It’s been a busy month. Actually a busy 4 or 5 months when you consider all the time spent with preparations and planning. Since we got to the glacier, I’ve barely had the chance to open any of my stuff sacks let alone change my clothes. So since it was such a clear, warm day, we decided to get clean. Jason headed off early in the morning to conduct our GPS surveys in the middle and lower cirques, while I headed up to old IGY survey spot just above our camp to take pictures. I have photos from Austin Post from this site from 1958, and I have repeated them in the past. I decided to pick a new spot for long term repeat photos, because as best as I can tell, Austin was sitting with his back against a rock bracing the camera with both hands while taking his pictures, and that site is just ...

Today we sent the last of our cores to Fairbanks. Darek had already thankfully prepared the cores for shipment the day before, so it was an easy matter to simply shuttle them down the hill, especially since our camp was now more conveniently located to both locations. It was a beautiful morning, so once Dirk got here we decided to do a little flightseeing and test out my new aerial photography camera. This camera is a 4 inch by 5 inch roll film camera, a Linhof Aerotechnika. They are no longer made, but when new cost more than $40,000, but thankfully not so much on Ebay. The main reason to use such a camera is the resolution – it allows one to use a telephoto lens to cover the same area as a wide angle lens, due the enormous size of the film. That is, the film itself has roughly the same...

For our final drilling effort, I thought it best to camp at our moraine camp and make a 10 minute commute to the site for drilling, but there was considerable objection to this from our drillers, Terry and Bella. At the moment, all of our stuff was spread between six sites on the glacier, and managing this was becoming a considerable burden to Jason and I, and the thought of yet another move after this one, during the scramble of the take-out, was not pleasant. And as we would be here for several more months, we needed to consolidate and assess what else we needed brought in, as the early June take-out would be our only opportunity for this for some time. Our scientific productivity on parts of the project unrelated to drilling was also quite low, for similar reasons. But the idea of a com...

The next morning the drill was lowered to the same depth to continue drilling, but it quickly became apparent that it wasn’t just frozen slush preventing progress last night, but a rock. We lowered the borehole camera down again, and beneath the murky water it was clear that a rock was present at 130 meters depth. Given that this was exactly the depth that our radar measurements predicted, we assumed this to be the bottom. The second hole was finished! A day or two earlier, Jason and I had uncoiled the thermistor string that goes in this hole to straighten it out and help it go down the hole easier, so dropping that down became the next project. I attached a couple large weights to the end to help it drop smoothly, and we got it all the way down without incident. ...