Readying for Radford

James: I can’t believe today was our last day in Barrow.  This week went so fast but I suppose that is because we stayed so busy.  This morning we needed to finish up taking data on the survey we started yesterday.  This data will give us a 3D scan of the ice.  After the success of the 2D data I have high hopes for this data, but it will take considerably more time to process.

It was pretty warm today, around -5F.  The wind was high though, and this made it feel very cold.  For the first time some of the cold came through my coat.  That’s a parka, a one inch foam liner, a fleece and two tee-shirts.  That’s cold.  It’s a balance of heat transfer though.  All you have to do to warm up is walk around briskly for a few minutes and the temp inside the suit can skyrocket.  We were off the ice by noon.  Dr. Herman and I turned around looked out into the horizon.  If felt like leaving the beach in the summer; we didn’t want to go.

After lunch, Dr. Herman found a poster printer and we made a small poster of the preliminary picture of our data to show to the CRREL team.  They weren’t around though so we went for one last trip into town.  We called a cab to take us to town.  We need the money tourist shot so Dr. Herman and I put on the tacky Hawaiian shirt and shorts and stepped out into the -5F with a -30F wind chill.  It was cold.  A quick couple snaps of pictures and we jumped back in the cab.  We needed to ship the borrowed transmitter and our malfunctioning transmitter back to Geometrics.  After we shipped that out we walked around town to see what we could see again.  I wanted to check out the fur store they had.  The natives make beautiful and practical jackets from all different animal furs.  We poked around some more and got some more souvenirs for the relatives and friends back home.

The evening was relatively uneventful.  At 8:30 we met with the CRELL team a while before their evening meeting started.  They were excited to see our data.  They seemed interested in what we had found and how nice of a picture we could get with our equipment.  Everything is going well.  Tomorrow we get on a plane at 10 a.m. Alaska time and we will get back to Dulles airport around 7a.m. Sunday.  Loving the time change.  I am going to miss being up here in Barrow but I am looking forward to going out side without layering up and fighting the cold.