The North Slope has blessed IGEA with some beautiful weather the past couple of days. After the cold and rain from earlier this week, the sunny 40-50 degree days today and yesterday were very much welcomed. We took full advantage of the warm weather yesterday; we left Toolik at 8:30 in the morning and didn’t get back until 9:30. We surveyed three different reaches of one of our highest priority sights, and also travelled to two of Ted’s sights to collect water quality samples. It was a very long day but everyone was very happy with the hard work that was done. We decided to push data entry off until the next morning and gave everyone the night off so that they would have a chance to rest.

Today we started our day a little later, meeting for breakfast at 7:30. Following breakfast, we entered the data from the previous day and then went out to the stream that we had gone to two days before. Despite getting a later start than usual we were still able to see two different sights at the stream and conduct a detailed survey on them. We even made it back in time for dinner at Toolik, and we all enjoyed lasagna together!

As we have spent more and more time in the field we have gotten better and more efficient at taking measurements and entering data. We were not expecting everything to go perfect, but we have made adjustments to our research plan, and we believe we are still on track to hit our goals for success which we outlined last semester.