Arrival: Back in the North Slope

Well, we are finally back at our “home away from home”! We arrived in Barrow yesterday evening, worked in the lab until late last night and finally got to catch up with some friends from University of Texas at El Paso. This morning we packed up and hopped on a plane at 4PM this afternoon to head down here to Atqasuk. We are spending one night here setting up the house and one of our sites (the trolley) and then heading back to Barrow tomorrow afternoon. Busy, busy, busy!

Above is an old aerial photo of the city of Barrow. It sits right on the Arctic Ocean. It is a fairly large city with a population between 3 and 4 thousand. I know it doesn’t look like much, but it is actually really pretty… in its own way. The only paved piece of land is the runway. All other roads, and most of the area in town, is gravel. So, it doesn’t look attractive at first, but it grows on you. Personally, I love Barrow. It is just so different than anything you could experience anywhere else. The city seems to be busier this summer because the Shell crew is in town, which kind of takes away some of Barrow’s charm. But, nonetheless, it feels great to be back.

The building shown above is our lab in Barrow. Our crew doesn’t usually spend a lot of time in the lab… most of our work is done outside. However, we do press some plants and actually use resin to make resin molds to have 3D representations of the plants. The lab also gives us a quiet place for data entry and a place to store all of our “stuff”… mainly rulers, knee pads, clickers, and rolls upon rolls of electrical tape.

But, Barrow is just half of the story. This year, about 2/3 of my summer will be spent in Atqasuk, but I will be doing a lot of traveling back and forth, which means a lot of time spent in the airport and on those little planes I love so much.

Sergio, Jenny, and Nate sitting at Era airport, waiting for our flight.

Walking out to the plane.

I am sitting in the last full row, looking up toward the front of the plane just before take off. A little small, huh?

The view from the sky! You can see the Arctic Ocean and the tundra leading up to it.  Also, yes, that is snow. 🙂

After a short 30 minute flight, we arrived in Atqasuk. Atqasuk is much smaller than Barrow, with a population of about 200 people, mostly natives. The “airport” is literally a gravel runway and a gravel pad, on which the trucks can drive right up to the plane and pick up all of their cargo. We all like this airport very much… hassle free!

Above is an aerial view of Atqasuk. Like I said, it is much smaller than Barrow. We travel mostly by ATV to wherever we need to go… which is pretty much just out to the field and to the airport. There isn’t a true grocery store here… but there is a native that sells some food out of his porch area. We have to ship all of our food down from Barrow. Atqasuk has more to look at than Barrow. The landscape is much less flat, and the river is beautiful. We sometimes go for hikes and look for fossils along the river. I always look forward to my time here. It is nice to get some personal space that is lacking in Barrow, and the weather here is usually a lot nicer. Not today though, windy and cloudy and cold. Of course, the one day we come down it is actually worse weather here than in Barrow.

Well, we have to go figure out how to put a bridge over a creek that is very, very high in order to get out to our sites. With that, I leave you with a quote: “How many scientists does it take to figure out how wide a creek is?” – Jenny Liebig.