It's official!

Sassafras passed her Canine Good Citizen test today! As a reward, she gets a whole month off of classes!

2 a.m. on a saturday night...

I'm procrastinating walking the dog, anxiously awaiting word from Alaska, and Jen's at a bachelorette party. So, to distract me, here are some pics from last Saturday:
We had a slightly successful yard sale- here are Jen and Mark around mid-afternoon, right before I ditched them to head out to the crazy Ann Arbor Art Fair.
The Ann Arbor Art Fair isn't your typical art & wine. First of all, there's no wine. Secondly, it's actually FOUR art fairs, each separately juried. Mass craziness descends on town for four days. This was one of the more creative booths. Mostly just your typical leather, jewelry, photographs, and tie-dye.

Camping trip

This past weekend, Jen, Sassy, and I went to camping in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Sassy was not amused by the large racoon that tried to eat her food at the campground the first night. She took the first chance she had to tell us how she felt.
Friday was gorgeous- we went to the Munising side of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. We were fairly limited in where we could take the dog, but we still had some spectacular views.

We stopped at Sand Point along the way and discovered Sassy's dislike for the water. We kind of got her to swim in knee-deep water, but it was more like a hop from one leg to the other.

On Saturday, we stuck around Taquamenon Falls where we camped because it was raining buckets in the morning. In early afternoon, we went on a couple short hikes to see the falls. Sassy was quite worried we were going to make her go in that water as well. She was actually more interested in all the people and made friends with a little boy who was glad "she's not one of those biting dogs".

After the Lower Falls, we took a break and went to the Whitefish Point Lighthouse and Shipwreck Museum. Michiganders are big on their shipwrecks. Funny thing, when you try to have a ton of commercial shipping boats go through a narrow channel east of Lake Superior, sometimes they run right into each other.

We went the Upper Falls on our way back from buying more firewood. On our walk back to the parking lot, we decided to take the "nature walk", i.e., the unpaved trail. When we were almost back, we heard two distinct woofs. Couldn't see it and Sassy was oblivious, but it was likely a black bear.

That night, it was hard to start a fire (damp newspaper and damp wood), so I had to take a picture of our hard-won log cabin fire.

We made one last stop in Mackinaw City.

The Goodbye Wave.

I'm not entirely sure what to do with myself, having left Toolik so early in the summer. I suppose I should work on writing my dissertation or something...

Found this on Youtube- Climate change video

4th of July highlights:

Our lab was the traveling circus- complete with lion tamer, lion, painted lady, clown, bearded lady, trapeze walker, and prancing pony. We finally won best float! Annie had constructed the prize: a small replica of the Titanic and an iceberg.

In his most challenging role to date, my advisor dressed up as the mime of our circus.

Secret Reagent man: aka 0.007 uM

Panorama on top of Slope Mtn.

I just finished my last day of field sampling, and look who's eagerly awaiting my return:

Sassafrass!

On top of Slope Mountain...Ashley and I hiked up Slope Mountain this past Sunday- it was one of the only (reasonable) hikes I hadn't gone on yet. On the way up, we got stuck in a huge field of willows up to our heads. The perfect place to live if I was a bear. Luckily, no incidents involving bears, although we did see a pair of Moose. I've never seen them north of Atigun pass that I can recall.

Up at the top, there was an amazing view of the Brooks range, where it turns to run mostly north-south. Ashley was standing on a ledge above a super steep drop when I took this picture. If you look closely, you can see a small glacier along with the haul road and the pipeline.
I'm not that brave and barely peer over the edge. We later climbed on top of those rocks for pictures with a self-timer.
And yes, I'm still doing work this trip. Lots of it. Which is why my updates have not been very frequent. The weather has been great but it's super buggy and the streams are low, the latter being not so great for transplanting bacteria in dialysis bags in streams.
But the fun never ends. Here Alex and Ashley are taping foam onto the handle of the D.I. water bottle. It's been cutting my hand for years whenever I moved it and we finally came up with a solution this year. Necessity is the mother of invention, even if it takes me a few years to figure it out.

Today was my 29th day of sampling the I-series, a watershed of lakes and streams that feed into the main Toolik Lake inlet. It was gorgeous weather again today, although the helicopter battery died and so getting back to camp was interesting, logistically speaking. Here are Byron and Joanna leaving the helicopter at the first site of the day.

We saw lots of wildlife including this super hungry catapillar that mowed this leaf down in the few minutes I placed him there.

This is a lichen known as dead man's finger.

Alex tried to get a tiger moth to climb onto his finger.

This is a type of Rhododendron. We saw quite a few of them at the I-6 headwaters lake.















My two mentors tried to capture it as well.






















Cotton grass, Eriophorum vaginatum, is "flowering" quite proliferately this year. All in all, not a bad day to end my I-series on. 29 days at the age of 29. The lake at sauna never felt so good.

Tomorrow I get to stay behind for the second day and prepare for a crazy, intense experiment I'll be running starting Friday. The fun never ends!

We drove the Husky up to Toolik on last Friday, June 15th. No major fires and very little road work. However, we did have to race a Princess bus to get a quiet spot at the Yukon River Crossing for lunch.










Yesterday (the 18th) was my second field day of the season. Alex and Ashley joined me in a jaunty little adventure surveying all the inlet streams into my study lake, Lake I-8. If all goes well, Ashley will be taking on part of the survey work as part of her REU project, for which I am mentoring her this summer.
It was a great afternoon- we couldn't have asked for better weather and the skeets weren't too bad.

Training all the newbies is going remarkably swift and well. It's going to be hard to leave so early this year, but it's easy when I remember all the fun adventures I have waiting for me back home. Including writing my dissertation, of course.

Before.
and After.

The day before I left for Toolik, my pup, Sassy got her summer haircut. I swear she's half the size she used to be.

With the assistance of my officemate, I discovered the search function here on blogger. We typed in "Toolik" and up popped several personal blogs dealing with research and life at the station- some of which are quite unprofessional. I've known about the dangers of posting online, but I never really considered it to be a problem. However, we found a blog by an employee of a company that deals with many of us at the station where the employee rants about an associate of ours. Now, if it had been me, I know I would make sure that the person's employer knew about this as well as the camp management. It's definitely over the line. If you are going to post something like that, you'd better make sure you know who is reading your blog.

My last night in camp, we had the grand opening of the pub art gallery, with the exhibit "Lost Antlers", complete with wine, cheese, and a piece of performance art. We actually had quite the range, from a line up of mosquito repellant (Safety in numbers) to a quite striking post-modern piece made of rebar, a milk crate, and rounded small rocks.

I was packing like crazy, so I took 15 minutes to bring over some silly things, including pages from a Finding Nemo coloring book several of us colored last year. It was a fun event to end the summer with, and I hope it becomes an annual event.

I left Sunday morning and met some really awesome people on the ride south. Met a friend for dinner in Fairbanks and got to see her "new" one room dry cabin. It's got potential. After a three hour nap, I headed to the airport this morning, and spent about 15 hours in airports and planes. Northwest left my bags in Chicago (including a cooler of frozen samples), but I'm home again...

well, on a friend's couch, at least.

Today was my last day of field sampling! We did the second half of the "I-series" where we get dropped off by helicopter and walk back in while sampling. We made pretty good time and were back in camp by 3 p.m. We also saw many more caribou and this small herd passed fairly close by. I was able to catch a tsik-tsik (arctic ground squirrel) watching, on guard, with a mouthful of dried grass (used for winter insulation). The mountains have been beautiful the past few days with the snow they received on Tuesday. It's still been chilly here with some rain, but luckily the sun is peeking through the clouds again.

Later, after lunch, we walked through a large patch of cloudberries, Rubus chamaemorus. Apparently, some other people ahead of us ate most of the ripe ones, but we were still able to sample a few.

Dramatic much?
Have you ever seen anything so beautiful? The package arrived tonight with one of our lab members. The helicopter also broke and everyone is blaming it on me.

Not only are there few people in camp, but everything is the end of the world and in the evenings we just wander around camp, aimlessly... Yup, it must be August.

Please excuse me while I go run down the haul road.

I just found out that a key package was shipped up here on the Lyndon truck. If there is anyway to guarantee that a package won't arrive quickly, it's to put it on a Lyndon truck. The next two days we are scheduled to go sampling on the helicopter with a large group, and I need that package. Now imagine me muttering around camp.

Nice rack.
The past week has been a blur, with many parties and the internet and phones going out for two days (courtesey of lightening storms). There was a bachelorette party, a metal birthday party, a couple of going away parties and a tropical luau. Yesterday I actually got to leave camp in a truck- for the second time this summer. We took a scenic drive up to Deadhorse and while the other three people went on the Prudhoe Bay/ Arctic Ocean tour I sat in the hotel doing data entry and reading the day's newspaper. Usually we get the paper a day late in camp. The drive up was a bit cloudy and we saw lots of caribou (and hunters at every pull-off).

The drive back was sunny most of the way and we did a short scouting trip (in sandals) to the Sag near the D.O.T. station. There were tons of ripe blueberries everywhere! On the way up, Christie gave us a recap of the story Hunted and so on the way back I read the last 20 pages out loud to everyone while she drove. The sun is going down around 11 pm these days (still not sure what time it rises, but I'm guessing sometime around 5 am) so it was still fairly light out when we finally made it back late last night.

Oh to be half-asleep and editing a post from the night before. Here are a few new pictures. These flowers (monk's hood or wolfbane) are by the outlet to my lake. The weather keeps bouncing back and forth between sunny, nice, and warm versus cloudy, cold, and rainy. Typical Toolik.






On Sunday, I went hiking with Cody, Ken, and Alexia, desperate to get "out" of camp. We hiked up over this ridge west of Jade and had some fabulous views of the rivers and lakes west of here. On our way back around, we saw a scruffy looking fox who really wasn't that afraid of us, but kept a comfortable distance away. It's been quite the summer for wildlife up here.


In other news, I now have to share the lab with a large research group and might even have to share my room. It's been a nice, quiet, productive summer and I think I'll spending the last week and a half here with my headphones stuck in my ears.

Inspired by David: 326 days at Toolik after this season, 345 days including travel for research in Alaska, plus ~3 weeks of vacation over the years in Alaska = over a year of my life in Alaskan summers.

Stuck in the towers...
The other day I went to use the towers (above ground pit toilets) and it was so stinky that I was in quite a hurry. When I finished, I turned the deadbolt, and it wouldn't budge! I panicked since last year someone actually got stuck for quite a while before they were rescued. After what seemed like an eternity, I realized that the lock was already open- I had forgotten to lock the door in my rush. Such a dork...

Cody eats fish smoothie

What scientists do for fun, or at least after losing a bet. And to think, I've actually had daquiris made in that blender...