Lake E Daily News, Russian Orthodox Easter Sunday, 19 April, 2009
We started the day with a little Easter Candy and traditional Easter Breads at breakfast today. The crew spent more than half the day out at the rig finishing the jack up of the rig runners from the ice surface with success. Most of the drill rig is now sitting on wood with the casing and pipe still down to -395 m. When we are ready to move later, the rig will be rolled about 10 meters to the north because the ice surface there is in the best shape.
Addie, Brady and I traveled to the old cabin site at the outlet by vezdahot with Jenia to take down the old YuriMet Station first erected by Matt Nolan, UAF, in 2000. Many of the above ground instruments are now damaged even though the solar panel was still charging the solar battery (got some sparks when I cut a few of the wires). The anenometer was found sitting on top of the battery box on the ground with some impressive teeth marks on it. We managed to dig out most of the tower from 75 cm of hard packed snow, but another trip will be needed after the snow is gone to get everything remaining on the ground and in the ground. The data from the data loggers should give us info since the last download in 2003, if some of it hasn't been written over by more recent data (once full, it writes over on the oldest data). Other small temperature recorders placed years ago on the top of Geodetic Peak have been recovered by earlier crews.
Otherwise a slow day here for the holiday and its snowing a little. Mud truck should arrive on Monday night and we are now hoping to fly in the lifter parts on Tuesday. We should be drilling again by night shift on Tuesday. Unfortunately, we can't speed up Christian Koeberl's immigration process in Pevek until Thursday.
Its snowing lightly tonight. Yesterday the crew at the plat form spotted an adult sized wolverine (vielfrass, in German) about 150 m from the rig.
All the best........ Julie BG
