SummerAtSummit

Made it through the big storm today. Forecast worked out alright with high of 21 (guessed 23) and peak wind of 28 (guessed 30). As promised, I will get into a little what I’ve spent my time doing up here…first, a couple shots of my home away from home away from home:

This is the larger building that you can see in the distance from ‘The Big House’ (as seen previously). I get to hang out in the lower right-hand corner of this frame. Here’s a direct shot of one of the ion chromatography systems that has been confounding me:

I’ll get a shot of the innards tomorrow…

The other spot I spend most of my time is a little way beyond this building. Here’s what it looked like through the back door this evening:

It’s the “building” on the right. In case you were wondering, it was as cold as it looks in this photo. In fact, I almost got frostbite on all 10 of my fingers tonight. Part of my job description is to collect surface snow samples twice a day. This requires using 2 pair of thin poly gloves, scraping up snow using a sqaure of plastic, and using a funnel to put in in a 175 ml bottle that I washed a couple months ago. Well, those glove are not very warm and after handling and filling 3 bottles tonight (doing this in the ‘clean’ area), I ran back indoors and used anything I could find to warm up my fingers. They were all purple to the second knuckle, but 3 hours later only 2 are numb. I would have taken a picture, but at the time I just couldn’t make the camera work. (Sorry Mom, I’m not trying to scare you:)

Here are a couple more shots of the conditions today:

This is another one of my patented ‘where is the horizon?’ photos

A prof from the University of Houston and a HS teacher from Billings, MT planting flags out by where they fly the tethersondes

One of the more athletic people who can get around on skies that he brought. The rest of us who work out at “Sat Camp” walk back and forth a few times each day. It was pretty challenging tonight since there was a strong headwind and the path was hard to see and had plenty of drifts. Some of the weaker ones had to stop for some refreshment on the way:

Just to impress everyone who thought my thoughts about the mild 12 degrees was cool, here’s what my hand looked like after I walked back to The Big House (about 1/2 mile) drinking a brew…between the cold and the low pressure, it was kinda foamy and my glove looked like this:

Now I’ll sit back and wait for the comments on what’s in my hand…