pictures again!

so it's been forever since I updated. Partly I have been busy, but also I have been kind of lazy about the blog. I will try to keep up on it more regularly.

Since I last posted at the end of August (yikes) I have been as far north as I've ever been, and I've also been underground at an exploration site, both of which were awesome! The weather here has gotten progressively colder, and about 10 days ago we had our first real snowfall, just in time for Greg's visit. :) Which was fantastic! (The part where he went home again was less fantastic.)

Anyway here are some pictures!

There were some northern lights the other night! They are a faint green streak down the centre of this image. My camera didn't do a great job with them, I'll have to try again with a better camera if I can get my hands on one.

I have owned my cellphone for 1.5 years and I only discovered this weekend that it will take panoramic shots! This is a picture of Frobisher Bay taken from the Iqaluit breakwater.

This wooden boat hangs out behind the museum. It was especially calm on Friday; in contrast we are having very windy conditions tonight with gusts up to 65km/h.

Maqtaaq! This piece is from the bowhead hunt that happened here back in the summer. It was good although it didn't have much flavour - if anything it tasted faintly of salt water.

A pretty sunset from a couple of weeks ago.

Snow!

 Hee. :) We got snowed on rather a lot actually.

A geologist outstanding in her field. :D This was from the furthest north I've been. It was super cold that day!

I'll put up more in the next day or so - I'm thinking of doing a post of all the neat sundogs/rainbows/etc I've seen since I got here. There have been a lot!

more pix!

so I got back from my first set of site visits on Thursday night and it was excellent. I had a really good time, the weather was excellent almost right to the end and the projects were super interesting, I learned tons of things.

Also I saw lots of wildlife! Here are some pictures!

My first musk ox sighting (yay!) - a herd of about a dozen that we spotted from the helicopter.

This is a caribou we spotted on our tour of a site - he's not very old, probably only a year or two, and he's rather scruffy-looking because they're starting to moult at this time of year.

He just sort of wandered by the truck, not concerned about us at all.

Me at the mine! The haul trucks behind me are ridiculously large and the tires alone are more than twice my height.

Bunny!

Count the ptarmigans! I've come up with anywhere between 14 and 20. I can only spot one adult but there has to be at least one more, I don't think they have more than half a dozen chicks in a season.

This is probably my favourite picture so far. The musk ox near this camp discovered that the grass was particularly green around the greywater drains from the kitchen and showers, so over time they have made their way closer and closer to camp. Now they come in twice a day for lunch, and I think I'm only about 20m away from them in this photo. There were about two dozen all together in the herd and about 5 of them are calves. They are surprisingly smaller than I expected - musk ox are not as big as domestic cows but their coats make them look much bigger.

Yay!

piiiiictures!

A photo collection from my first field trip!

Some garnets in some rock. Not as exciting as rubies but still pretty nice. :)

This is an American Golden-Plover.

An inukshuk. The bear spotters build these when they're out spotting for bears. There haven't been any.

Purple saxifrage! I love these flowers.

This is either a semipalmated plover or a semipalmated sandpiper. 

Siksik! Also known as arctic ground squirrel. This guy was pretty chill, he just sort of came out to see what we were up to.

The sky was very pretty.

The white blobs are flocks of snow geese. They were either in those huge clusters, or paired off (being as it is that time of year).

More flowers! I don't know what these are called but I like them.

And ditto these (although they might be a kind of heather?).

Hoping to have some pix of larger creatures after my next trip, I hear we may be in an area for caribou or musk ox... fingers crossed!