Alaska - Pt. 2

I haven't been in Alaska in a nearly a couple months, but I did finally get my photos and stuff together. Though I lost a memory card (sure it fell between the seats in the rental car) so I got a bit discouraged. Such is life...

The highlight of the Alaska work was not the work :) I think the last post summed up the drive there (near Mt Denali aka McKinley) and a couple small weekend roadtrips and such. And the last week of work I worked with Paul, an electrician who I did utility locates with (me on a GPS unit, him with essentially a fancy inductive metal detector). And it turns out Paul has a log cabin in the middle of nowhere, but this nowhere is exactly half way between Fairbanks and Anchorage via the southern route (via Delta Junction, nearly into the Yukon and Whitehorse), which is exactly the route I was planning.



Turns out Paul's cabin is a very nice 2000 sq. ft. log cabin above the tree line on Summit Lake. And most importantly, it has nice wood burning stoves and a solar system to make life easy.

When I first arrived, it was a dark, foggy, gloomy almost surreal afternoon / evening. The place was totally deserted with not a car or person to be seen anywhere. And because above the treeline, you could see everywhere (no such thing as privacy here)...



The next morning, everything had come to life! I don't know if you can tell just how scattered the cabins are on this treeless plateau. There's a little townish type clustering of houses around the lake (though definitely no shops and no people whatsoever when I was there) and then a scattering of cabins on the upper ridge. Just felt very strange with no trees...




After leaving the cabin, I took about a hundred photos, all on the card I lost. So here's what stuff looked like... (note, use your imagination).








Here's a couple river scenery photos for Carole (the 2nd being a river that starts at the distant glacier - the glacier used to be at the highway)...




And some random pipeline photos, since I was along two major pipelines at various times - I think both started at Prudhoe Bay (aka the North Slope) and one went into Canada (Alcan)and eventually Fort St. John and the other (Alyeska) to the port at Valdez (the infamous namesake of the Exxon Valdez).




The road trip took a rather random detour to Valdez just because (and where the fish are big, almost as big as in Kenora!)...




The road to Valdez was very impressive with glaciers and waterfalls around every corner in the road. Of course, most of these photos are goners, but here's a few...




And I was lucky, because they had just had torrential down pores the previous day and the road was nearly flooded out in a few places (it look more impressive in a few other places where the backhoes were doing there job, but I was trying not to get killed stopping in random places on the highway - this little stream going through the culverts is the runoff from the glacier I had just hiked up to in the previous photos). Apparently this happens every year and people just accept being stranded for a few days now and again. If I had been there a few weeks later you can take a ferry to Anchorage, which would have been sweet!




And lastly, just some more miscellaneous photos...




Since Alaska, I've been to Seattle for a couple days to visit Justin, then to Montreal for a week with Mel, then to Calgary for a day, Edmonton for a week of work, Winnipeg for a weekend wedding, back to Edmonton for a couple weeks, then a Jasper roadtrip with Carole, back to Edmonton for a couple more weeks of work, then to Calgary for a day and now I'm in Montreal for 3 days (in a cafe right now) and heading to North Carolina tomorrow for a month or so? Working 10 days on, 4 off and not sure how many shifts, so everything is very week to week shall we say. Anyway, with one paragraph I've covered the last month or two and now I'm up to date - sorry, don't feel like being wordy anymore :)

Alaska - Pt. 1

Hey folks. Nice to know a few of you complain when I am lazy and don’t blog. I’m in Alaska finishing up my 3rd of 4 weeks of work. Currently sitting in a coffee shop on Saturday morning - I do have internet at the apartment, but my roommates girlfriend just flew in so I’m being scarce.

And yes, apartment... usually I stay in hotels for fieldwork, but the company has rented 4 apartments for the project. Which is very nice since we have a per diem and are able to eat at home. Might be the first bit of field work where I loose weight! And a good crew out that all gets along and takes turn grilling fresh salmon on the hibachi and such. Life is tough...

The work started off a little funny. Was supposed to be installing wells and doing soil gas sampling in basements, etc. But delays in approvals and such meant the first week or so ended up being mostly hand auguring soil piles. Though I’ve been doing a lot of GIS and GPS work too - mostly tracking down as-built AutoCAD drawings, compiling in GIS (ArcInfo), uploading to a GPS (Trimble unit that does real-time corrections to ~2ft accuracy) and then field locating pipelines, drill locations, etc. etc.



So Alaska and you think cold, but temperatures have been high 20s (Celcius that is), even pushing 30 a few days (mid 80s F, which if I’m doing my conversions correctly, is about 30 C?). Apparently this is quite nice weather for this time of year. If fact, I nearly got heat stroke one day while auguring a tad too fast, but I digress…

So what's up besides work? (before you fall asleep)... last Sunday morning a handful of us drove to Chena Hotsprings about an hour east of Fairbanks. Was a nice hotsprings, definitely developed, but done somewhat tastefully. Though I only took photos of somewhat interesting things in the front...



In the afternoon after the hotsprings we did a hike up Angels Peak, where we got rained and hailed on just as we reached the peak. I really wasn’t expecting much of a hike so I was wearing sandals, jeans and a cotton t-shirt (the hiking shoes, gortex jacket, etc. were in the car). Oh well, since the weather here has been warm, the hike down was muddy, but not too cold despite looking like drowned rats. Side note, And we saw a moose and a bear in the same day too.



A less exciting day was a trip to the north pole. Funnily enough, one must go south to get to the North Pole. The North Pole is actually a town with a ridiculous amount of Christmas theme stuff for everything. We had also thought about driving to the Arctic Circle (ummm… is it the 15th or 30th parallel)? It's a bit of a drive though, and not necessarily nice rounds along the Alaskan Pipeline (which I saw last week as well - not very exciting, but...). Isn't the 2nd photo of Santa strange... almost like if one were to rearrange the letters in Santa one would get Satan!! HMMMM???



Well, that’s a quick update. I’ll be finished here on Sept 9 and then taking a few days to get to Anchorage - get to drive past / through Denali Natl Park, Mt. McKinley (tallest mountain in North America), etc. etc. – Then looks like I’ll be heading to Seattle for a day or two, then Montreal for a week or so and then off to Edmonton for a repeat of some work I did last fall. I had no other plans after Edmonton (even Edmonton still hasn’t 100% confirmed) until 2 days ago and then things went crazy. I got 2 emails in the morning trying to get me on a project in Nevada and then that would conveniently start near San Francisco the following week. I was contemplating how to make these fit in with Edmonton when my OL (operations lead – sort of my boss) called asking if I wanted a 2-4 month placement in Honolulu and he needed to know ASAP. What was I to say? But just as quickly, things aren't looking as good. So looks like my surfing skills may remain poorly developed :(

geeky work babble from Florida

I've just finished my first 10-day shift here in Florida. I'm drilling geotechnical borings for a proposed nuclear power plant (I should mention the drillers would probably say they do the drilling and I just watch, but...). Right now it's just swamp and forest with some interesting wildlife (at least for me). So far this week:

- three scorpions (in my empty core boxes first thing in the morning)
- one 4-foot long alligator described as "poor" by the driller who caught him and declared that he needed to be moved to better hunting grounds
- two armidillos that were squished on the access road by the drillers (I'm convinced the guy aimed for them - it is the south you know)

Did you know that this week the US just put their first nuclear power plant online in something like 20 years, and there are going to be lots coming online in the next handful of years. I digress...

I was just looking for some money from this job (12 hour days, two 10-day shifts, time and a half after 8 hours, all expenses paid = many thousand in the bank after 3 weeks of work). But this has actually turned out to be interesting work. I typically do water supply or environmental wells in unconsolidated alluvial / fluvial / glacial type sediments. If the sediments are lithified (i.e., cemented), we often call this bedrock and stop. So I rarely get to really look at interesting rock. The rock here is rock (limestone), with lots of fossils, voids and some nasty big cavities (think 10-foot caves filled with water & sediments 100 feet below the ground). These big cavities scare people because foundations for 423 billion tonne reactor buildings, cooling towers, etc. have a tendency to compact soils & rocks and cause such cavities to collapse resulting in... well, preventing such things is why were here swiss-cheesing the landscape with borings and preparing plans for foundations, grouting programs, etc. etc. I can't say life here is exciting, but interesting from a geologists point of view - life for me is mostly about sitting under a canopy, supervising the drilling and logging core. It's more usual for me to focus on well construction and hydraulic testing, so it's great experience to be here with some very experienced geologists focussing on logging rock.

And everyone has now gone home, except me. I've got 4 days off, but for me to go anywhere where I know people is either a non-direct flight into other time zones or an $1800 flight (which company would pay for, but grudigngly and does seem excessive for what would really just be 2 days once you lose the travel days). So I've decided to stick around and do a road trip on the company (I don't get paid, but expenses are covered - it's cheaper for them to have me travel about than pay for my travel time). I'm going to start heading down to the Everglades in a couple hours. I've chosen this as a general plan, though we'll see which way the car points when I get on the road. Could also go to the Keys or Miami or the beaches or ?? Though it is nearly noon, I haven't left my hotel room, am on my 3rd cup of coffee, and am very much enjoying taking it easy, doing emails, etc. etc. Perhaps I'll give an update on what happens later...

Florida tomorrow.

I've been slacking on blogging I know. I have a Peru blog in progress, but...

I'm off to Florida tomorrow for a week or three in hot humid weather. Drilling wells at a future nuclear power plant in the northern Gulf region of Florida (a couple hours north of Tampa). That's really all I know. Got a few things printed I'll read on the plane tomorrow.

Right now I'm at Gabe's packing at 11PM - well, only sort of Gabe's see he moved out, but such a small technicality :) Have had a couple fun weeks in SF since Peru. Definitely miss SF every time I leave (though I seem to come back often).

Just as a foreshadow... there's some talk of me working in Alaska for July & August, which doesn't really fit in with other plans, which is why it's just talk. But spending some time in Alaska would be neat! Especially in the summer!