Working in Putt Lake Labrador

I spent the past 16 days in the Putt Lake area of Labrador. I stayed in a two man bush camp 81 km north of Nain. It is a beautiful location here are some photos.

Guess What

I thought it was time for another mystery photo. Have a guess what this is an image of and post your guess as a comment. The answer will be revealed soon...

Geopolis

I am experimenting again with HDR imaging. This a shot of the Geopolis building in Val-d'Or Quebec. I took this shot at about 0600 as the Sun was rising behind the building. This image was generated from 3 shots, taken using auto exposure bracketing. The shots were processed in Photomatix 2.5 then edited in Picassa.

My Office

This has been my office for the past few days, I have been opperating the transmitter for a Time Domaion EM survey. This is a moving loop survey where the 200mX200m loop is moved with the receiver recording at two stations within every loop before it is moved another 50m along the line. I switch the power off before the loopers disconnect the wire to move it, then, once the loop is resdy, I adjust the voltage needed to reach the required current. I do this every 20 minutes or so all day. It is a very fun job!!!

Chukotat Camp, Raglan

Here is a view down two of the streets in Chukotat camp. As you can see there is still a lot of snow in camp it will soon be gone as it melts fast here, I think the wind aids the rapid melting.

Raglan... Again

After a week in Val-dOr I made the trip north via LG2 and Povirnituk to Raglan. This shot was taken through the rather dirty window of a twin otter as we approached the landing strip.
I have to say every time I fly on a twin otter I am more impressed with what those little planes can do. The landing strip was really just a gravely bit of tundra that had been flattened out a bit, if it were a dirt road I would consider it rather rough. It was only about 300m long with a cliff at one end, so the approach was interesting, we flew low over the tundra and from the back of the plane the landing strip was not visible, so it was a bit of a surprise when we passed over the edge of the cliff suddenly hit the ground, dust and gravle were flying all over the place as the plane slowed down on the short air strip. Watching the plane leave was even more impressive, it actually backed just off the end of the gravel, reved it's engines and lurched forward, after bounding down about 200m of bumpy gravel it leapt into the air.

3lb'er / 1.3kg'er

The fishing season opened here last week, on Friday night the conditions looked about right so I headed up to the pond to see if anything was moving up there.














It was one of those nights when there wasn't much on the go, I think a couple of cold nights had killed the flies, so the fish were not feeding. After about an hour of changing flies I caught a reasonable little ~1lb trout, then the large fish started feeding just as it got dark, I could hear them splashing out in the middle of the pond. I tried a place I know where the larger fish sometimes come close to shore and as I was drawing the fly in there was a little "slurp" at the fly, I hesitated then struck it, sure enough it was a fish. After about 20 minutes of fighting I wrestled this 21 inch beast into my 12 inch net.

Sea Ice

Lewis and I went for a walk to look at the ice the other night - this is what it looked like..

RockFall 2009

RockFall was great again, lots of good climbing! I am experimenting with Picasa web albums as a way of showing the images. So here it is...

Santa Monica Beach

Yesterday I returned from LA where I had attended a two day Ground Probing RADAR workshop. After dropping my gear at the airport I decided to have a look around the city, but it is a big place, so I decided to go the the beach and at least have a look at the Pacific ocean. I hopped in a cab and asked the driver to take me to a beach. He recommended Santa Monica, perhaps because it is nice, or perhaps because it was a $45.00 ride away. As beaches go it was quite nice, a bit like Bournemouth beach, but with more palm trees. This photo doesn't really show the beach all that well. After visiting the beach I had a walk around Santa Monica, before getting the bus back to LAX, the bus was only $0.75 quite a deal!

Gasifier wood stove

For a few weeks now I have been trying to build a gasifier camp stove. This is a camp stove that efficiently burns wood. In a camp fire wood burns inefficiently, in fact much of it is not burned at all. Much of the combustible material is lost as smoke and is left behind as ash. Also, most of the heat is lost and is not easily directed to heat food. A camp stove is very convenient, but you have to lug fuel with you and the fuel is usually non-renewable fossil fuel.
My plan is to design a wood burning camp stove, that has the portability of a camp stove, but Burns wood. Currently it works, but the flames are a bit big. I am going to experiment to see if I can get the heat a bit more concentrated at the top of the stove, like a real camp stove. Fore a more complete description of my stove check out The Brain Saver

Spout Hike

In January of 2003 (I think) Neil and I decided to attempt a hike to the spout (A wave driven fresh water geezer on the Southern Avalon Peninsula). This is trip didn't go so well and we didn't actually get to see the spout in it's winter glory. This Year we decided to have another go. The next few photos are of various stages of the trip. Here Neil is on the barrens about 2km from the spout.

Spout Hike

This is a view looking south from the top of the ridge above the spout.

Spout Hike

Neil Surveying the landscape, trying to pick a good route down from the ridge. There is only about 800m of woods between the foot of the ridge and the shore, but this is the hardest part of the trail. on our return in 2003 it took us about 8 hours to get through this section, yes, a speed of 100m/h. Deep snow and fallen trees made travel extremely difficult!

Spout Hike

The Spout is created as a small brook runs down a fracture in the rock leading to a submarine cave. Wave action pushes water in and out of this cave, as waves enter the cave they act like a piston and force air and brook water out through the fractures. In the summer this is a pretty impressive feature. In the winter the fresh water freezes forming a large cone, here we estimated that it is standing about 20 feet above the rock on which it stands.

Sliding at Flatrock

On the north west facing side of the beamer (a 1km long peninsula in Flatrock) the 550 million year old sea bed is exposed and dips at about 20 degrees to the west. This winter ice has formed on several parts of this surface making walking out there an interesting, but possibly dangerous way to pass an afternoon. We also found that the ice can be quite fun as if provides a great surface for sliding - no sled required! Unfortunately this image fails to convey the motion, but rest assured that you can reach some pretty high speeds sliding on these ice sheets.

It should be noted that the beamer is notorious for the lives claimed by the waves pounding it's shores. We were sliding well out of reach of the waves and separated from them by several hundred metres of grass, boulders and rather short trees.

Taking a spin out to Flatrock.

The last snow storm we had in the Northeast Avalon area ended, as most have this year, with heavy rain followed by rapid freezing. This has resulted in some impressive ice sheets. Form this image you may think that I have been foolish enough to drive out onto a frozen pond, however this is just a parking area covered in about 10cm (4 in) of ice. Most flat surfaces in this ares look like this now unless they have been salted. Many car parks, drive ways and even some roads have a healthy coat of ice.