Stuck in Raglan

We were supost to leave today, the weather was perfect, the plane came in, but had a problem with the landing gear and had to go to toronto for servicing and they could not carry passangers. Hopefully it will be fixed by tomorrow, or they will charter a plane to get us home.

Aurora over Donnaldson Shaft

Pretty impressive Aurora last night, didn't last long tho. The weather took a turn for the worst and they were soon hidden behind viscious blowing snow, which is still on the go now. 

Drills in zone 5-8

This is where I spent most of wednesday night. We surveyed the hole drilled by the drill in the foreground, unfortunatly we had to do it in 3 sections because the rock was unstable. doing a hole in sections is a slow job, the drillers pull the rods up so the bit is just below a bad area of rock, the rods keep the unstable rock from falling into the hole, blocking it. We lower out probe down the rods, through the bit and into the rock where we do out survey. When we have finished the first section the drillers pull the rods up to the next section of bad rock and we start all over again and survey down to where we started the first time. We have 4 probes we put down the hole, the first is a dummy that we use to check that the hole is not obstructed and is safe for our other probes, the Z, the XY and the IFG probe. it is a lot of up and down. 

Crazy Frost!

Another walk behind the camp, here you see the frost build up on the tops of some grass sticking through the snow. This frost grows on almost everything outside, and the hightr above ground the more frost, so the VHF radio repeater antennas are looking very strange, probably over a foot of frost in some places. 

Fog Bow?

While setting up for our survey yesterday the sun was shining through the ice fog and illuminating this arc in the sky. There were two, one below the other, but as my story usually goes, by the time I got my camera out I missed it. I managed to capture the lingering single arc. Note the length of the shaddows, this was shot at about 2pm, so the sun is really starting to get low, it always looks like early morning. 

Under The deck

This little chap was peeping out from under the deck behind the kitchen. Probably waiting for a snack to fall from above. 

Fox b/w

I took this photo the same time as the other fox photo, but hadn't bloged it, 'cos I had hoped to get a better closeup, but I have not had the opportunity. I thought you might like to see this little guy, so here he is. This image was very grainy and I could not seem to get the colours to look right, so I gave up and desaturated it. 

2 generations of frost

When it is foggy here frost grows on everything abd can get quite thick. Here there are two generations of frost. The first has recrystalized to form clear ice, the second is still white. 

3 Foxes

I went and waved the camera about before heading out to work today. These 3 arctic foxes were having a meeting on a frozen pond behind the camp here. 

Northern Lights and a drill

The northern lights were anazing last night, of course getting the camera out had the usual effect and they didn't return to their full intencity untill my battery was flat.  

The Crone Shack

Here is a view of the Crone shack, where we repair, clean and store our equitpment. The rather large snow drift has blocked the door, so some digging will be required as soon as the storm moves away. This was shot at 1600 ISO, because I didn't want to stand out in that weather any longer than I had to. Well actually it was getting dark, any way it has made for a rather grainy image. 

Still snowing!

Here is a shot of the core chack during today's storm. It was taken just as it was getting dark, so I had to shoot at 1600 ISO, hence the grainy quality. 

Another blizzard!

Well yesterday was nice, clear sky and not much wind. We got out and pulled the loop wire out of the snow where it was frozen in below a crust. Hopefully we will not get any more rain and the wire will not freez in again, so the wire will be easy to pull when it comes time to pick it up. today we are are stuck in camp again as the weather has taken a turn for the worse. there was snow over night, it might still be snowing, abd the wind must be 80 - 100 km/h, so it is not nice out there. Time for me to get some paperwork done.

At last, we had a hole to survey!

Last night We had our first hole to survey, after a week of waiting. Unfortunatly they were not ready for us untill 0130 this morning. It was an all nighter! we didn't finish untill about 1000 this morning.
Firtunatly it all went fairly smoothly, the Generator only froze up once, I just had to chip some ice off from around the carboretta and it worked fine. The hadest part was staying awake. I kept falling asleep between readings, as did charlie, my helper.

Welcome back to Raglan!

Here is a view of donnaldson camp, my home for the next 4 weeks. All that snow is fresh, mostly since we arrived. After th eplant touched down the weather closed in, so the guys leaving were not able to. so there are over 100 people in a camp built for about 50.
The road out of the camp is closed, so the drillers can't go out and neither can we, so there is 100 of us all stuck in camp with nothing to do. 

Welcome Back to Raglan!

A flash photo of the snow! 

Iqaluit

Here is Iqaluit, well part of it, from the air. 

Iqaluit

Just to prove I was there. This is the sign on the side of the control tower at Iqaluit airport.

A long day!

Well, I was supost to leave St. John's yesterday and overnight in Montreal to catch the 8:30 flight up to Raglan. However, due to a hurricane warning the flight was canclled (as was the hurricane). I had t ogo stand-by on the 6am flight to arrive in montreal at 7:10 am. Fortunatly I made it. The raglan flight leaves Montreal and stops at Rouan-Noranda where our luggage is searched for drugs and alcohol, than it is supost to be off to Raglan. So we were about to touch down In Raglan, about 100m above the runway and the pilot pulled back up. The weather was too bad, he couldn't land, so we headed for the nearest airport where the 737 could land, Iqaluit, Nunavut. We refuled and waited there for the weather report from Raglan. Apparently the storm cleared, so we all got back on the plane had headed back to Raglan, where we approached the runway to about 100m and pulled up again, apparently the weather got bad again just before we arrived, so we went back to Iqaluit and refueled again before heading back to Rouan-Noranda for the night.

Cranberries

Went to flat rock for a climb with Michelle and Lewis today. After climbing we went looking for cranberries further out on the beamer. We found a little ledge at the top of the cliff where there were loads of cranberries, so we spent about an hour picking.