Today was another day of extreme archaeology. While it started out significantly warmer than yesterday, it was also significantly wetter. It started raining in the middle of the night and was actively precipitating all morning. By warmer, I mean around 50F instead of hovering near 40F, so we're not talking a trip to the tropics. But still, it was enough that we all noticed the difference when we headed up to the site this morning.
Well, all that changed by mid-morning and I found out just what the limits are to team extreme here at Raven's Bluff. During some parts of the morning I felt like I was on a sailboat in a storm as sheets of rain pelted the rainfly that protected our dirt screening area and wind gusts made it flap and shake. But still, that was not enough to make us stop our day's work. After all, we are extreme archaeologists.
All that changed with a particularly strong gust of wind. A pole snapped on the rainfly that protects the dig site. It was all hands on deck to grab the fly and use stakes to pin down all the flapping corners. And then? Did we go back to work? We may be extreme, but we're not crazy--hot soup and a warm tent certainly were better than trying to wrestle a flapping, wet rainfly. Are we sissies, or what??!!
An extreme archaeologist knows when to head back to camp to sit in the rain instead of excavating in the rain.
After a couple of hours in camp, the weather pretended to clear up enough to lure us back up to the site. We re-arranged the rainfly with one slight shorter pole (3 sections instead of 4 to remove the piece that had broken) and got back to work.
The new, closer to the ground version of our rainfly. We had to modify it when the 4-part pole broke and became a 3-part pole.
With only intermittent rains in the afternoon, it hardly qualified as extreme archaeology. Well, except for the wind gusts that took out the rainfly that was over our dirt screening area--one of the poles bent in half so it was, once again, all hands on deck to pull it down and put it away.
Equipment failure!!
This evening, just before heading off to my tent to write this journal, I saw a strange big yellow ball in the sky. What could it be? It looked familiar, but I'm not sure. Will we be using the rainflies as sun shades tomorrow?