For the first time since I arrived a week ago, I wasn't able to look out onto the Brooks Range as I opened the door to my tent. In fact, the fog that arrived overnight even blocked my short-distance view of the tundra. Our first job of the day involved identifying locations for soil sampling at a site north of camp. Being a two person job, I was happy to catch up on some writing and stayed behind at camp. The morning was seemingly productive with just one snag. Kiki walked into the lab and declared, "Note to self: don't touch bear spray and then touch your face." Apparently she had touched the opening on the nozzle of her bear spray and then touched her face. She was feeling better, but the experience was still quite vivid in her mind. "It felt like someone was holding a match to my face." I suppose anything designed to drive away bears in the event of an attack would do a number on your skin. After seeing the camp EMT, she was ready to get back to work.
Since we also received some rain overnight, we changed the schedule and ventured out into the fog to play in the mud!
Team Spider venturing into the foggy tundra.
The OTCs (similar to open-top, mini greenhouses) needed to be sealed. The purpose of the OTC is to increase the temperature of the air inside them, allowing us to examine the effects of temperature on the communities in our mesocosms. OTCs work best when they are sitting flush on the ground so they don't let air flow underneath them. While we did our best on Saturday to get them as flush to the ground as possible, the tundra is anything but level. Our best bet was to pack some mud along the base of each OTC.
Amanda Koltz and Kiki Contreras packing mud along the bottom of an OTC.
Having an excuse to play in the mud turned out to be a great thing! Who didn't love playing in the mud as a kid? After all these years I can say it's still a lot of fun to play in the mud!
At the end of a cold, wet day I was looking forward to getting back to camp. We had set our packs on the boardwalk that runs between our plots, but had a little trouble finding them. The fog had increased, and combined with hours of looking at the ground it turned out to be very disorienting. With no visual reference points, I sloshed in the direction I thought the boardwalk was. Scanning the ground, I spotted my pack sticking up above the tussocks and changed my direction to the boardwalk. It was officially time for a warm dinner.
Losing sight of my teammates as I pause to take a picture.
Playing in the mud - that's fun science!