Group 3 is officially in Fairbanks! 

After a very long day of travel Nate, Emma, Elizabeth, Ellie and I (Chris) successfully landed at Fairbanks International Airport yesterday at around 9pm. Nate, Emma, Elizabeth, and I had a short flight from Connecticut to Minneappolis, had a long layover and then met up with Ellie for our 6 hour flight to Fairbanks. A shuttle took us from the airport to Sophie’s Station which is where we will be quarantining for the next eight days. We did some quick grocery shopping as a group and then officially began our quarantine at midnight. 

Overall, we had a busy first day of quarantine. We started the morning with a meeting outside in the rain to get used to the weather and try out gear. We went over the science plan and safety protocols in depth, reviewed emergency communications and put them in our field notebooks, discussed the social media plan, and received our gear that we had stored in Fairbanks. We then went over the Code of Conduct, organized the daily plan for the remainder of quarantine and started data analysis for the total stations and isotope data that groups 1 and 2 collected at the beginning of the summer. We hope to use this data to get a better understanding of possible trends and patterns, and make changes to our science plan depending on our findings. We also met with Oskar, Sam, and Jackson who all gave good insight on data analysis and other helpful information. After this we called it a night and decided to pick things back up tomorrow morning. The weather cleared up so some of us decided to go on a socially distanced walk outside to get some fresh air and keep from going stir crazy in our hotel rooms. (side note: Elizabeth has already locked herself out of her hotel room twice and we haven’t been here for 24 hours yet…)

So far the last two days have been long but very productive. It has been great getting to bond as a group and we’ve been working together to make sure we have a solid plan while in the field. We still have a lot more to do, especially for data analysis, but I’m fully confident that we’ll be able to get it done and successfully conduct our science plan while in Toolik.