Jackie and I got up at 3am to hide Easter eggs around the mess hall, command and control hut, and the latrines (nicely on top of the stored toilet paper). It was great!
Next morning everyone in some form or another did some little thing to celebrate Easter. The head of logistics had sewn his white felt boot liners together and put them on his head to look like bunny ears (funky bunny ears). The cooks had boiled and colored Easter eggs for breakfast and laid out Easter grass with little stuffed animals at all the eating tables. Everyone was in good spirits. It was a good day!
I took a walk to the ridge study at Jen’s suggestion but she and Alice were working together quite well so I stayed out of their way and just worked on photographing some depth hoar samples. I found a beautiful pit with big samples 1-1.5 cm in diameter. They looked like diamonds. After lunch I took a walk with Adrian and Katharine to check out the newly formed lead that had formed and now separated us from the later half of lines #4 and #5. It was a very good thing that we had finished the survey when we did because our lines are starting to be cut off. Jackie had called this our playpen and up until yesterday, our playpen extended to about 1.5 km in all directions before a lead had cut us off. Now there were several leads and we are limited to 500m excursions on lines #3, #4, & #5. Line #2 had a lead in front of the ridge about 500m beyond the end. Lines #1 and #6 still have big ridges at the end which are still approachable. The spring is coming and the ice is starting to break up but it has been gentle with leads spanning no more than 5 m – just enough to stop the survey of those regions but still possible to cross when needed. We have been really lucky with the timing and the weather for getting our work done.
Tomorrow Mani and Scott arrive and I will be very busy working with them for the next two days to get the 7 GPS buoys and collect stereo imaging of the ridges. Hopefully I can go with Andrew to survey these ridge areas with Mani, Scott and their stereo equipment. Hopefully the weather is nice tomorrow so their work days are effective ones. Hopefully we can get the helicopter time and snow mobile requests to get to where we need to go. A lot depends on many, many factors working out just right. Time for bed, I have a busy day tomorrow.
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