Traveling to Toolik, First Day in the Field & Many, Many Animal Sightings!

On our sixth day in quarantine, we received our truck and had our truck orientation to prepare us for a safe trip up the Dalton Highway. During our last quarantine meeting, we had a total station race to see who could set up the total station the fastest. Unsurprisingly, our gear lead Jackson won taking only 8 minutes to set up and shoot the back sight. Meanwhile, Thanh and Morgan tied for last place at 18 minutes because they typed some things wrong and had to reenter them. That day, Ellie also surprised the group with ice cream after the total station race!

On Sunday, May 29th, we began our eight hour drive to Toolik Field Station. The drive was very bumpy the entire ride and very foggy with terrible visibility through Atigun Pass. Towards the end of the journey, we saw a herd of caribou on the side of the road. 

From our first day in the field, we realized the importance of vigilance since there were so many more animal sightings then we expected. During our drive to Ellie and Ted’s sampling sites in the Sagavanirktok River, we had four separate sightings of musk oxen and one of the groups had a few babies running around! At Ellie and Ted’s second site near Ice Cut, a truck stopped by to warn us that there were two blond grizzly bears just a few hundred meters away from where we were working! On our small hike to another sampling location we ran into a musk ox less than a hundred meters ahead of us blocking our path to the site. 

After hitting Ellie and Ted’s sites, we still had plenty of time so we headed over to our first stream, a thaw pit! Here, we saw two caribou in the distance while surveying. We noticed that the permafrost layer was pretty shallow today, barely a few inches below the active layer since it hasn’t warmed up from the colder months yet. Surveying and sampling this site took us over three hours since it was our first attempt at the science plan in the arctic tundra. We made some changes to the procedure so hopefully tomorrow is a bit smoother and less time consuming. Even so, we ended the day earlier than expected at 6:40 PM and hit all our goals for the day!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *