Way Station - Jen's House 25-27 March

On Sunday at noon (25 March), I left the PolarTREC training early to hook up with Jen so that she and I could synchronize on field camp preparations. She had been running at least as hard as I had to get issues sorted out and organized. We went to get some lunch at a place which had an internet café so she could catch up on vital e-mail communications (dial-up only at home). She had been going full tilt and I could see that my first job as fellow PI was to help her decompress, get something to eat, and work out a plan for dealing with the next couple of days.

One of the more difficult issues was the fact that Mani (UD Ph.D. student - see team list) had a flight delay already in Philadelphia so he was not going to make his connecting flight. As a result we were thinking about how to schedule the day since he would now arrive at 02:00 of the next morning instead of the scheduled 16:30. Basically we knew we were in for a very, very long day. So we start making our lists. One thing I have noticed about the synergy of this team is that all three of the lead ladies of this expedition are fastidious about keeping lists (post-it queens!) and this has been a huge asset. So when Jen and I started to sort out strategy, we also started to make our lists including sorting out housing issues for Mani, finding the polar gear for he and Scott (second UD student), and meeting up with Jen's student Alice (see team list). We ran around tending to several of the one million details that remained incomplete while Robert finished up his communications training. We finally "decompressed" (as Jen likes to call it) by heading to her home and getting ready for an informal dinner party with 4 of her friends. It was the first real dinner Jen had made for herself at home in almost a month so we really needed to take these few hours to just relax, enjoy a meal and talk to some colleagues. It turned out to be quite effective as these people would also be around for the next three weeks while my student Mani was in Fairbanks as our high-speed logistics and relay node so I was able to work with Jen to ensure that he would have enough friendly folks to look after his well-being while I was in the field.

We left after that to get Mani at the airport (yet another flight delay). For Mani, the adventure had been full of flight delays (several hours overdue in each airport). He walked off the plane worn and tired but with this incredible smile on his face because he had never been this far north before. He was amazed at the mountain ranges he had crossed on his flight and since he arrived in the middle of the night he was welcome by the northern lights as we drove to Jen's house at almost 02:00. Mani grew up in western India so for him, this felt like coming to another planet.



Bright and early at 06:00 on Monday 26 March (we were in bed with only three hours of sleep), we had to wake up, get ready and prepare for more training. We picked up Robert from the PolarTREC training and proceeded to Joe Nava's house on NRA Way for an experience called "Bear Training". Roughly nine of us (Jen, myself, Mani, Robert, Alice, Andrew, Bill Simpson, and a couple others fellows - see team list forthcoming) all destined for the ice camp sat through a 4 hour training course on how to deal with bears. This included a video and the use of shot guns including the operation, safety, and firing range practice of 12 gauge shot guns (see photos). It was such an amazing experience that I forgot my backpack at Joe's house and had to spend a good part of the day figuring out how to get back there to retrieve it. The afternoon was spent chasing down yet more of the million details (Robert's glasses had broken and we needed to find an optician that could fix them). So Robert and I dropped off Jen and Mani to work on setting Mani up with his computer at her office while Robert and I spent 3 hours driving from store to store in search of those last minute things that we were still missing. We ended the day by hooking up with one of the PolarTREC administrators (Janet Warburton) for one last dinner as she was a long-time friend of Robert’s. In nearly every event we encountered someone knew someone from long ago. The more the events unfolded, the smaller the world and shorter the time.

Robert's journal entry.

We finally unpacked Robert's gear from the car late that evening and then proceed to load up Mani's gear and get his stuff to the Nordic House which is a visiting faculty house where he would be stationed for most of the expedition. To the delight of both Mani and I, the place turned out to be just super. Mani has been sticking with Chandra and me through some pretty thin funding years and it has finally paid off so I tried to include those little extra specials for him for his years of can-do effort to make sure that his accommodations during this trip would be, as they say in Norway, the Viking way - dry, warm, and comfortable. He and Scott (fellow Ph.D. student and team buddy) would share a cozy upstairs floor with two rooms in a house with shared bathroom and kitchen with other visiting scientists. It was a real treat for Mani and the UD contingent felt very happy about the setup we had managed to coordinate. I got to bed about 02:30 that night with the next adventure just around the corner.