Camp Flu 2011

Fusulinids: those light blue blobs in that rock. They look like rice grains

Apparently blogger doesn't like this photo, because it took me about 20 minutes to upload it. Probably because of how cool it is. Anyways, it's uploaded now, and it's pretty neat.

Today was probably the worst day I've had this whole summer. I woke up around 2am, and had to run for the outhouse. Apparently I've caught the flu that my coworker had a few days ago. It's awful dark at 2am, and puking in an outhouse is the worst place I've ever thrown up in my entire life. I got up for breakfast to tell my boss that there was no way I was going on trav today, and then went back to bed, where I remained all day until about 4pm. This flu is intense. Lots of stomach cramping, just nasty. Ew. I'm feeling better now (and I kept down some crackers at dinner, woo hoo!) but still not really enough to head out on traverse tomorrow. Which works out, because we're having an office day (weather is supposed to be crap all day).

I've been brainstorming something to write about for the Accretionary Wedge #37: Sexy Geology (hosted by Lockwood DeWitt at Outside the Interzone) so that might be a good project for tomorrow (maybe a day off where I get out of bed).

When the going gets tough, the tough get going.

Snow Peak in the middle from Aug 2nd

Today: simultaneously the coldest and hottest day we've had up here.

No joke. I woke up and it was cold in the tent, and there was frost on the ground. My watch stopped in the middle of the night (well, 4:30am) because it was so cold. It was pretty difficult to get out of my bag today.

We ended up having a bit of a roundabout morning. We were supposed to head out on a truck traverse to Hloey Lakes Road, where there's a hydroelectric facility, and had someone to come unlock the gates for us this morning. Apparently they forgot or something, because we waited for about half an hour and they didn't show up. We ended up calling the chopper pilot, and then racing back to camp to head out on traverse. As such, we didn't get out until about 10:15 or so, about two hours later than usual. We bumped back our pickup time to 7pm, so we would have enough time to do our traverse. It's a bit rough being out that late, being that we got up around 6:45. I find that I get into a groove where I pace myself(and my snacks) so that by about 5pm or so I'm about done. But not today.

The traverse was good though, oh boy. Every outcrop we stopped at was a different rock. By 3 hours in to our hike, we had 4 or 5 different rock types. We had amygdoloidal basalt, a gabbroic intrusion, dolomite, fusulinid-limestone, limestone (with recrystalized crinoids), laminated blue (and green) siltstone, chert, chert and limestone (interbedded), and some maroon and green volcaniclastic rocks. It was epic. We don't usually get this much variety, let alone all in one day. The fusulinids were neat. I hadn't heard of them before, but basically they're these little rice-grain shaped marine organisms that tend to get preserved in limestone (from here).  We started up in a swamp, and hiked down into a creek, and then along the creek, and then up the other side to another swamp. We're kind of like moose, we spend a lot of time in swamps. The creek wasn't even that bad. It was cliffy, and we got stuck ('cliffed out') a few times, but we worked our way around it, and climbed up and out, and then went back down.

It was so exciting though. We saw this EPIC fold, and I've never seen such a big fold in real life before (I've seen photos in textbooks, but not in person, so close!). It was so exciting. The photo is looking north-west from the cliff on the other side of the creek. We couldn't get down and up the other side easily, so we couldn't go get measurements off of it directly, but we did get some measurements from further up the creek.

By the afternoon, it was so hot out today, I nearly threw myself in the creek. I am not really a fan of hot weather, especially when I'm exerting myself, so when it hit about 20 degrees today, it was ridiculous. I wet down my headband twice in the creek, soaked my hair, and refilled my waterbottle. The creeks up here have the best water I have ever drank in my life, just so fresh and cold. Delicious.

We got to our pickup spot around 6:30pm, which was nice. Often we end up running for the swamp at the end of the day, and that's just stressful. We didn't really pick a decent landing spot when our pilot showed up 10 minutes early, and we were in kind of an uneven spot, so we did a proper hover-entry, which was neat. One skid was on the ground, one was in the air.

EDIT: The stupid fusulinid photo wouldn't upload fast enough and I'm exhausted. Tomorrow will be fusulinids.  I promise. 

Like, totally pheric man.

Today's trav was a bit ridiculous. We were kind of tidying up a blank spot in the middle of one of the maps (where everyone else has mapped but left a nice blank spot in the middle of some marshes). It was uh...pretty pheric(pronounced fear-ic for my dear Auntie). Oh! So one of my fellow students came up with a new slang term meaning 'awesome'.... we're using 'pheric'. I'm not sure how this started, but it's pretty neat. Hopefully it makes it into most people's vocabulary, but I don't think we're hoping for much.

Yeah. So we had a nice traverse through some marshes and swamps, up some knobs, and through more than enough creeks. And in the creeks. I waterproofed my boots yesterday with Skidmore's waterproofing stuff (on the recommendation of my coworker's professor) and the water just beaded off of them in the swamp this morning. Unfortuantely I then stepped in to a creek this afternoon, right up over my boot, and my clean dry boots are now soaking wet again. I didn't really help the situation after that, because I just started marching through the swampy bits because my boots were wet anyways at that point.

Back at camp, things are good. We've been rotating showers, so two people get to shower a night. It's decent, considering that there are only 5 of us now that two are out on fly camp, so we get a shower almost every other night. Decent!!

I had an office day yesterday, and then we had a rain day the day before, so I don't have any exciting photos or traverse stories. Maybe tomorrow will be exciting. I'm hoping, anyways. :)

A Sad Day for the Geological and Flying Community

There was a helicopter accident north of Stewart, BC yesterday that claimed the lives of two geologists and a helicopter pilot. Their names haven't been released yet, but thankfully the UVic student who works at that same camp was not in the accident. The full news story can be found over at the CBC, but they don't have a cause of the crash or anything yet, or names of those killed. This is just such sad news, and I send my sympathies and condolences to the families of these three men and the rest of their crews.

I know it's dangerous out here, but this just really hit home for me, that accidents do happen, and that accidents out in these remote areas don't often end well. It's scary. It won't stop me from going out, but it's something that sits in the back of my mind now.

90% chance of rain? More like 100% chance of downpours.

I woke up to a downpour of rain on the tent today. It was just the sound I was hoping to hear. It's not that I didn't want to go out on traverse today, but it's nice to have an office day every once in a while. Plus, traversing in the rain yesterday and not finding any proper outcrop was a bit of a bummer. Speaking of which... When my trav partner plotted our traverse on the map, it turns out that little bit of possible-outcrop-from-underneath-the-tree was actually off the map we're doing. Not by much, but enough that we did truly get skunked yesterday.

So the office day today has been mostly busy. I spent the morning cleaning the shotgun and handgun (shotgun for fly camp, and my boss carries the handgun in the bush instead of bear spray). The shotgun doesn't have a waterproof case, so it's looking a bit rusty, so I had to put some elbow grease into it. I know it sounds weird, but I really enjoyed that. It's kinda fun to take them apart and oil them up while listening to music. It's soothing. After lunch, I was slabbing some rocks when the rock saw ran out of gas. After refilling the fuel tank,  the saw wouldn't spin anymore even though the engine was going. I busted out the manual, took some covers off and found the problem: the fly belt was shredded to pieces. It's going to take a while to get a new belt up here, so that sucks. The North is pretty isolated. The closest decent sized city (Smithers) is an 8-hour drive away, and the closest proper city (Prince George) is even further than that. We had to order new tires for the truck (as we kept getting flat tires) and it's been 2 weeks, and we still don't have them. Imagine if that was our only vehicle, we'd be SOL. This belt has to be ordered from Vancouver, so it probably won't even be up here by the time we're done. Basically things are shipped up here through a freight company that leaves Smithers every Monday morning, and it arrives up here on Wednesday morning. The truck is packed Sunday night, so if something isn't in Smithers by Sunday, we're not getting it for a week. Even groceries are ordered like this, so living up here requires one to plan ahead by about a week. There is a store in Dease Lake, but it doesn't really have a lot of food, just kind of the basic things you'd need, like a bigger corner store. It's about the size of a 7-Eleven. So that's also why our shower probably won't get fixed by the time we leave. It's kind of like an entirely different way of life up here. Life's slower up here, and you just have to adjust to it.

My boots have finally dried out since fly camp. While this is lovely for my feet, it really accentuates how trashed my boots are. They look like they've got a few hundred kilometers on them, which I bet they do at this point. We hike about 5-10km every day, so that's about....150km at the least. Not bad for a month, not bad at all. We've got about another month up here still, but only about 10 traverses or so. We're running out of chopper time, and also out of map area that's accesssable. That's really the main problem: Accessibility. You'd think that with a chopper we could just set down anywhere, and hike around and find rock, but unfortunately the rock here is pretty elusive. There's a fair amount of swamp and other low lying areas where there is no exposure, and plenty of bush cover everywhere else. We had a couple good traverses in the alpine above the treeline, but there really wasn't too much of that. Just enough to realize how crappy the bush is, and how lovely it is to hike in the alpine, even with the rain and snow and wind.

I know Ron was wondering about possibility of geology overlays for GoogleMaps and GoogleEarth, but unfortunately there aren't any dedicated geological ones (The BCGS has some here but they look pretty basic (Disclaimer: I can't run GoogleEarth and double check this, so reviews are 100% welcome)). The current geological map (NTS Maps 104J and 104I) or the topographical map we're using (104J and 104I) can be found at those places. Both geological maps are in black-and-white, and difficult to read (as they're coded instead of coloured). I spent a while today looking for a coloured map to no avail (which is a bummer, because we have copies here on the wall). I hope we will be using our data from this summer to create a KML file for GoogleEarth, because that would be awesome.

Edit: The maps won't load on my laptop here (slow connection and all) but this page from Geoscience BC appears to have geology maps of BC.

Mosscrop

Our note to whoever's driveway we parked in.

We got skunked today. Not by a skunk, but by the geology. We hiked 10km through the bush, along lakeshore, up a creek, around another lake, up two knobs, and then back down a creek...no outcrop all day. Just mosscrop. 

Looking northwest from the east side of Dease Lake

Okay, it wasn't THAT bad. But it wasn't good. We hiked along Dease Lake for the first four kilometers of our traverse, sneaking up into the bush when the lakeshore disappeared. We watched some floatplanes land and takeoff, and it was hardly raining at this point (as you can see from the picture).

A nice photo of the mosscrop

But we did get the mosscrop. Basically everything was covered in this lovely dense cover of moss at least  6 inches thick, so we collected a sample of moss, took some photos, and are presenting this as our 'outcrop' today to our supervisor. He'll get a kick out of it for sure.

Handlens closeup of some moss

We finished early, after adding on a few extra bits that were just off the map area. We found this overturned tree around 2:30pm that had some rocks underneath it, so we had some subcrop.We couldn't really tell if it was in situ or not, but these rocks were definitely bedded. It would have been epic if we had bedding, but we couldn't really tell. It was kinda sketchy as it was, but we had to do something geology-related today to earn our keep.

Unfortunately our slog back to the highway was swampy. Over-the-top-of-my-boot swampy. My socks are soaked, my boots are soaked...Just not good. I was already soaked anyways (thanks to the rain) so it wasn't such a big deal. At least it's sunny out now, and my boots are drying by the firepit. 

Putting my faith in foliage.

Today was the most beautiful weather we've had in weeks up here. Blue sky in the morning, sunshine....Wow. I keep forgetting what summer is supposed to be like. It was a great day for a traverse.

We started off up on this knob in the forest, hiked down into a creek, hiked around in the creek searching for this limestone for a few hours, and then hiked back up the other side, and then hiked along a ridge until we got to the swamp for our pickup. The hiking-down part was pretty good; the bush wasn't thick, and we had some outcrop. The creek was pretty dense with brush. It had a pretty good flow to it, even pretty deep in some parts. We had a bit of trouble finding somewhere to cross, but we found a bit of a logjam to cross eventually. The creek was pretty cliffy on both sides, and we had to do a bit of depending on foliage to get around. We had to kinda Tarzan off of this cliffy part using a tree branch, but the branch was covered in dry pine needles, which mostly ended up in my hair and down my shirt. Pretty awesome. There was a ledge I had to inch over, grasping onto juniper branches (I was wearing gloves) to prevent myself from ending up in the creek. The edge of my boots barely fit on the ledge...It was a bit of a tight maneuver. We spent a few hours hanging out around the creek, searching for this limestone that was apparently there. I guess the team that mapped this area back in like the '80's did it all from a helicopter, and granted, these rocks certainly look like limestone. However, they just have a calcite cement on the surface, and when you whack them open with your hammer (or with your trav partner's sledge), you can clearly see that they are not limestone, but a flow-top-brecciated type of rock (lots of amygdoloidal basalt (with zeolites) and clast-y bits).  So, we did make some changes to the map (which is what our main goal this summer is), but it was a bit of a pain to bum around in the creek all morning...especially this afternoon.

We had a late lunch by the creek, and then hiked up the ridge again. Unfortunately the bush was a lot thicker on this side of the creek. It was a bit brutal. My thighs and hips are killing me from having to kangaroo-step over all the bush all afternoon. We ended up taking a bit longer to get up the hill than expected, and it was a bit further than we thought to get to our pickup spot. We scaled the ridge by about 3:30pm, and then we had another 3km or so to get to the swamp/pickup spot. I have never bushwacked so fast in my life. It's too thick to run, but we definitely hoofed it. We knew it was going to be close, but we really had no other options. So we booked it. And still did geology. At 5pm, at the last geology stop, we had just over another kilometer to go to the swamp, with a half-hour till pickup. The bush for that last half hour was probably some of the worst bush I've been in up here, and that's saying something. The shrubs were about 8 feet high, and dense enough that I lost my trav partner a couple times (He's taller than me, has longer legs, and can walk over logs and shrubs that I have to yoga over). We did make it to the swamp with about 2 minutes to spare. I'm so tired now. I have to stretch out my legs tonight for sure, otherwise tomorrow morning will be brutal.

Speaking of brutal, our shower broke about 6 days ago, and it's not fixed yet. It's an electrical problem with the pump inside the on-demand-heater, so it's pretty much beyond repair, but I think we're getting another one sent up here, but that will take about a week or two. It's pretty isolated up here. A couple people have lucked out and had brief showers inside the house, but because the hot water tank is not working properly, we have to have super short showers, and only two people a day. I haven't showered in 6 days, and I don't even really mind anymore. I'm sure I smell bad, but I can't smell myself (like I could after fly camp) so I'm sure it's not that bad. That, and we're all in the same boat, alternating showers. Today was a rough day to have no shower, as I have a riduclous amount of nature in my hair.  I'll have to shake myself off before I crawl into my sleeping bag tonight.