The Colorful Lights I Strung to Brighten My Apartment Have Become Acceptable for the Season

(December 9)

Bears Seen: Still just 2

Hello everyone, I’ve decided you deserve another update. Not a lot has gone on since my last post. Thanksgiving was awesome here in Alaska. I was invited to a coworker's house where we forsook the traditional holiday bird in favor of Moose, King Crab, and two types of Salmon! It was delicious, and I came home with leftovers.

 I went to a progressive Christmas party this weekend (where you move from house to house for appetizers, dinner, and dessert) which was a lot of fun!

BEAR FACT: Polar bears have little to no holiday spirit. They would rather consume you than the bottle of Coke you have in your hand. Please do not anthropomorphize the bears.

At work I’ve gotten started on my ROV project, which is really exciting! These are the units the kids build, the frame is PVC pipe and the motors are three amp DC bilge pump motors. Right now the controls are very simple, just switches that drive a motor either forward or back. I found a simple way to ad a dial (potentiometer) to give the motors adjustable speed. I’ll also be making a more complicated prototype with an Arduino microcontroller that would allow the use of sensors, a display, and a video game controller to drive with! You know, provided I remember enough of my engineering education.

The best of the scenery pictures from night skating. Check out the Big Dipper in the top left!

I’m dog sitting two huskies, they’re great dogs. We’ve gone dog sledding twice now; it is a ton of fun! Remember the glacier from last post? There’s a lake at the base of it that freezes over this time of year. We went night skating there a couple weeks ago under a full moon (I borrowed a kick sled) and this weekend I took the dogs out there. They were reluctant at first, but once we got going we had a blast!

Glacier-adjacent dog sledding!

I’m Done Counting Days: Two Months In (Give or Take)

(November 22)

Bears Seen: Still Just 2

Sorry to everyone that for taking so long between posts. I took a week off because Sam was here, and then it was hard to get back on the writing wagon. As far as the mundane, day to day business goes, I’ve been working, dog/house sitting, and spending time with friends, the same as always. Since this post has so many weeks to cover I’m just going to hit the highlights. You’re in for a picture heavy post; they count as a lot of words, and I owe you all a lot of words.

My lovely wife was here for a long weekend at the beginning of October. We had lots of fun despite the rainy weather; we walked around town, spent some time with my friends, toured my office, and even drove out to hike on a glacier! The day we hiked out to the glacier was a little rainy, but it was still really cool!

On our way back we saw dozens of bald eagles along the road.

BEAR FACT: Bear spray (think mace on steroids) is designed to propel a mist for 15 to 30 feet. If discharged into the wind or in a vehicle they can adversely affect the user!

I got to go out on a research boat to help test new SONAR equipment on the ROV (Remote Operated Vehicle). Eventually we’ll be building ROVs with the kids out of PVC pipe, but this is the real deal. The goal is to be able to use this guy to search for schools of herring underwater. Driving it takes a coordinated effort between the operator and someone up on deck calling directions. You can’t see anything outside from where you sit to drive, just what's on your screens. I saw a giant starfish (3 feet across) on the SONAR, but I couldn't catch him with the video. If I remember correctly I was told it was probably one of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflower_seastar

The yellow cable or 'tether' is fiber optic. The ROV is about knee high, but heavy. The yellow float on top weighs 60 or 70 pounds all by itself. Oh the side you can see one of the four thrusters (angled up) as well as the ballast (silver) that makes the ROV neutrally buoyant. We were a bit positive (floaty) but the thrusters were strong enough to overcome it.

Mission Control. The big screen in front of me is a video feed from the ROV and displays the depth, heading, etc. All the controls are in that box. The laptop is displaying data from the SONAR rig we were testing. It was really cool to be able to see fish swimming around on both screens!

November has brought us amazing weather; up until this week it’s been cold but sunny. This Thursday brought snow followed by rain which all turned to ice on our frozen ground. I got a ride home from a friend with the intention of stopping by the post office on the way. I couldn’t even tell she’d applied the brakes to get ready to turn, we just sailed on by. Time to bring out the chains and studded tires!

These are from an October storm.

We got about an inch of pea sized hail!

Last weekend was the annual Sobriety celebration, a festival put on by the Native Village of Eyak to encourage responsible drinking as well as showcase culture. The native corporations are one of the few entities who can still hunt otters; the gloves and hats are super warm and soft, but also pretty pricey. There were also dancers and musicians and a big potlatch dinner (the real draw). There was moose and bison as well as shrimp, scallops, and crab; everything was amazing!

That’s about all I have for right now. I’ll try to post more regularly in the upcoming weeks! The next post (hopefully this weekend) should include night skating on a glacial lake and maybe some shots of the aftermath of today's storm.

DAY 25: One Month Down!

(October 5)

Bear Sightings: 2

Take another look up there at the top. That’s right, two bears! We were driving down the road and saw what looked like a big fluffy black cat in the middle of our lane. As soon as it started to move you could tell it wasn’t a cat, though. The cub loped across the road and up the bank and we saw the momma standing up there. It was pretty awesome!

BEAR FACT: If a bear attacks, you have two choices: play dead or fight back. The best choice depends on whether the bear is acting defensively or seeking food.

This week saw some changes in staff at the Science Center. My immediate boss is taking a position with emergency dispatch; my coworker took a second part time job at one of the schools, so she won’t be able to help me out in the classroom anymore. On Monday I’ll be the only full time member of the Education Department. So what does this mean? I’m not really sure what will change about my day to day duties, but I do know that my job is safe, so that’s a plus.  I also found out that the government shutdown doesn’t have any effect on my pay, my position was essentially paid for before I started.

Here is an adorable baby otter to help you change gears:

In more interesting news, I’m spending time this weekend working on Salmon Blitz. Salmon Blitz is an effort to document which streams in the Copper River Watershed contain which types of salmon (we have five types in the area). Everyone knows that salmon return to the same stream they hatched in to lay their eggs, but what I didn’t know was that they spend as much as five years living in that stream and going through various stages of their development. Part of my job at the Science Center will be to help create some training materials for the volunteers, but we won’t get to that until the survey is done for the season, probably in December.

A couple of giant tweety birds.

We set 10 minnow traps with bait today, and tomorrow we go out to check them. Ideally we’ll have something in all our traps, indicating the presence of one or more types of salmon. If our downstream traps have salmon, but our upstream traps don’t, then that means there is some sort of barrier preventing them from moving further upstream. If all of the traps have salmon, then the stream is a candidate for further study, someone will come back another weekend and explore further upstream.

NON-BEAR FACT: Bald eagles do not make sounds that are awesome or intimidating. The call of a bald eagle sounds like tennis shoes on a gym floor.

THIS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlq2kcYQcLc

NOT THIS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33DWqRyAAUw

Day 21: Week 2

(September 29)

Bear Sightings: Still 0

Yes, I am still alive. No, I haven’t seen any bears yet. I’ve been busy this week, hence the lack of updates. I’ll try to remedy that with this post. 

Here are some otters as my apology

We worked with the 6^th graders this week in the Discovery Room, due to their schedule we go in on Monday and on Friday for a total of about 3 hours. This is the biggest class we work with; there are 28 kids in the class. Our focus with the 6^th graders is the arctic biome and how that environment effects and is effected by the oil industry. On Monday we brought in trays of frozen muck meant to simulate permafrost and had the kids build clay houses on them. When we came back on Friday we examined the structures and how they had fared when the “permafrost” melted. We talked a little about how climate change can influence the permafrost layer.

We also talked about what defines the “arctic” (area north of the Arctic Circle, north of the tree line, or where it doesn’t get above 10 degrees Celsius in the summer) and what sort of plant and animal life you can find there. I gave a talk about energy and nutrient cycles within the environment. The coolest thing we did was “blubber mittens.” A blubber mitten is a pair of Ziploc bags nested inside one another and filled with Crisco (any type of fat will do). Then you have the kids compare putting their bare hands in a bucket of cold water to putting in their hands protected by blubber. 

Our Tuesday lecture this week was a training session for something called Salmon Blitz. The volunteers go out two to the streams on the delta on two different days, the first day to set minnow traps and the second day to see what they caught. The types of fish caught and their sizes are important, the goal is to map out where salmon spawn, and where they spend the first few years of their lives before they head to the ocean. I signed up to go out, but I didn’t have time this weekend. Luckily the program goes on for weeks so I should have a chance next weekend!

Most of my office time was spent prepping for the Discovery Room or trying to figure out how to edit the tapes from the previous lecture series. I finally got them converted into a file format that Windows Movie Maker (for Windows XP) would read, and started editing late on Thursday. I did take an online “course” that qualifies me to drive a 15 passenger van on field trips, and I spent my day on Sunday (today) getting CPR and First Aid certified. I also got out of the office on Monday to do some water sampling out on the lake. We took a canoe out to where the glacial runoff starts to mix with the lake water and took temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, and nitrogen and phosphorus measurements.

The water was super green that day, apparently you can usually see the bottom though.

 BEAR FACT: Bears don't like surprises. When you are out hiking take precautions to make sure bears can sense you coming.