impending snow

Yep, that right there is snow on the mountains around camp. There's quite a bit of it and it just sort of appeared overnight, with no sign of going away. It's been cold enough the last couple of days that there is ice on the little puddles in the morning (although it's pretty much melted by midday). There is snow in the forecast for this week.

*shivers*.
We had a pretty extraordinary storm here two nights ago. The wind was pretty crazy, every so often there would be huge gusts that felt like someone was taking my tent and shaking it, and heavy rain that would wake me up. So I didn't sleep too well. Yesterday was pretty sunny and today is spectacular, with a perfectly clear blue sky. It's only a couple of degrees C out there, but when the sun's out it's not so bad.

Yesterday Mike and Catherine and I got to take a trip into Fiskaenesset, which was a really great break from the routine. :) We went to the store and got some licorice and related gummy things for the next time we play yahtzee, and I bought some chips that turned out to be really terrible, which was disappointing. Danish chips are weird - they're all kind of like Munchos and Pringles and that kind of chip - like they're made out of those fake mashed potatoes or something. If you want chips made out of potato slices (like Cdn chips), you need to look for 'franske-kartoffeln', French-style potatoes.


I really like the little dragon/sea monster finials on the top of this house. It's fun to see little decorative touches like this - most of the houses in Fisk are prefab so they all look pretty much the same.


A view of Fiskaenesset from the ridge above the town. This is probably one of my favourite pictures I've taken this summer.


A shipwreck! This is on the other side of the ridge, I guess it wasn't worth it for the ship owner to recover it, so it was just left. It's in reasonable shape, I suppose - Mike climbed on it a little and didn't fall through the boards or anything. Anyway, it made a great subject.


Mike and Catherine on the ridge where I took the last picture from.

The last few days have been pretty awesome. I got to do some real field work. :) We went up the hill to the place where the drilling was, and Mike and Jose and I made up a grid to map the area on, which Mike and I then photographed and mapped. It was tough work but a lot of fun. Also the weather has been*fantastic* for the last three days, so we finished just in time - today is cloudy and cold and tomorrow through Wednesday call for rain in the forecast. (It was nice enough that I got a bit of a sunburn on my arms and my nose has come over all freckly. oops. -_- My hands are nice and tanned though!) In this picture I have just finished painting some lines.


Yesterday I also learned how to drive a Zodiac boat, which was pretty cool. Mike and I weren't sure if the helicopter was going to be able to come up for us in time, so we took the boat across the lake and were just getting ready to start the hike down the hill when it showed up, so we took the boat back and got back in time for supper, instead of an hour late. yay!

The view was pretty spectacular from up there, too.

A handful of the remaining people in camp left on Saturday. Brian, Iqbal, Jose, and Gary have all left, so things are even quieter than before. I think pretty much everyone has a cabin to themselves.l-r: me, Mike, Jose, Brian, and Gary.

I'm back in camp and the weather has definitely turned cold - Lex's mittens came in super-handy, I really didn't think I was going to have to wear them right after I got back! Very glad to have them.

It was snowing yesterday up at the drillsite and the other spot where Brian was out in the field. Then it hailed and rained a bit in camp and I got lucky and snapped a picture of a rainbow. :)

I also had an unexpected visitor to my tent last night in the form of the largest spider I have seen since I got here. I was pretty sure it was on its last legs (heh) as it didn't really move much when I picked it up on a piece of paper, so I took the opportunity to get a couple of pictures of it, and then put it over in a less exposed corner of my tent (the deal being that I didn't put it outside in the 0C temperatures if it stayed out of my hair). About half an hour later I looked over and it was gone, and since I didn't wake up screaming with a spider on my face, I guess it listened. ;)

*gasp* an update

I got to go into the field yesterday. ^_^ It was such a nice change! I'm pretty tired of the computer work, tbh, especially since the weather has been *spectacular*. Perhaps there will be more opportunity later in the season.

Interesting textures abound!

This rock is a neat result of what happens when a rock is metamorphosed, and then goes through retrograde metamorphism - minerals that grew at higher temperatures or pressures are gradually reabsorbed into the rock as its temperature or pressure conditions decrease.

The light-coloured blobs used to be garnets, and I'm unfortunately not sure about the darker stuff, I can't remember what we decided it was.

The second picture is a view from the hill we were working on. The inland ice cap (I almost feel like that should be capitalized... the Inland Ice.) is just barely visible in this picture, which is sadly a bit overexposed. It's in the centre of the picture, if you look straight up from the dark boulder by the lakeshore up towards the horizon line.
Hopefully I will get a closer look sometime soon.

more landscapes

A couple more landscape pictures. The sunset pic is another photo, a little later at night (sometime around midnight I think), from the night I saw the fox. He's been spotted a few more times hanging around the camp.

The shoreline pic is from Ruby Island, where my boss and I have been doing some mapping. It's going well and I got to pan some sediments for any rough stones, which was fun. Found some little ones, but we still have to clean and sift the fine stuff to get them out.


The white rock is pegmatite (a rock type consisting of very coarse-grained crystals that have intruded (while molten) in to the existing country rock. The thing that's neat about these chunks of country rock is that they have very clean edges and near-90 degree corners, which is very cool. Usually stuff melts and you end up with oblong blobs, so the breakage likely happened later in the history of the intrusion.

wildflowers

There are some pretty fantastic tiny wildflowers up here. A lot of them seem to be pink, as you will see. I wonder if the pink attracts pollinators better. There are bees here, although I'm not sure what kind they are. Large ones anyway.

The little white ones in the first picture were on a cliff face next to the harbour in Fiskaenesset.


The second picture is from Fiskaenesset as well, from a field next to the helicopter landing area. I think they are crowberry blossoms. So far this is probably my favourite picture that I've taken here. I really like the out-of-focus rocks in the background.


The third one was out in the field the other day. I asked Aaju what they were called and she told me, but I can't remember, so I'll check again sometime. They looked very much like fuchsias, just skinnier.


The second-to-last ones are good to make tea with. You just steep the whole plant (flowers, leaves and all) in some boiling water. I didn't try this one but there is a variety of labrador tea that grows here. Mike made some of that the other night and it was quite nice.


These last ones are called pincushion flowers.



I heart the macro setting on my camera. ^_^

the landscape

This is a picture of the lake on the south side of our camp. There's no fish in this one, as far as I know, but a couple of my coworkers caught some fish at the next lake down. We'll be having them for supper as soon as there's enough. I'm sure Gary's crushed about having to go fish some more. :)

And, the picture below is what we're here for. We all got the talking-to before we got out there about what we could and couldn't bring back... so no samples, sorry guys. ;) However I did get some nice pieces of some other minerals, and I'll post some pics once I have a suitable setup for my camera.

wildlife count: duck and duckling family; 6 (!!!) eagles of some kind.