The Anaktuvuk River Fire

For the past two days my workday consisted of a daily commute by helicopter to the Anaktuvuk river valley where in 2007 a large tundra fire burned from mid July until the end of September. From the ground the burned area spreads in every direction as far as the eye can see, all 250 thousand acres of it.

For two days as we rode to our destination I looked down upon the earth's skin. Every wrinkle and fold, vein and artery, was made visible from that elevation: spines of protruding rock, gushing rivers, lakes and ponds and pools dotting the tundra like a never-ending golf course, ice wedge polygons fracturing the velvety green with thin reddish clay gashes, slopes of wave-like vegetation that from above resemble lumps of melted green wax. Some terrain resembled alligator skin: green, hexagonal, disturbingly alive like the hide of a living being.

The burn site itself is now largely covered in vegetation, but the burned black ground still shows beneath. Walking on burned tundra is even harder than unburned, the tussocks protrude even more to trip you up as you lug your gear and survival bags to your point of origin to being the day of measuring and sampling plot by plot.

Mosquitoes: More than you want to know

If you are going to be out on the tundra in midsummer, a mosquito net is not only necessary but vital. Mosquitoes are swarming all over the tundra this time of year, and there are several options for protective gear. One is to go with a simple mesh net with a wide brim that covers the head. This is great if you just want face protection, but it does nothing to stop them from biting you through your clothes or on your bare hands. For full upper body protection nothing beats the Bug Shirt--a pullover made of a tightly woven synthetic fabric that the proboscis of a mosquito can't penetrate. It also features a cleverly constructed zippered mesh face net and long, adjustable elastic sleeves to cover your wrists and hands. My bug shirt works wonderfully and also provides a bit of thermal insulation on cool days (arctic mosquitoes seem to be just as happy to suck your blood at 40 degrees Fahrenheit as at 60). To complete my ensemble and protect my hands I usually wear a pair of neoprene lab gloves and, as you can see from the thumbnail image, I look like a spaceman! Besides the bug shirt's zero style factor, its other chief drawback is that in hot weather (namely, July 2009 on the North Slope) you roast inside it like a chicken in an oven bag. The other drawback is its limited vision. But you adjust, and go about your days looking out at this remote, vast and uniquely beautiful landscape essentially through a black veil.

The other day I was up slope collecting samples and I decided that with the abundant sunshine and cool breezes the mosquitoes weren't such a problem, and I was dying for some ventilation, so I unzipped the head net and cast aside my veil.

I looked around me, and suddenly realized I could see every contour of every leaf for quite a distance with a clarity I can only describe as hallucinatory. Every blade of grass and each leaf and petal stood out in perfectly razor sharp relief all around me for acres and acres. It was like I suddenly had Superman vision!

Before long the wind calmed and the mosquitoes once again found me and began to glom onto me like a bunch of groupies trailing a famous celebrity. Alas, I was just some warm body in a khaki colored mosquito shirt spending the summer in Alaska. I zipped my veil back up and went back to my collecting.

Today I called my family on my computer using Skype, and I was able to take them on a tour of Toolik camp. It was fun to talk to all of them, my dad, stepmom, sister and her boyfriend, and my two younger brothers. I borrowed a pair of earphones from a friend and was able to hear everyone's voice so clearly. I had a camera in my laptop that allowed them to see pictures as I tramped around camp holding the laptop, and I could picture all of them all gathered around my sister's computer though I could not see them. We chatted for about a half hour, and I hated to say goodbye. Luckily the camp was quiet today due to so many people out on hikes, but after we said goodbye I had to have a moment in the wash house to wipe my eyes. I had recently been offered a year long position in Fairbanks, and my husband and I decided I should take it, so we announced to our families about a week ago that we are moving to Fairbanks in early September. My folks were surprised and also thrilled at the news, and said to me today: You sound like you really love it up there. And so I do. But I also realized how great my family is and how much I am going to miss them.

My girlfriend had warned me that I would fall in love with Alaska the way you fall in love with a lover. It's completely true--I would do anything to make this relationship work! And already I can see it's an unequal partnership: Alaska says jump and I jump. It will turn beastly cold and dark after the middle of September so I will be flying home to my husband at the end of August to pack our things and rent a vehicle to drive across the vastness of North America together to begin our new life in Fairbanks.

Time is going by much faster than I thought it would.

Sometimes it's a shame to go to bed on a beautiful sunny arctic evening. Summer up here is so short, you just want to savor it as much as you can.
For the first few nights I counted the days I would see my husband instead of counting sheep. Now I'm counting the hours in the day hoping I have enough time to get everything done! We typically work 10 to 14 hour days, and some people probably work more. It just becomes natural when there's 24 hours of daylight: it's hard to explain but you just don't feel as tired when it's 10 PM and the sun is shining over the lake and the mountains are glowing to the southeast and songbirds are flying about and the yellow billed loon pair that lives here are singing their weird, wolflike duet as they glide over the water like an old married couple taking an evening stroll together. On such evenings the grad students and REUs are kicking up the dust of the camp pad in shorts and tee shirts playing a lively game of soccer in front of the lab trailers, and some people usually end up the next day wearing bandages or duct tape on their glasses.

Two days ago our beautiful 70 degree weather was washed away by cloudy skies and a strong gale that hammered away at the tents early in the morning. The wind was so strong it shook the platform under my bed, and I scrambled to look out the window and saw the through the curtains of rain that the ground around our tent city was covered in a few inches of water. It subsided, but ever since the weather has been chilly, rainy and foggy. The flowers that were so profuse and colorful have begun to fade, and were coated in droplets of bright cold water that reminded me of October in Chicago. I took my camera while collecting samples and tried to capture images of the droplets covering the foliage like tiny diamonds, and I realized how much I love it here, rainy or foggy or bright and sunny, windy or still and humming with mosquitoes.

We have not seen the mountains for the last 48 hours. The valley has been ringed by thick clouds that look like they are touching the green tundra just a few hundred feet away. When you can see the Brooks Range it is probably going to be a decent day. In about seven days the sun will begin to drop behind the horizon and we will have a taste of the long darkness to come.

Prudhoe Bay: Are We There Yet?

Yesterday I was lucky enough to find myself in a van with 10 journalists headed due north of camp to Prudhoe Bay. The journalists came to Toolik as part of a two-week Polar Science Fellowship administered through the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. One of the journalists had an interview scheduled at Toolik that day and gave up her seat on the tour, and I happened to be walking by just as she was trying to figure out what to do about the open spot. The next morning I had a seat in the tour van which left camp about 8 am and took the haul road north to the Sagavanirktok ("Sag") River valley and on to the Arctic coastal plain. It was a clear sunny morning, and the colors of the sky and mountains against the bright green tundra was almost hallucinogenic; before long we began to see all kinds of wildlife along the road: herds of caribou, a couple of moose, a short-eared owl, some jaegers and gulls, a snowy owl, several tundra swans and Canada geese, a golden eagle, a few snow buntings, and finally, at our destination, a plastic goose decoy at the checkpoint gate to the Arctic Ocean.

Prudhoe Bay is run by British Petroleum in partnership with ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips. The entire area consists of the oilfields and the adjacent unicorporated town of Deadhorse, which is where the housing and medical facilities for the workers are located, plus a couple of hotels for the tourists: the Caribou Inn and the Prudhoe Bay Hotel. This part of the world very graphically illustrates the dichotomy of the manmade and the natural: onto a vast and primal and poorly understood landscape have been thrust all manner of pipes and wells and buildings and construction rigs, retention ponds and bridges and all the stuff that humans must have in order to lead a life powered by fossil fuels; if you already feel bad about driving your car, the sight of tundra swans and caribou in the shadow of these things will hurt. The irony is that you need a fossil fuel powered vehicle to see it. Even more ironic, a gallon of gas in Deadhorse is $4.00. You would think there would be some kind of Arctic Mafia up here with secret spigots tapping into the mother load all fresh from the well and all but it doesn't work like that. The oil travels the length of Alaska, gets loaded onto barges in Valdez to a refinery, and probably has traveled half the world and seen more and done more in most people's lifetimes before it gushes into the gas tank of your average Alaskan. This rather complicated extraction process more or less was explained in an informational video we were obliged to see at the Caribou Inn at the start of the official tour, where each of us had to present our ID to the driver before we could be allowed to board the tour bus. It is informally known as the "blue valve tour" because halfway through you stop to take pictures of the rigs and a blue Schlumberger valve known as a Christmas Tree. Another stop featured a Halliburton facility where it was allowed that we could take a photograph of the Halliburton sign, complete with gold painted rocks sitting on the pavement below the signpost. I believe Dick Cheney sent those up, our driver commented. Were there any shotgun shells in them? one of us asked.

The tour includes driving through a checkpoint that officially tells you you have left Deadhorse and are now on the oil refinery side of things, right on the Arctic Ocean; in fact, the tour officially encourages visitors to remove their shoes and dip a toe into the ocean, just to be able to tell the folks back home that they did. I rolled up my jeans past my knees and briefly felt the combined painful sting of the cold water and sharp pebbles. A couple of the hardier souls in our group actually stripped to their swimsuits and took a dive. In fact, one of the journalists as I recall stripped off her bathing suit top and dove into the water half naked. I thought to myself: does she do that at every beach she visits or just the Arctic ones? But I have to say it was brave. The driver later presented each of us who wanted one a signed certificate from the Polar Bear Dippers Club. In retrospect I felt a little silly accepting it on my half-hearted effort.

Before heading back to Toolik we decided to stop for coffee at the Prudhoe Bay Hotel. The driver had mistakenly told us there was a Starbucks there, and I was dying for some. Boy were we disappointed. It was the same setup as the Caribou Inn: dingy cafeteria and giftshop, plastic flowers, coffee served in white styrofoam cups. But it was free.

On the return trip we stopped a couple of times along the Franklin Bluffs, a formation of colorful sandstone cliffs that stretches north to south along the Sag River. The later stop was to scope out some distant musk oxen and skip the colorful stones into the water. The earlier stop had a very different purpose. Several of the journalists and scientists had gotten together in camp the day before to form an impromptu dance troupe whose goal was to perform the steps to Michael Jackson's Thriller. The news of his death came just as quickly to Toolik as to every other corner of the world. So this makes me wonder now if there are people in remote Mongolian villages as well practicing claw, claw, step step step clap, shimmy? The goal of the earlier stop was so that the journalists could practice and film what they hoped was the most northerly performance of Thriller ever. I stood on the edge of the Dalton with our designated video cameraman and snapped photos of the performance which wasn't bad considering the audience consisted of four humans and about 100 caribou.

And as tonight is the journalists' last in camp, they and several scientists got together out in front of the dining hall, about two dozen strong, for a full dress performance. The costumes consisted of mosquito veils, bug shirts, and xtra tuff insulated rubber boots. The backdrop consisted of the Brooks Range in late evening sunlight. Even without sound, after a minute or two you could figure out that it was the moves to Thriller. It was quite something to see. I wished I had been there for the first rehearsal to learn the steps. But I tend to find myself sometimes running to keep up with the energy around here. It has taken me until 12:15 am to finish this post. Like Alice, just when I think I've got it something new comes along and leaves me a bit bewildered. Did I ever think I would come to the North Slope to see a performance of Thriller? God no! But as someone here told me not long after I got here, everyone's a bit mad.

It was a MASH episode today.

The helicopter broke, so no one could get in or out to the combat zones. That meant the dining hall was extra noisy and crowded for lunch, but at least the pilot got to eat a hot meal for a change. He had flown 37 separate missions the day before someone said. No wonder the damn thing is broken another said. What about spare parts? another said. The nearest spare part is probably 400 miles away came the reply.

Then in the middle of lunch there was a temporary power outage, and everyone fell silent. But Radar knew what to do, the power went back on, and the doctors and interns resumed their wisecracks.

The end.

Oh and I almost forgot:

The Michael Jackson Memorial Dance is tonight in the meeting hall.

O the Endless Days, O the Grizzlies!

In just a few short hours the summer solstice is upon us. The sun never sets at this latitude from May 26 to July 17, so there is really no "longest day" this far north. I arrived June 9, and ever since I've been here each night has looked either like a sunset or sunrise when clear or like a very dim late winter afternoon when cloudy. It hasn't been difficult for me to fall asleep either; there's a three hour time difference between Alaska time and CST, and my body would just start to poop out at about 7 pm for the first week.

There are many young folks here, undergraduates, grad students and post-docs, and they seem to have no trouble staying up into the wee hours and showing up for breakfast at 7:30. Mealtimes are strict here: if you miss the meal service the kitchen staff are kind enough to put leftovers in the fridge which you can microwave. One of the best kept secrets about Toolik: the dining hall head cook is a former haute cuisine chef, and we have some of the best meals! There is always fresh fruit and a tossed salad, the dressings are homemade, and there is always dessert. But not just poundcake and a few tollhouse cookies. Oh, no. The other night we had steaming hot berry cobbler with home made vanilla ice cream. That was the night the chef served pasta with steamed mussels, scallops and shrimp. Friday is usually steak night and our chef prepares rare, medium, and well done steaks, and there is always a vegetarian option and now even vegan options. I thought I was going to lose weight this summer with all the physical exercise, but I've actually put on a few pounds. It's partly because the food is so amazing, and also partly because the weather can go from a very pleasant 60 degrees fahrenheit to about 35 degrees up on the slopes above camp when a chilly fog wafts in from the Arctic Plain. You never want to be out working on an empty stomach because you can start shivering in no time, so a bacon and egg breakfast with biscuit and sausage gravy is the way to go. Unless you're a vegan or vegetarian, for whom a hot bowl of cream of wheat or oatmeal with real maple syrup can be a great tummy warmer. Or the blueberry whole-grain pancakes. Jeeze, I'm getting hungry already. And tonight was lasagne with marinara sauce, caesar salad, and chocolate hazelnut torte for dessert. You would think there would be more bears hanging around camp than there are (total observed bear sightings to date: zero).

Oh yeah, bear mace. Part of the normal daily equipment you're supposed to carry into the field strapped to your belt is a canister the size and color of a small fire extinguisher printed with the words: "Counter Assault Grizzly Tough Pepper Spray." It has a safety like a fire extinguisher, and like a fire extinguisher, should never be deployed except in the event of an actual emergency. Bear attacks are usually prefaced by the bear charging at you full speed. In addition to the real ones there are supposedly "bluff charges" in which the bear supposedly stops just short of reducing you to a small greasy spot on the ground and backs off. I guess the bluff charge is distinguished by the fact that you can actually live to tell someone about it.

In all seriousness I had a very good talk about bears with our resident EMT. When he's not bandaging wounds and saving lives at Toolik he lives in the Kenai Peninsula with his wife and children (the Kenai Peninsula is about 150 miles as the crow flies from Katmai National Park where Timothy Treadwell got eaten by a bear). I asked him if he ever saw a bear on his property and he replied: All the time. I asked if they were ever a problem and he said they weren't but he's taught his teen-aged daughter to use a 12-gauge shotgun just in case (since she is also here I asked her if this is true and she confirmed that it is. And since she's no longer a teenager it is probably a pretty good thing her father taught her). Goosebumps aside, he explained that my fear of being attacked by bears is about as rational as an Alaskan's fear of being attacked by a mugger while visiting Chicago. I've lived in Chicago my entire life and (fortunately) have never been mugged. So there you go. Alaskans don't freak out about bears any more than the average Chicagoan would freak out about being mugged. I don't go out of my way to visit a mugger's natural habitat either, nor do I accidentally bump into the mugger in a dark alley, or walk around with my purse hanging open to tempt a mugging, or leave my door unlocked for him to sneak in. And therefore I've never felt the need to carry a gun. But apparently in Alaska, as careful as you may be about not leaving food out, avoiding surprising them, etc--the shotgun, the bear mace--you have to carry them. Just in case.

Walking on the tundra

is a little like walking on wet sea sponges. You're not supposed to walk on the vegetation around camp, because the wear and tear damages the insulating layer and causes the soil to warm which melts the permafrost beneath and changes the soil and thus the plants that depend on it, so the scientists here have built a network of what they call boardwalks around the camp. The boardwalks extend from camp up the hillsides where various experimental plots have been set up. This is not the same boardwalk sung about so melodiously by the Drifters or fought over in the game of Monopoly. Not by a mile. This boardwalk is a bunch of two by fours or two by sixes or if you're really lucky, two by eights nailed together on little stilts, some of which are even with the ground and some of which are a foot or more above it. There's also an aluminum bridge without rails that sits about five feet above a little creek that flows into the lake. I had to cross the bridge fully loaded with backpack and various equipment in both hands twice a day and try not to lose my balance or faint. The first time I thought I was going to fall over, especially since it had rained and the little creek was more of a raging creek. For the first week I was dreading it, especially when I was following a line of people, because the weight of their footsteps made it extra bouncy, and it only made things worse whenever I looked down. I would get to the other end with my heart racing, trying to keep up my end of the conversation as the person in front of me merrily bounded along telling a story. By the middle of the second week (basically yesterday) I crossed for the first time without the butterflies in my stomach and sweaty palms.

The tundra is basically a mat of vegetation composed of different species that grow together in different combinations or communities. Plant scientists here want to study the effects that global warming may have on the tundra by simulating changes in temperature, light and nutrient content of the soil. They also study the effect of species removal of certain plants from the community to see if any particular species take over. "Species removal" is basically weeding for science. You have to squat over a small plot surrounded by these boards and remove certain plants that are growing inside the plot. To get in the middle of each plot you have to kneel over an aluminum ladder bridge not unlike the one I nearly fell off every morning to get to the plots. Fortunately the ladder bridges are only a few inches over the plots. Some plants can be chopped at the perimeter with pruners, others have to be hand plucked. Moss especially was hard, some plots practically required tweezers. I had moss dreams soon after that. Did I mention there are over 100 plots (that they've told me about so far)? But this is the nature of science: to gather and interpret results from a suite of controlled and replicated experiments, in this case over a period of many years. So there is a lot of grunt work involving hauling lots of things around like plastic bags, garden tools, bags of plant material, buckets of fertilizer, plus all your raingear, bugspray, sack lunch, sunscreen, and of course your mosquito shirt. By now you must know that Alaska is famous for its mosquitoes. More on that later. Oh, and remind me to tell you about the bear mace.