Monday May 19th:

As forecast, we woke up to moderately high winds and low visibility this morning. The wind started around 3am, at about 10 knots, and steadily increased to 23 knot average for most of the day. We’ve had such good weather so far that we decided to take it easy and wait until the weather would improve to resume our activities.

Bluee was the first one to get up, and he immediately went to shovel some fresh snow to make tea and coffee for breakfast. Mid morning, as it looked like we were not going to get out before lunch, Tessa baked delicious French toasts.

Shortly after lunch, I went out to “Mountain Side” (our sampling site) with Rebecca and Ali to evaluate whether there was any damage to our tents. We drill in one of these huge inflatable party tents, and it’s not really clear yet how much wind they are able to whistand. We were pleased to see that no snow got into the yellow dome. A couple of the pillars of the large white tent were partially deflated, and we re-inflated them, tensionned the guidelines.

Wednesday May 21st

After a warm and sunny day on Tuesday, the weather forecast was for snow and another storm on Wednesday. Snow started falling on Tuesday evening. Lots of it. When the wind peaked up, it redistributed the snow around into huge drifts, doing its best to erase any object or color in the landscape.

We went back out to inspect our drill tent, and we were pleased to see that only one of the pillars had started loosing air. We had tensionned the guidelines again, and it held up better.

The drifts are definitely a challenge to walk through, they are so light you sink in to your thighs, and they can be quite steep. My tent also got almost completely buried. When clearing it, I need to be very delicate with the shovel, or I risk to put a hole through the tent.. But the snow is very light, and it’s an easy job. Only we need to do it over, and over, and over again…