Saturday, July 9, 2011

Fogged in!

Yesterday was my day off, so I had a lovely little sleep-in. I woke up thinking I slept though the chopper pick-up somehow, but the clouds were so low that the rest of the crew couldn't fly out to where they wanted to traverse, so they had a shed-day. Catie  and I got our dirty laundry together and drove into town. In the process of picking all my dirty laundry out of my suitcase I found three clean tshirts and two pairs of socks. Oh well. The place where we do laundry is also the cafe/post office/corner store, so it's a hub of activity. They have free internet, which would have been useful if it took less than 5 minutes to load a webpage. We ended up chatting with some other geologist types who were doing laundry. They were up in Boulder City doing some prospecting, and nearly lost their truck in a mud pit. One of them knew one of our coworkers, so we had a good small-world laugh about that.

We stocked up on beer( well Kokanee, if you can call that beer, it's closer to water), and went to check out the actual lake of Dease Lake. Beautiful. So beautiful. It was smooth as glass, and I took some awesome photos of it that I'll upload some day. We drove back to camp and hung out in the sun for a few hours before dinner. It was so beautiful out, sunny, warm, and windy (which kept the mosquitos away enough for me to put on shorts!).

Having clean laundry is probably one of my new favourite things. That and indoor plumbing. We don't really have access to the toilet in the house, so we mostly use the outhouse. Our shower is outdoors too, so it's a bit of a luxury to be inside these days. We eat breakfast and dinner inside, and we've even had the lights on lately because of the weather.

We were fogged in today as well, so we've had two weather days in a row. It dumped rain all day yesterday, and then cleared up around 4pm, but today it's still low cloud, maybe about 150m or 200m above where we are right now (about 800m above sea level). Basically we can't see the ridge we want to fly over, so we can't fly over it. It's pretty reasonable, but it's a bit annoying being stuck in camp all day just reading about rocks. It's good, because I'm actually learning about what rocks belong in what groups, but I'd rather the weather was dry and we were out mapping.

I did get to slab rocks all morning on the rock saw, so that was awesome. I want one of those so bad; just because the textures are so much easier to see on a fresh cut surface than the lichen-covered weathered side. It's tricky; there's a lot of volcanically derived conglomerates here (although I always called them agglomerates, but we don't like that term here, apparently), and it's weird to see plagioclase in the matrix of a conglomerate, but when you slab it open, it looks more like a conglomerate again. We've had some good debates on 'flow vs conglomerate' which haven't really resolved anything like slabbing a rock open. It's fun. I love the debates.

Slowly things have been coming together though. We've starting plotting outcrops on the big compilation map, and the databases are filling up with lithological descriptions at each station with GPS coordinates and magnetic susceptibility readings. It's going to be great when it all comes together at the end. Even though that's about a month and a half away. Not that I'm counting.

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