The theme of this season was certainly “precipitation”. I kept thinking about the Forrest Gump quote, “One day, it started raining, and it didn’t quit for 4 months”. Luckily we were only there for two weeks. We earned bonus points for the four days of snow. I’m not sure what those points will get me, but I’ll take them.
It wasn’t all bad. We actually did get a few bouts of nice weather. Usually, this was in the form of some breaks in the clouds in the afternoon when one system left and we would watch as another system churned over the mountains to the south or north . . . or pretty much all around us. One evening I yelled at the tourists (15 miles away), as we could see they had pretty blue skies over the Richardson Highway corridor. I could just hear them talking about what a beautiful day it was to be out for a drive. “Hey, look over there, it’s the Black Rapids Glacier. How pretty!”.
Nope. Miserable.
We had nice weather for our flight on June 13. At least from the road to our campsite. Unfortunately, I also needed to install some time-lapse cameras higher up on the glacier where the skies weren’t as cooperative. It was impossible to land near our highest camera site that overlooks a large, ice-dammed lake on the margin of the glacier. There is not really anywhere flat to land nearby and the snow was deep, wet, and unstable. We did fly over the lake and could see that it was filling along with numerous potholes on the glacier as well.
We had better luck down-glacier at the site of two other lakes. I managed to get the cameras installed, but unfortunately, one of the lakes wasn’t even filling. The lowest lake, on the other hand, was full to the brim!
The science goal was the same as last year. We would set out reflectors in the ice in locations around the confluence of the main trunk of Black Rapids and a large tributary (the Loket) and range them with an automatic theodolite. From this, we can determine the velocities of the ice in different parts of the glacier. We wanted to observe what response the tributary has when the lakes drain on the main branch of the glacier if there is a speed-up on the tributary as well, and how far up the tributary that speed-up happens.
Nature’s goal must have been different. I had planned this trip based on observations of the drainages for the last two years. Every drainage had occurred during the dates of the two weeks we would be staying this year. I figured it was a sure bet to at least catch one or two drainages in the same time-frame this year. When we arrived the snowline wasn’t even to our camp yet. This, combined with bad weather meant that we spent 3 days trudging through snow, probing for moulins near obvious old streams so we wouldn’t fall through the snow and 1500 feet down to the bottom of the glacier, drilling holes in the ice on which to place the reflectors, and post-holing through deep snow on a mountainside to place one fixed reflector (not moving with the glacier).
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All of that work would be in vain (most likely); not one lake drained in the 15 days we were there.
Day 2 – Woke up to gross fog, lot’s of post-holing in deep slush, more fog, then it rained.
Day 3 – Beautiful morning! I spent almost all of it trying to cross a stream.
Day 4 – Mostly rainy day.
We managed to get out and do some GPS maintenance. More difficulties trying to cross streams. Took a walk down to the landslides down-glacier, all of the water that wasn’t draining down moulins this spring was pooling up there and flowing around the debris.
Day 5 – Rained. All. Day.
Until the evening when it started snowing. We had some cool views of the mountains through the clouds.
Day 6 – I don’t want to talk about day 6
Day 7 – Waited for the snow to melt
With all of the reflectors out, there really wasn’t that much to do. Weather moved in and out all day, we ran the theodolite when it wasn’t total white-out or pouring rain. In the evening another rain system started moving into the south while there were blue skies to the north and I took out the telephoto lens to take some pictures. It was really pretty despite the weather.
Evening light hitting peaks – and a new storm rolling in for the night.
Day 8 – Pretty day.
We had to do some maintenance on reflectors that had turned in the wind or had filled with condensation, but otherwise nice. A little rainy, but not all day.
Day 9 – More fog, more rain.
Day 10 – Bear wastes day.
We were packing up to head out of camp when a large black bear came strolling down the glacier. We tried to track it but lost sight after a while. We made the decision to stay in camp since we weren’t too keen on it getting our food. We had an emergency stash of food in a bear container, but I wasn’t too thrilled on the idea of eating rice and soup for the rest of the trip. By late afternoon I was fairly convinced it had moved out of the area so headed out to do some GPS and reflector maintenance. It was the last we saw of the bear.
Day 11 – A day made almost entirely of good weather.
Actually a fun day to walk around and maintain stations! We moved our tents in the morning. The moraine we lived on might look like a pile of rocks in the middle of the glacier, but it’s actually just an inch of soil, with some rocks, and underneath is all ice. The sleeping pads in the tent insulate the ice beneath it, so the ice on the sides of the tent melt down faster than the middle. After 10 nights my nose was nearly touching the top of the tent.
Day 12 – AWESOME HIKE!
After drilling a few new antenna poles so they wouldn’t melt out over summer, we decided to hike out to one of the lakes we are monitoring to see if it had drained. It took a long time to cross the channel to get to the northern moraine, and it was not an easy hike to the lake from where we needed to cross. It was rainy, and the landscape is desolate. It’s really surreal to go walking in there. We came across a large lake that had already drained (not monitored as it’s relatively much smaller).
Arriving at the lake I could immediately see that there had been a partial drainage. There were obvious waterlines on the ice-wall to the south and there was water running into a crack nearby. When we went down to inspect the stream drainage into the crack there was also a large canyon that had definitely been excised by water drainage. Eye-balling it, it would be very close in height to the difference in the water levels we could see in the ice. It was really cool to experience the sights and sounds associated with massive amounts of water draining through the ice.
We hiked up the mountainside to the camera site to check that it was working ok and then decided to just keep hiking up. It was really nice after 12 days on ice to see some different views and the terrain was steep, but awesome to walk on (grass!).
Days 13, 14 – Bad weather – cleaned up reflectors and finished GPS maintenance
Day 15 – Time to go home!
Luckily, we had a nice weather window for take-out. That coupled with a crazily efficient and fast pilot, Brandon made getting out a breeze. I don’t think a pilot has ever even made it to our camp to take out before noon, and he managed to get to us before 10 am. He took out Andrew with some gear in the first load, made a round-trip in like half-an-hour, then grabbed a giant sling-load leaving me with basically nothing but my personal gear and some survival equipment/food.
We still needed to visit the camera sites to make sure they were still running. I had hoped to get a camera up at the uppermost lake, but the weather would again prove to be a challenge. We did manage to get close enough for me to see that it was in the process of draining. Some of the potholes had filled even more, they were quite a stunning shade of blue.
*The photos from this post (and more) will eventually be up at https://photos.lwpetersen.com/Date/2014/June/15-Days-on-the-Black-Rapids-Gl/
