pollen that we find in our ice cores to determine how the climate changed over time, since the type of plants that grow (and release pollen) change with changing climates. So rather than fly the equipment in later in summer on its own flight, we took advantage of an otherwise empty plane on the way in now. Before Dirk took off, this time I tried to pack the skiway down with the snowmachine, but this didn’t seem to help too much as it took him almost the same distance to take off. It being Friday, and civilization expecting weekends off, we planned our next flight for Monday, and I vowed to keep packing the skiway down to help make it slicker for take-offs. Once again Dirks timing was perfect, as within an hour it would not have been possible to land.


The skiway was sticky, so much so that I had to help get the plane moving, and in the process et my first shower in weeks...


Matt: “Next time bring some soap...”