Ice-worms, Boofs and Bunny-hops: The Beauty of May in AK

A handfull of us glued in thigh straps last week, huffing glue and MEK while drinking Moose Drool, I think it was, and eating Great Harvest peanut butter chocolate chip mega-cookies at Alaska Raft and Kayak.


Yes, quite a party with Jeff C., Toby S., and Tony P. We had to wait for the glue to dry and so didn't consummate the party the way we should have: with a run down Six Mile's Third Canyon boofing everything in sight with those new, cone-headed, long-tailed, 2011 Alpacka Rafts.

By the time the glue was dry I headed for the Harding Icefield with Amy (my snow algae grad student) and Melissa (my ice-worm student) and Tyler (undergrad assistant). It was an Alaska Pacific University research trip investigating glacier ecology.

The weather was sunny and interesting with some low blowing snow one morning and cooking sun the other. Our main objectives were to drill holes through the snow and into the underlying ice to anchor "ablation cables" for measuring snow melt over the summer using the steam drill:




We had the guys' and gals' tents. The gals' tent looked far more spacious than the guys', and the gals even managed to build a multi-walled wind block from the snow.



Another objective was to install a worm cam to shoot the emergence of ice worms as the season progresses and measure the light and temperatures simultaneously.



Basically we got up at 7 AM, melted snow, ate breakfast and headed out for our drilling project with the steam drill, a pressure cooker-like contraption that forces steam down a hose and so melts a hole in the ice and snow.



The skiing was great.



And the work crew stellar. They called the steam drill, "Hookie".



Tyler Katzmar, Hookie-meister.



We drilled about three dozen holes -- actually they drilled. I was just the supervisor/surveyer.



After we put in the holes, Amy fertilized her experimental plots to see if she can get more snow algae growth by adding nutrients to the snow.



We just worked on a small corner of the enormous icefield. Look closely in lower left to see the skiers.



After two nights on the Icefield we headed out, the gals a few hours ahead of the guys. The icefield was great traveling.





The gals had passed the Harding Icefield emergency shelter a couple hours ahead and would get down so far ahead of the guys that they went into town and got pizza and beer.



Spring had sprung and, boy, was the snow rotten on the trail.




And the bridge slick.




In the three nights we were away, spring had come.



I've written here about the Harding before and even after like my dozenth trip up there I am reminded of how much I like its Pleistocene austerity.

Skiing across its flats lets my mind wander through hypotheses big and small about why and where things live and grow up there, and this was one of the more productive 96 hours I've had there.

It's just that hike up and down with big loads that keeps me from returning every year instead of every other!



But the real reason for this post is to provoke readers with my fatbike's gearing arangement: a trials size dingle:



Look at the drive train! 16 T chainring and 16/18 T freewheel.



These are my two most-often used gears (1:1 and about 0.8:1) when riding wild. Since I only needed to shift two gears (and would need a chain tensioner anyway) I decided to do rear dingle rather than front dingle.

The derailleur is from my old teen-age Campy bike -- very retro.



I tested it today by riding the Brown Bear Trail on Hillside coming and going with ease.

Is it slow? You bet!

If I want fast I'll take my Pivot 429 out and rip, snort and roll. But for stability and crank and slo-mo fun this low geared dingle and 7 psi is just my ticket to ride.

100 Miles on the Harding

APU student Todd Tumolo and I are just back from a hundred miles of skiing back and forth across the Harding Icefield, one of the most amazing places in all of Alaska. I guess counting a crossing as once across, and an out-and-back as twice across, these would be like my 10th and 11th crossings since 1983. This trip was collecting iceworms for a genetic study that might shed light on how iceworms disperse from glacier to glacier.

What makes the Harding Icefield so amazing is the play of light and weather on the assortment of nunataks and the expanse of ice and snow. So vast and disorienting can the Icefield be, that in the the pre-GPS days it was a terrifying crossing!

I once skied from Skilak to Chernof solo during a Wilderness Classic and was afraid of getting lost and/or being hit by a storm. I had nothing but a pin-on compass and a bivy sack. Cody Roman (then 14), Jazz (then 12) and I did a big week long loop in 2001 when we were hit by a storm of ferocious winds and rain. There's simply no way to dig into the hardpacked firn and with such a long fetch, the wind speeds are tent-flattening. I had to put on a face of total calmness while inside my head I feared the tent would be ripped apart and we soaked in freezing rain at 50 miles an hour.

But now with GPS, my familiarity with all of its glaciers and peaks, and a good kit I feel comfortable up there.

My favorite way to cross it is north to south, skiing into the warm sun. One May we skied from Exit to Nuka and I never put on gaiters or gloves so warm was the ski. Skiing south one looks at the icy north faces of the nuktuks, nunataks, and mountains and they are so picturesque. Skiing north you see the barren south faces of choss-heaps. Most of the rock is schisty country rock but the nuktuks of the central Nunatak Plateau are granite and the route to the Chernof passes across the granite and schist contact. The precipitation gradient is so steep that standing above the Chernof Glacier and looking at the McCarty Glacier peaks one sees a view of mega-glacier draped mountains like the Antarctic Peninsula while looking toward Truuli Glacier you see peaks bare of snow.

The geography of the Icefield is singular. The Icefield proper stretches between the Chernof and Exit Glaciers. South of the Chernof are a series of range crossing glaciers separated by rocky ridges. These unique "saddle-passes" are broad passes from big glacier to big glacier that have steeper cols above them that cross the ridges. Late in the season, like last week, the ridge crossings have deep and nasty, roof-ripping bergschrunds, whereas the stretch from Exit Glacier to Tustumena has nothing but "guppy" sized cracks. In other words, from Exit to Tustumena is rope-free travel on a flat, flat, flat icefield with distant peaks. Whiteouts and blizzards make for what Todd calls "full-on iPod conditions". From Tustumena south to Nuka Valley is more typical mountainous terrain with steeper hills, rocky passes, and cracks.

One measure of how great a place is for adventuring is whether you'd go back or not. As we returned to Exit Glacier after six days, Redoubt's ash wearing the fishscales off my skis, I thought about what my next trip up there might be: "Ski to Sea", a ski tour across the Icefield followed by a fjord-hopping packraft paddle back to Seward.

Anyone interested?

National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON)

Ecology has yet to be considered as "Big Science". Big Science means big bucks and ecology has yet to have the kind of infrastructure that physics' particle accelerators, astronomy's telescopes, oceanography's research vessels has had.

That's about to change with the National Science Foundation's NEON program. This program has $400 million slated for startup funding and another $70 million/yr to keep it running. These big dollars will set up and operate a network of 20 observatories across the US reflecting an optimal sampling design to measure the continent's ecological state.

The primary goal is to observe and forecast ecological and environmental change in wildlands. Climate change, nearby land-use, spread of invasive species and infectious diseases (like the West Nile virus) will be monitored. It's a very ambitious and timely program that will include a range of organisms and processes from soil microbes to landscape and atmospheric changes.

NEON represents the coming of age of ecology and environmental science at a time of the most rapid change seen in over a millennium. I spent yesterday at a NEON meeting in Fairbanks, participating in the discussion of where and what are the most important central processes to observe in Alaska, as well as the names of people who can do the organismal sampling of birds, mosquitoes, beetles, fish, small mammals and other focal organisms.

As Alaska's environmental changes accelerate in parallel to Earth's human population growth and energy consumption, this kind of integrative and systematic observation network becomes increasingly important. It's an exciting time to be an ecologist.

Back in the Saddle

Did some tree work today with Doug Jewell. Not really work – more like re-creating our forest canopy access and sampling scheme for a talk I’m giving at the Ecological Society of America meeting next month. We climb trees and then rig a doubled traverse rope between them. From this horizontal traverse we suspend a vertical rope for sampling. We can move it along and go up and down it without relying on trees. That way we can visit just about anyplace inside a forest and some parts above the forest. Looks sort of like this:



It was really good to be up in even the low canopy of birch and spruce here in SC AK – only 40 feet or so up. Doug and I did this stuff in some really tall forests – pushing 300 feet tall – near Mt St Helens back in ’06 and ’04, collecting data on “canopy structure”.

Every time I’m up there two things come to mind: (1) how exceedingly slow and laborious it s to move around above the ground and between trees, but how exceedingly appealing it is to “canopy trek”, something I developed in California redwoods and sequoias, Australian Eucalyptus, and Borneo's Dipterocarps from 1999-2002 with Prof. Steve Sillett. Steve's an amazing scientist and tree fanatic, made famous by Richard Preston in The Wild Trees . Steve and I had a bit of a falling out, so don’t expect to see my name in Preston’s breathless prose. But every time I get into a tree, the second thing comes to mind: (2) I use big-tree techniques that Steve taught me, techniques he and others developed to climb and move around the crowns of the tallest trees in the world. And I am forever grateful to Steve for that.

Through Steve I met Tom Greenwood and Brett Mifsud, Australian big tree climbers and hunters, with whom I’ve traveled to Borneo in search of the world’s tallest tropical trees. We’ve found a 290’ monster there, which we climbed of course. Tom is the most adept person I have ever seen move through trees. While Sillett taught me the equivalent of rock climbing’s direct aid, Tom is like a 5.12 free climber. I have yet to get the gear appropriate to learn his techniques, but someday, before my old man joints give out and while his are still functioning, I hope to get some lessons.

Anyway, unlike a lot of the packrafting and landscape trips I enjoy so much, forest canopies are a delightfully slow paced place to be and I look forward to climbing trees again, if even little birch and spruce in Anchorage.