We spent the 14^th traveling. We flew from Fairbanks to Anchorage, and from there to Prudhoe Bay. The flight to Prudhoe was on a 737-200, a special cargo/passenger plane. They figure out how many seats they’ve sold and take out the ones that would be empty. There’s a movable partition inside the plane and everything forward of that becomes cargo. When everything has to be flown or barged in, you need all the cargo space you can get.

We landed at Deadhorse, which is technically about 5 miles from Prudhoe Bay proper, but they call it all Prudehoe Bay. Its as charming as it can be for a mud-covered industrial slum. Its only raison d’etre is oil production and shipment. Prudhoe Bay is where the Trans Alyaskan Pipeline begins, a four-foot diameter mostly above-ground pipeline that goes to Valdez and pumps some hundreds of thousands of barrels a day. The pipeline is elevated and the supports are sunk well into the permafrost. In places the supports have big heat sinks attached to them, apparrantly in parts of the tundra that are more susceptible to melting because of the pipeline oil.

We got a rental truck in Deadhorse, a 1991 extended cab Ford pickup truck with a supplemental electric heater and covered in dirt inside and out. The windshield had enough cracks in it to pass as a map of the Nile delta. We threw out a bunch of trash from the back and put all our gear inside the cap-covered bed, and off we went. If you ever get the chance to ride in the back “seat” in an extended cab pickup truck, don’t.

Anyway, we set out for Toolik Lake research station, 120 miles or so south on the “haul road,” which runs more or less next to the pipeline and was built to facilitate construction and maintenance. For a dirt road it was pretty decent. It was paved in places too. I was impressed that the roadbed was built up about 4 feet, presumably to lessen impact to the permafrost. We saw some muskox just south of Deadhorse, and an hour later we were chasing caribou down the road. There were a couple of herds along the way and there would be one or two on the road. Since they’re not all that smart, at least the ones on the road, they’ll just run right down the road for a while. Maybe they -are- smart, and its easier to run along.

The camp at Toolik was hospitable and cozy for an arctic center. I regret not getting photos of the dining hall; there was a wall full of shelves and a counter that had cereal, chips, candy bars, etc available at any time, along with two big glass-fronted commercial refrigerators full of juices, milk, lunchmeat, salads, and other leftovers. The kitchen staff did a good job feeding us, but some researchers had to take lunch into the field, and I guess you never know when a grad student is going to want a Snickers bar in the middle of the night.

One thing I was surprised by was the communications systems they had in place. We were over 100 miles from the nearest commercial electricity but Toolik has its own generating plant. Along with that there were telephones and high speed internet. They even had WiFi throughout most of the campus, so I posted lots of pictures and read email from my laptop. I even had a few icq sessions with my buddy Dave Weeks near San Francisco. There I was in the arctic, with a T3 fiber cable going five miles out of camp to the pipeline, which obviously carries more than oil. How handy.

On the 15^th we spent most of the day with Brian Barnes, who’s doing research with arctic ground squirrels. They trap squirrels, tag them and implant temperature sensors in their abdominal cavities to study hibernation. The next year they trap them again, take the little data recorders out and see what they got. We were there to see what kinds of impact climate change may have on them, since they keep a schedule based on snowmelt and pup rearing.

In the late afternoon Peter and John took a helicopter ride to shoot some tundra aerials, shooting footage of Ken Tape as he shot new stills to compare with the 1940s aerials for his shrub study. This time Pete had a good seat and no worries about doors.

After a long day of traipsing across the uneven tundra and shooting squirrel surgery I had a glorious introduction to the Toolik sauna, sitting right on the lake, with a window overlooking the water. There’s a little floating dock with a ladder at the ~38F shore, and you can jump in the lake and return to the sauna if you’re nuts or something. I did get into the lake, but climbed down the ladder and decided to keep my head above water. The incision from my July appendectomy adventure was still a little touchy and I didn’t want to spaz my abdominal muscles just yet.

The next morning we went out into the tundra with Donie Bret-Harte who is doing flora plot experiments with heating and fertilization, to see what happens when the tundra heats or there are more nutrients available. She had an open fertilized plot, a control plot, a fertilized and unfertilized greenhouse, and a couple of shelters that had netting to shade the light some. It was our first rainy day, but the slow drizzle tapered off by 11 or so, and we were glad to see it go.

We spent the afternoon with John Hobbie and two of his grad students. John was one of the people who got the Toolik station established, and along with Brian and Donie, is a senior scientist there. His students are studying Greyling and their migratory patterns. They catch fish in the river, tag and release them, and follow their progress to see when they head for the arctic lakes to wait out the winter. They measure and weigh them, to see how they do from year to year. We found ourselves nearly boot-deep in a quick mountain stream with John, who was fly-fishing for science. I forget what he started off with, but he was having good luck and caught a greyling in about two minutes. The next two minutes weren’t so good, so he changed to a mayfly and thought that would improve his chances.

That night I was hoping to find the sauna-keepers and request a repeat of the night before. The sauna schedule at Toolik indicated that there was no banya that evening. Brian Barnes encouraged me to light the stove and word passed through camp that there was a “rogue sauna” that evening. Of course we were impatient and went in about an hour after the fire was lit, so it was just getting good by the time we left. Still, others came and soaked in the heat.

The next morning we said our goodbyes to Toolik and drove north to Deadhorse. Except for a huge honking bear next to the road at one point, it was a fairly uneventful trip back. The weather was a little foggy and drizzly, a good day to be traveling and not standing out in the tundra. We flew to Anchorage for the night, on our way to Vancouver for a couple of days. That evening I had dinner with my friend and former intern Monica Aufrecht, who is an Anchorage native and just happened to be in town. We went up into the foothills walking afterwards, and I shot a couple of panoramas from there. We also went down to the water, and I got a great tour of Anchorage.