Ice_olation

Ice_olation.

This post should have been released in early January when I wrote It, I forgot I had it, It might be a little rough. I have released as I found it.

Its WInter, that is not news. But it is deep winter and that means it is road season. I was watering the snow flowers the other morning at some point during dawn. As I stood facing Winter lake, I spotted a flash out on the ice. And a thought crossed my mind. It is not a new thought its seasonal. The thought is that this place is more isolated during the summer then during the winter.

The last few days have seen some new visitors. Residents in fact. As part of a contract we host a portion of RTL's road construction crews. We host them and in return the return road passes by our camp. This gives us access to the outside world at a tiny fraction of the cost of having to order a ice road build specifically for this camp. So now we have some new faces and some old ones from last year.

To accompany the new faces is an small armada of heavy machinery. Wolverines, Hinderbrands, a few different style of snow cats, machines never seen south of 60.

Road building out here is very different form southern latitudes. Gone is the compacted gravel, the hot tar and graders. Instead there are snow, plows of various grades, fro braking trail or for establishing a usable road. Hot tar is replaced with water. Rather then binding loose bits of gravel with a nearly liquid heavy oil product, the road is strengthened and smoothed with ice.

Where the ice is less then the full thickness, but temperatures low, water is pumped from the lake on to the road surface. This flood ice is not as strong as natural ice but the addition of extra inches more then covers for the slight weakness of the flood ice.



(Science Geek Moment). The trouble with waiting for the ice to thicken naturally is that ice is an insulator. In order for the ice to thicken, the energy of the water, underneath it has to be released to the surface before the water can cool enough to freeze. But because ice can not convect, being solid, heat can only move all be it slowly through conduction or radiation. The result the thicker the ice the better the insulation and the colder it has to get for the ice to get any thicker. Add snow to the mix and insolation gets even better and the ice thinner for a given temperature.

By pumping the water to the surface, its heat can be dumped strait into the air. With out the insolation of the overlaying ice it freezes quickly. Off of the lakes water is also used to improve the ice roads.

On the portages, which with the exclusion of a few miles of road near Yellowknife the portages are not perminent lengths of road. Rather the portages are trails cut out of the bush, the route can change from year to year. Without permanence these trails are rough. Which is where the water trucks come in. Rough portages are flooded this solidifies the trail. The compacted snow and ice obscures many of the bumps.

After all this work and thermodymanics we are a couple hours from town. This lets us have visitors. Today we were visited by someone from the propane company, in a effort to keep our supply from liquifying and killing the heat and hot water at camp.

Frozen Foody Hell

A rather rough Rant.

I think I hate Yellowknife.

I have been in town working out of a hotel for a few days. A city without friends is more isolating then a camp. It has the down sides of the north without the advantages of a camp's simplified living. Out here its cold, I am in a hotel room with a barely functional kitchenet. So I am faced with trying to cook or going out or calling out for food. There is a second side effect to this posting I eat alone. At camp even though there were days I did not want all the company that was there eating alone was not enforced.

After the before mentioned few days in town I now have a biased and under informed opinion of the dining situation in this town. Firstly its a small city, there is not room for more then a couple shops of any type and many shops have no competition so service can be slack. The basis for my biased and ignorant opinion is that this town is built around Newfies and central canadians. Everyone comes here for work, many are or were miners. With them comes simple meat and potatoes eating habits.

To support this I will site that I have for the first time seen buckets of Naval cured salt beef in grocery stores, with the island of newfoundland stamped on the side of the bucket. The other thread of evidence is the unhealthy number of eateries offering, Specializing in Chinese and Wester.

You know the type of eatery, cheap plastic and chrome chairs next to formica covered tables, which were looking dated by the mid 60's. Often ran by a family who at one point were the token asians in the town. And I am sorry but you can not specialize in Chinese and Western foods, either you are a specialist in one or the other.

One last thought, feel free to take offense to this if wish. I will freely say that I am poorly traveled. But I will also say that of the places I have been Yellowknife is home to more natives then any other town I have visited. So the thought crossed my mind, why is there not a single native eatery, serving traditional food. I want to see the Dead Dog Cafe, serving 1001 things you can do with a Cariboo.

Mail the Opera

Nothern Lites Presents Mail the Opera: A Farce.

Post Card Prelude.

In the beginning there was a post card. I found it in the Yellowknife air port gift shop. It was pretty with a picture of the Northern Lights one better then I could ever take. I picked it up to send to a friend who I knew would like the random surprise of it. I picked it up without having an address to send it to or even a stamp to send it with. Those failures were quickly fixed. Armed and ready I wrote out my note in my best(worst) script and pondered how to send it on its way.

I was at camp, no roads to town at that time, and there was chaos around the planes. Lots of flights coming in but I was always else where when they came in. A week after my arrival I sent it off with Doug, the site manager. This almost worked. It got passed off to the chief Geologist and some how made its way back to Doug.

Through Doug it traveled to Saskatoon Sask, where after a week in hiding it was cleared out of the depths of a brief case. I have been told that an extra note was added to it. I had spent some a few seconds worrying about the content of that extra message, but all people in the loop have a good sense of humour. My worries were replaced with a good laugh and an interesting story to relay. Ultimately the card was well received and unlike other items it was received.

License Fugue.

Events parallel to those of the post card. On the day that post card started its journey out of the store to BC, I was on the last leg of my trip north. As is routine I had stayed the night in Edmonton. As is often the case I slept poorly. Worse then normal, that night. I slept for 20 minuets at a time. I was dead in the morning. Which is how I managed to forget my Drivers License. It was folded up in a spent West Jet boarding pass. I was able to sweet talk my way through the air port.

Once at the gate I tried to call the hotel. My phone was dead, thankfully airports are the last hold out of pay phones. It was easy to call the hotel and have it sent south to family. So far so good. It made it home in a little over a week. During that week I picked up what I was told was an address that would get things to me.

This package like the post card before it spent a week in hiding before it got sent out. By this time my rotation was nearing the half way mark, and speed in postage became key. I tracked the package online. I saw what day it arrived in Yellowknife.

I was in Yellowknife. It had vanished. two and an half days in town talking to all the people at all the places it logically could have shown up, and nothing, nada, zip.
After those couple days I had became convinced I should become a Spy master and say to hell with the geology.



B.C. Coda.

A day or two after my pointless running around Yellow Knife, I was back in BC. I had a busy time off planned. Mostly things went as planned, and it was a generally sanguine time. Its vacation like qualities were masked by things like a trip to the dentist. As I was running around half of BC I had concluded that drivers license was fully lost.

So as I was waiting to go into to the dentists chair, I set the wheels in motion to replace my lost ID. Because I had lost or placed securely in a safe place some other key papers, I had to start from scratch. Two cities later, the day of my departure for the north I was able at last to start the replacement of the lost drivers license. It was in the mail after I came back up north.

I have not yet seen this new version. I have no faith in the post so the new one can wait for me to come to it. My temporary one will be valid long enough to get me home where I can take my new peace of plastic into my hands.

For the musical score to this opera please send $1dollar, cash, to
Po Box 111, Nowhere drive,
Nowhere BC, N0W 0R1.

Silly Stuff

From Skepchick
comes movie preview that I hope is for a real film.

All Alone In the Night

The last post ended with me returning to the hotel at Quarter to 12pm. It is the drive not the work that brings this post to me. As always I write around work, avoiding specifics which can lead to trouble and honestly no on cares about a day to day log of my life up here. So I look for slices that stand out above the noise of work and the silences of snow. Though out here some times the absence of contrast can be as out standing as the brightest of days. For there is something humbling about the north.

And Down right scary at times, this though is not the gland stimulated rush resulting from a stuck snow mobile on a narrow trial, but something more demanding. After I expending my energies unstucking my self successfully finishing my Friday I had to get to the hotel. To do that I had to drive an ice road. The rout was marked, heck as long as I took the first turn as a right not a left I was headed to town no trouble. The trouble became mental.

It was Prosperous Lake, one of the larger lakes in the Yellowknife area. The roads on the larger lakes are plowed wide, to let the ice thicken and to leave room for the big haulers. So there I was Miles from any were, a faint red glow reflecting of the clouds to the south that was Yellow knife, and every thing else was white and black. It can shake me of my normally sanguine attitude.

It was real night time, no moon no stars and civilization. At the edge of my field of view was the white snow banks that defined the side of the ice road and the odd patch of white that was snow drifting across the road.

Were it not for the clouds in the sky, that icy plane surrounded by black could be any of a dozen or more small worlds speckled through out this solar system. It was just me and the truck, A self contained world 3 meters long located in neutral territory All alone in the night.

Frosted Face

I have recently returned from a busy but generally satisfying trip down south. A trip that saw me spending more nights in hotels then my own bed. Of the 14 nights I had off I spent 8 nights in four different cities. My being a slut to geography caused me to never loose my work sleep pattern. Waking me to consistently at 5:15 am and having to force my self back to sleep.

Lots got done on that trip, some fun and too much paperwork to be a full on vacation, it was just an extension of life, I was not working but it was not fully time off. But this rambling about time off is beside the point, I am back up north and work is dominating my attentions again.

Work has taken a twist, a change to routine has taken place, along with a shift to my time table sent me home a week early to bring me back a week earlier to fit a gap when we will be under staffed. So that gets me to last Friday and Saturday. I came in as usual on a Thursday and had easy half day back with some quick briefing and some simple errands.



The Friday was a little more interesting, I took my first trip to the drill on a Ski Do. If you think that is fun remember this, technically I am half blind and I can not operate in the real world without my glasses. Snow mobiles are not part of my normal world. In the hope of not getting frost bite over the hole of my face I ware a helmet. The company has one that on paper is designed to prevent fogging up. On paper that is. In practice I find my self faced with two equal evils.

The choices have become, try to ride the sled with the helmet sealed up and no glasses, or try to drive with an open visor or no helmet at all. The reason for these choice is, visor down and glasses on leads to fogged up glasses and a clear visor, if I am lucky if I am unlucky both get fogged up. When Things get fogged up at -30 they instantly freeze up and leave me blind. The visor up or helmet off option work only at warmer temperatures as the near case of frost bite from saturdays adventures attests.

Friday I managed to navigate the trail with the aid of the drill crew for both the in both directions. But the local navigation proved more difficult, the main trail is easy, there is only one main branch, its difficult to get lost. But around the drills there are many local small trails and a missed turn gets me into trouble.

I took a trail that I thought would take my to the main trail back to the road, it was a dead end. Barely ridden with lots of ruts pits and side slops. At this time I was riding without the glasses but the visor was clear so I had some vision, enough to see the trail, but not enough to read the trail. I got stuck again and again.




By the end of the attempt to reach the trail, I was burned out and the sled was still stuck. By that time I had managed to turn around and head some of the way back the way I came. As I struggled with the sled I switched from trying to get errands done to getting my self out of shit. So I walked to drill and got me some help. This delay negated the sense of my trying to head back to town, which was the original goal of my sled trip.

In failing to find the proper trail head I ended up staying at the drill site late to run a test. The day ended late, and I after a long lonely drive home I got in at 11:45pm.

More on that in the upcoming Post All Alone In the Night.

Inspired by a conversation on Slice of Sci Fi