Learning to Ski

by Randall

During the first week at Camp 17, we spent the majority of our time learning all the skills necessary to cross the Juneau Icefield, including everything from tying knots and crevasse rescue to to  ski practice. JIRPers come from all over, so skiing ability varies greatly. Some people have never stepped into skis in their entire life, while others are powerful alpine skiers or graceful tele-skiers. Needless to say, ski practice was hilarious and there was non-stop carnage. The first day was full of yard-sales, blood, sweat, and tears.

Ski practice on the Lemon Creek glacier

The former alpine skiers are now in tele set-ups, which is like learning a foreign language. Soft leather boots and free heels make for squirrelly skiing when you’re not used to it. A few of the staffers, are dedicated and experienced tele-skiers (including the JIRP director, Dr. Jeff Kavanaugh, who is probably the best tele-skier on the glacier… and the one with the biggest ego).  They have demonstrated the skill and finesse necessary to execute a proper tele turn. After a week of ski practice, everyone can competently ski down any intermediate slope.

Fortunately, there is no lack of ski slopes at Camp 17. Fifty feet to the east of camp is the Lemon Creek Glacier, which offers an excellent bunny slope to start working on pizza-french fry transitions. To the west is the Ptarmigan Glacier (also known as the “Gnarmigan”), a much more formidable slope.  It’s steep and covers about 1000 vertical feet. At age 79, Alf Pinchak skis the Ptarmigan every morning before anyone else even wakes up, making all us youths feel lazy.

Looking down the "Gnarmigan" glacier

                  As a die-hard snowboarder, looking around at the lines on the surrounding peaks is a bit tantalizing. I haven’t skied in six years so I’m way out of my element stepping into two planks rather than one. Hills that would have been like a walk in a park on a snowboard now seem like gigantic mountains and I spend half the day falling and getting back up. At the end of ski practice, I’m usually soaked to the bone with snow filling every bit of clothing I’m wearing. That said; it’s definitely fun to be learning something all over again.

 Now that we are all feeling somewhat comfortable in the tele set-ups, most afternoons consist of ski practice on the Ptarmigan (weather dependent). It’s a great way to practice turns when the day’s activities are done. Along the ridge where the Ptarmigan starts, there are various lines down, some steep and some shallow, which allows for skiers of all levels to practice.

Alf Pinchak (age 79) on the right carrying his skies to the Lemon Creek Glacier while a student struggles to get up.

French Alex, Hannah, and Kim during ski practice on the Ptarmigan on a beautiful day

Notes from a JIRP Alum

by Jay Ach

As a JIRP alum, returning for the first time since 1973 and 1975, I am struck by the similarities to what I remember from some 40 years ago.

Weather has kept us at Camp 17 for longer than expected, so I can only judge from past and present Camp 17 experiences.  The infrastructure here is almost identical; some buildings have been changed or extended to a small degree, but it’s all immediately recognizable.  Certainly on this side of the Icefield, the weather has not improved over the decades.  All field parties were supposed to be in Camp 10 by now, or at least well on their way.  Instead, two parties that left in a brief spell of good weather are completing their two day traverse to Camp 10 today, while all others are holed up at Camp 17, waiting out horizontal rain driven by 50+ MPH winds.  The new flag raised over the camp two weeks ago has been blown to shredded tatters.

Student spirits are far from tattered, however.  Days of comprehensive glacier travel training, including knot tying, belaying, prussiking, self-arresting, building crevasse rescue systems, and learning or improving cross-country and telemark skiing transformed a group of students from new acquaintances to a group of competent scientist/mountaineers constantly on the lookout for each other.  Staff personnel is, of course 100% different from when I was here before, but exhibit the same awesome degree of competence leavened with abundant irreverence that I experienced as a student.  The last two days of being all but confined indoors in a couple of small buildings due to inclement weather would cause any normal group of strangers to go bonkers.  Given the sense of team that has formed, though, spirits have stayed incredibly upbeat and the tremendous good humor and frequent bouts of hilarity have been wonderful.

The sense of group, of being a team on an expedition, and watching out for the good of the group as opposed to one’s own self-interest, was one of my most enduring life lessons from my previous JIRP experiences.  It is great to see that the same lessons are still being transmitted to students decades after my own experiences as a JIRP student.

The science is still way cool too . . .

Introduction to Digging Mass Balance Pits

by Carmen Braun   

Today marked the first day we weren’t all doing safety training!  While some JIRPers continued doing some safety training, others expanded our horizons to probing and surveying, and nine of us began digging mass balance pits.    After the standard morning time activities (wake up call, breakfast, and work duties), we started getting ready.  Considering the fact that most of us were already wet after our work duties, we all knew we were in for a cold, wet day. 

Those of us responsible for digging mass balance pits were divided up into two groups, each with a safety staff member to show us the ropes.  We skied north down the glacier for about half an hour before arriving at the dig location. The other group’s location was a bit closer to camp.  Upon arrival, we got to work right away, after covering our packs with our tarps in a futile attempt to keep them from getting wetter.  We dug, rotating positions from time to time, for about 4.5 hours.  That warms you up quickly!  My group was really quiet; I spent most of the time in a zone where the only thought in my head was where to shovel.  It was very meditative work.  The other group was chatting most of the time, which I’m sure created quite a different atmosphere. At one point, Dougal, one of the guys in the other group, started yelling out names of things he hates as he chopped at the snow. In these cold and wet conditions, I was very happy to just dig.   However, in nice weather, I can see how digging with a little music and good conversation would be great as well.

As for the actual digging of a pit, everyone starts in the pit until snow starts to accumulate around the edges.  At that point, one moves to clear the rim of snow and the other four start focusing on one quadrant each.  We would rotate from time to time at the beginning, but I think I spent about 3 hours in the same quadrant after that.  Eventually, you have one quadrant that is very deep, and then the other three become progressively shallower.  The one in the lowest quadrant eventually starts passing snow to people in higher ones so they don’t need to throw the snow up and out of the pit. 

This has been a low accumulation year, so we only had to dig to a depth of about 2.25 meters to find last year’s layer.  It was really fun to finally see all the structures people had been telling us about, like the ice lenses and the layer of less dense depth hoar that formed above the much more dense snow from last year.  We finished our pit before the other group, but they had all the scientific equipment so we skied up to their pit to grab that.  Most of our boots were at the point where water sloshed from the toes to heels and back each time the angle of our feet changed.  My overmitts had started retaining water long before, so each time I brought my poles up water splashed over my fingers.  We ended up just separating into two new groups, one to head back to camp, and one to do the measurements because so many of us were very cold at that point. 

I am pretty sure we all enjoyed ourselves, at least in the type B version of fun.  Below are a couple quotes from other students.

“If it’s raining it sucks” – Jenny

“I like it, it’s my friend” – Matt

“No matter how vertical you think the walls are, they’re not.” – Kelly

“A good way to stay warm in the freezing cold rain.” – Randall

“Chat through adversity.” - Randall

“Good way to get in shape.  Once we get to the dry parts I think it will be really fun!” – Natalie

“If I ever want to become an ice sculptor, digging mass balance pits will prepare me well.” – Danielle

Erik talked about how it’s the only way to really see the inside of a glacier, in a way we are evolutionarily developed to understand. He compared it to probing, which is completely uninformative for the senses we use.

“Sometimes it’s like highway construction, one person is working and five people are watching” – Tristan

(This was in reference to a pit we dug where the last annual layer was only 92 cm below the surface.  It ended up being about 1m3; we fit 7 people in there and took a couple selfies once all the science was done!)

FIELD REPORT: TAKU TERMINUS SURVEY - June 26 - June 30

Introduction

Under the sunny blue sky of Juneau (we swear this is not fiction!), we, six intrepid JIRPers- Scott McGee (Alaska), Paul Winter, Martin Lang (Germany), Tristan Amaral (New Hampshire), Alex Mischler (Yukon), Saskia Gindraux (Switzerland)- took off from the downtown floatplane harbor. We packed Albert’s shiny DHC-3 ‘Otter’ floatplane with our camping gear, backpacks, a ton of macaroni cheese and spam, and land survey instruments, then flew to the touristy Taku Lodge. We passed over the spectacular Norris, Taku and Hole-in-the-Wall glaciers and had an aerial peek of the icefield we will be traversing later! From the Lodge, two small boats adapted to shallow water brought us directly to the Taku terminus.

Taku is the largest glacier flowing from the Juneau Icefield in South-East Alaska. Unlike other glaciers, it has the particularity to be advancing (over the past 100 years). The scientific community is interested in the rate of the glacier’s advance which is precisely the reason why JIRPers are sent there to measure the terminus’s extent every year.

Arrival at the Taku terminus

          Airmail delivery at camp

Study Area

Mosquitoes loved us... for dinner. And breakfast. And lunch. We had to fight to keep the bites and itchiness below insanity levels. The kitchen meshed shelter was an absolute must for our endeavor. Our base camp from June 26 to June 30 was located on Oozy Flats. This outwash consists mostly of sedge, grass, lupine, fireweed, cow parsnip, driftwood, alder and balsam poplar. Where the Taku Glacier meets the land is a sopping wet landscape of mud, gravel, buried brush and ice.

Inventory of local forces:

Aerial: the 53 Artic Terns Kee-arr!! Defense System against the rest of the world, a few bald eagles, common ravens, herring gulls, all quickly chased away by terns. Two hummingbird spies were regularly hovering around the tents, some warblers and sparrows were also singing for us. We cannot forget the noisy floatplanes and helicopters. But nothing compared to the 1,763,388,182 blood-thirsty mosquitoes and millions of flesh tearing flies.

Terrestrial: unseen unheard track-making wolves, the resident grizzly bear and a wandering moose, plus a family of curious voles.

Naval: essentially obnoxious speedboaters, including a nerve-wrecking airboat out for a Friday night rip on Taku River…

 Wolf and Grizzly bear tracks in silt

   Mosquitoes on the mesh of the cooking shelter

Methods

In order to make measurements, we carried 2 sets of Trimble 5700 differential GPS. The Trimble is a ridiculously expensive and cumbersome backpack wired to an antenna and controller, making for a very precise GPS. There was no field base station since we could use the Juneau Airport Continuously Operating Referential Station (CORS) in post-processing to increase accuracy and precision of waypoints up to 1cm.

We split in two 3-person teams and took waypoints at the ice margin, whenever ice was visible or probed under silt deposit, with a 40m interval approximately or whenever the terminus feature was relevant. For each waypoint, we waited in position for 30 seconds to average points taken and reduce error. We backed up each Trimble with handheld GPS (Magellan Meridian Platinum) for the same waypoints and for 30 seconds WAAS average for backup.

Making your way through unsupportive silt mud and rocky push moraine was extremely strenuous. It was necessary to either sneak in nap in the warm air current flowing from the glacier surface (and keeping mosquitoes away) or to play a quick game of pétanque (the famous French bowl game) with rounded rocks on flat silt to stay energized.

To finish off a day of surveying, when back in camp we would reach for a can of glorious SPAM, open and slice its content, fry in a pan until the imagination tells you there’s bacon in it and then eat. And repeat (until satisfied and/or disgusted).

         Scott explaining how to use both GPS instruments 

  Walking on the edge of the glacier overriding alder trees

Fieldwork

The first day we split up into two teams (Team Europe and Team North America) and each headed in opposite directions along the edge of the terminus. Needless to say, travelling along the terminus was unbelievably treacherous.  After each walking about one mile in opposite directions, taking survey points along the way, the two teams regrouped and debriefed over delicious spam pilot bread sandwiches. It was discovered that Team Europe only collected 35 GPS points while Team North America recorded close to 70! (According to Martin however, the terminus where Team North America surveyed was akin to the “Autobahn” whereas the section they hiked over was more like the Himalayan mountain range).

Day two began with instant oatmeal and sausages and a second swarm of very hungry mosquitoes. All six of us travelled in the same direction and collected about 35 more collective points before getting stopped by a raging outlet river that flanked the side of the terminus. This section of the terminus was extremely hard to travel over as we (Alex) encountered hip-deep mud, hard stream crossings and very steep cobbly push moraine slopes.  Again, the day’s work was debriefed with spam sandwiches which were later followed by an enormous quantity of mac and cheese.

The third day we hiked up on the terminus to explore this vast extent of ice. We were getting more comfortable walking around with crampons and route finding over crevassed terrain. We reached a viewpoint of the Norris Glacier terminus, west of the Taku before turning back for more spam! Our plan for the next day came from the skies: an airdrop containing a note from Al, along with chocolate, caramel and pop tarts. The next morning we will be picked up by boat for the return trip to the lodge then to Juneau under pouring rain.

Analysis

A comparison between the points taken in June 2013 and in June 2014 reveals that the terminus position was not moving evenly and has been mostly stable: minor retreat in some areas of 5-10 meters, minor advance in some areas of 10-15 meters. We calculated an overall average advance of less than 1.5m only which is barely visible from an aerial view as shown in the map below. This is a reduction in the rate of advance as compared to the past several years.

Overall the trip was a success as we collected the data we needed, got our stomachs almost accustomed to the gruesome expedition diet and did not get fully devoured by mosquitoes. All the while we were able to admire the beautiful, ever-changing expanse of the landscape as both researchers and explorers.

From left to right, Saskia, Tristan, Alex, Martin, Scott and Paul

Fourth of July on the Icefield

by Danielle Beaty

Waking up to a socked in C-17.

I woke up this Independence Day to a completely socked in Camp 17. It wasn’t the typical Fourth of July weather to be expected, with near white out conditions and continual drizzle, but we made the most of it nonetheless. We spent the day traversing across the Lemon Creek Glacier in rope teams of four, and attending lectures about wilderness medicine and virtual field realities that we will help create on the Juneau Icefield.

Rope team practice

For dinner, we ate American classics including mac and cheese, baked beans, spam, and homemade bread.  For dessert, we had peach cobbler and cake topped with blue m&ms, powdered sugar and jam to look like the American flag. After dinner, the sky cleared so several JIRPers and I hit the Gnarmigan for tele-skiing under the setting sun (The Gnarmigan is the appropriately renamed Ptarmigan Glacier for its gnarly ski run). Back home, I have a family tradition of skiing Mt. Hood each Fourth of July, so I was happy to be continuing the tradition. The sky was a brilliant orange color, and the view as we skied down was glorious. The snow was like soft spring corn, excellent for practicing my telemark turns.

The most lovely Fourth of July cake!

Skiing to celebrate America!

 Lindsey and I prepared a “Fourth of July Dance Party Playlist”, so after the day’s activities were through we cleared the cook shack of tables and chairs, and danced the night away to very American-themed music. Perhaps the highlight of Fourth of July on the icefield was Luna’s rendition of Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” music video, using a climbing rope and prusik hitches whose primary purpose is for crevasse rescue. Though Fourth of July on the icefield wasn’t necessarily traditional, it was one for the history books and my most memorable one yet.

Dancing like champions

Billionth Annual JIRP Knot Tying Competition

by Laurissa Christie

Crazy Costumes + Laughter + Knot Tying + Unpredictable Behaviour + JIRP Love = Great Night.

We’ve been doing a lot of safety training here at Camp 17 to get ready to cross the Icefield safely. The staff has made training fun, but stayed extremely serious until the night of the knot tying competition. The students were all divided into competing teams to compete in categories such as best dressed knot, quickest knot tying, and most stylish.

The competition looks fierce!

One of the highlights of the knot tying competition was the selection of costumes.  Before the competition, we quickly dressed in the most ridiculous funny outfits we could obtain given our limited wardrobes.  Outfits included (but were not limited to) neon shirts, flags, rain pants, onesies, hair even wackier than usual, and sports bras worn over shirts; we even had a visit from “Flava Flav.”  After we made our costumed appearance, the competition really began. We were tested on overhand knots, figure eight knots, bowline knots, double fisherman’s knots, girth hitches, clove hitches, Munter hitches, and prusik hitches. The judges were “celebrities” and completely “unbiased” – otherwise known as our favourite field staffers.  When it was widely advertised that the judges accepted bribes, Snickers bars and brownies seemed to be shared freely.  Before we knew, it people were tying knots while singing, doing pushups and yoga, dancing, sitting on each other’s shoulders, and wearing blindfolds.  The cook shack – packed with students, staff, and faculty – felt as if it could have fallen down with laughter. Everyone had fun, and it was a great reminder of the JIRP bonding that attracted many of us to the program.

Look at those smiles

Some definite contenders of the costume competition.

Perspective of a visiting professor to the JIRP

by Dr. Karen Grove, Professor of Geology (specialization in sedimentology), San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA

As a geology professor with 25 years of experience, one of the highlights of the JIRP is the 33 student participants who have chosen to stretch themselves beyond their comfort zones. They are learning to do research in a harsh environment, which includes numerous days of safety training and learning a variety of techniques to investigate the glacial environment, often in inclement weather that includes cold and very wet conditions. But always the attitude has remained positive and the curiosity to learn high. For me, it’s like taking my top students from over the years and putting them together in one class---a total joy!! The students are pursuing degrees (mostly undergraduate, but a few graduate) in a variety of Earth Science fields, but all are enthused about the ice field and the opportunities to expand their horizons. No doubt, we’ll be hearing more from them as they continue in their education and subsequent careers. It’s a bright and highly motivated group of young people that gives one hope for our planet’s future.

What does a visiting professor do? For me, it’s the first time to the Juneau Icefield, and so I’m doing the safety training along with the students. For my husband Jay, who was a JIRP student in 1973 and 1975, it’s a refresher course and a chance to reprise a life-altering experience. We also assist with the educational mission as much as we can. We provide perspectives from our areas of expertise.  For me, this has included informal discussions about geology, leading a field group to describe the rocks Camp 17 is built upon, and giving lectures on the geologic record of global climate change during the past 60 million years. Jay has provided perspectives on how to manage projects (including the students’ research projects) and used his photography skills to document JIRP activities. Some professors/researchers come here with their own specific research goals; they include students on their team and teach them how to do the investigations. We feel like one big expedition that is collaborating to accomplish common goals. Most visiting professors stay for several weeks of the 8-week-long program. Although I at first resisted spending two summer weeks on a cold and windy ice field, the students have made the experience well worth the effort. The scenery of rugged, glacially-sculptured mountains is quite a draw too!

Faculty geologist Karen Grove during safety training week.  Photo by Jay Ach

Life at C-17

by Lizzie Kenny

After more than a week at Camp 17, everyone has settled into camp life.  Wake-up call is at 7:30, which is when the most important question of the day is asked: “Is it raining?” The answer is usually “yes”, but we have been lucky enough to have a few clear sunny days.

The day begins at 8 with breakfast – unless you are one of the chefs, in which case you have to be in the kitchen bright and early at 6, as cooking for more than 50 people is no easy task. After breakfast comes work detail, and everyone chips in to do chores around camp. Daily chores typically include cleaning the outhouses, fixing the water supply (shoveling snow onto tarps which will later melt for water), refrigerator maintenance (making sure the food is guarded from ravens – also known as “glacier dragons”), sweeping the buildings, picking up little bits of trash around camp, and setting out trail lunches.

After all the chores are done, it is time to head out to the glacier! We have mostly been doing safety training and improving our skiing in order to prepare for crossing the Icefield. While doing so, we have been exploring the Lemon Creek and Ptarmigan Glaciers. Depending on the day’s activities, we usually head back to camp for lectures at about 15:30. With 9 fabulous faculty members, we always have interesting things to learn about. Lecture topics have included paleoclimate, glacier dynamics, wilderness medicine, and many others. There is occasionally some free time in the afternoon, but we are usually kept pretty busy.

At 19:00, it is time for dinner! On clear days, the majority of people sit outside, enjoying an amazing view of Juneau and the surrounding mountains. The food is always delicious, thanks to the hard work of the chefs.  Brownies have already been made numerous times, much to everyone’s delight. After dinner, there is usually another lecture or knot tying practice, mixed with fun events such as 4th July celebrations or the knot tying competition. And of course, if we are lucky enough to be able to see the sunset, nearly everyone gathers to watch. It’s lights out at 23:00, so we can get enough rest for the next full day. The whole group has become extremely close during our time at 17, and as we prepare to go to the next camp, Camp 10, we are all excited to see what the rest of the summer has in store.

Camp 17 in all of it's glory!

Students gather in the cook shack at C-17.

Everyone recaps a great day in the cook shack at C-17.

JIRPers prepare for a great day of safety training!

JIRP participants enjoy a fabulous sunset.

C-17 from above.

Burying Dead-men and Plummeting Head First and Upside-down: It’s Much Safer than It Sounds

by Kelly Hughes

A large chunk of our days at Camp 17 are spent in safety training lectures and hands-on safety activities both on and off the glacier.  JIRP is dedicated to the health of all of the participants, and the first step to being healthy is being … yup, you guessed it … ALIVE.  Fieldwork on the ice and glacier travel between camps subjects the participants to inherent and sometimes unavoidable dangers … you know, like human swallowing crevasses.  The Field Safety Staff (FSS) and certified badass Jamie Price have led us through a very nice progression of safety training lessons over the past few days. 

We started gently (swaddled in our baby blankets) by learning how to tie knots and hitches.  Everyone immediately fell in love with figure 8’s, bowlines, and double fisherman’s knots.  After dinner hours exploded with knot-tying frenzies, and experienced students helped the more motor-skill challenged individuals (like myself) with those naughty knots.  Girth, clove and Munter hitches came next, and again the knot magicians shared their secrets to success until everyone (even me) had the orientation and folding of the loops correct for each.  Our friendly FSS members checked off everyone one by one to ensure that everybody is able to tie themselves into a rope or into anchors appropriately.  A team built with self-sufficient members can travel with less risk and less confusion.  Another crucial part of successful team operation that the FSS has been pressing upon us is communication.  Effective communication can lessen confusion and keep a team focused and efficient under stressful circumstances.  For long traverses across the Icefield, like our journey from the Lemon Creek Glacier to the Taku Glacier will be, the less risk and confusion the better (assuming that everyone would like to get there alive, in one piece, and sometime within this decade).

Ice axes outside the cook shack at camp 17. Photo by Jay Ach

Just as we were all getting cozy with our knots, Jamie and the FSS took us out to a steep hill on the Lemon, stripped us of our skis and packs and armed us with nothing but our ice axes.  Jamie took us through 3 different scenarios of how we might fall (or be yanked over by a falling rope mate):

1) feet sliding out from under us onto our butts,

2) sliding face first on our bellies, and

3) sliding head first on our backs. 

There was initial hesitation from some people, but I personally have practiced self-arresting previously, so I knew very well the fun we were in for and couldn’t wait to run to the top of the hill and chuck myself off!  Everyone was jumping left, front and sideways within just a few run-throughs.  Later on we had a maximum sliding contest, burning a trail in the snow behind us!  Oh, and no one lost an eye to a poor pick placement … so the day was a WIN!

Jon Doty teaches crevasse rescue. Photo by Jay Ach

The safety training progressed to lectures on and practice with building snow anchors and belaying, should we be fortunate enough to recognize that we’ve entered dangerous territory before a team member pops through into nothingness while traversing across the Icefield.  There are regions on glaciers where extensive crevasse fields are more probable than other places, like convexities in the glacier surface (rises, bumps, or the top of an icefall) where tensional stresses are dominant, and along the margins where shear stresses are dominant. 

Along our traverse from Camp 17 to Camp 10, we will rope up in such areas, and if open crevasses are visible or probing reveals possible snow bridging, we will stop and build snow anchors in a secure area to belay team members across more questionable ground.  To do so, we will implement one or two of a few methods to establish an anchor point:

1) burying dead-men (not dead men we find on the Icefield, though that would work, but an ice axe placed horizontally into a slot dug at least 1.5 feet into the snow),

2) driving an ice axe in vertically (actually, not exactly vertical, but angled about 10 degrees away from the direction of pull for added strength), or

3) doing either of the first two methods with a snow picket if one is available. 

After the anchor points have been established, we will connect them with a closed cordelette and tie an overhand on a bite into the convergence point (called the master point).  The belayer will then girth hitch or likewise connect to the master point and put the climber/skier on belay using one of three methods:

1) an ATC belay device,

2) a Munter hitch, or

3) a body belay (though if a crevasse fall, rather than just a fall on a steep slope, is likely, the body belay is not the proper method as the friction is not high enough for a shock load). 

When practicing snow anchor building and belaying, we worked in small groups of two or three students supervised by an FSSer. Each person took turns as the belayer and the belayee (that’s not a real word, FYI), and the belayee would pretend to fall suddenly, surprising the belayer.  From what I could tell, everyone passed as a safe belayer (awesome!).

There was one more hitch we had yet to learn, but the night Jamie and the FSS had us learn it something was different.  The tables and benches in the cook shack were stacked and shoved off to the side and three ropes hung from the ceiling.  I knew what was coming because I had hung a very similar rope set up with my dad from a branch on a tree in our backyard in Colorado.  We made prusik hitches for our waists and feet, attached them to the rope (in the proper order: waist prusik on top of the foot prusik … crucial), and then we began to climb the rope to the top of the cook shack, three people at a time!  Everyone quickly realized that the hardest part is coming down … you know, when your muscles are already near maximum SWOL (as Lu-Tang would say).  We’ve set up the prusik lines on a few evenings now, and every time someone is ascending the rope (whether they’re “killin’ it” or having a bit of a struggle fest), everyone else in the room is cheering them on.  The dynamic of this group is indescribable.  For only knowing each other for a little over two weeks, we sure act like we’ve known and adored each other for years.

Kate Baustian demonstrates a self-arrest position.  Photo by Jay Ach

The last main thing on our safety training list was the crevasse rescue system called the Z-pulley.  I won’t bore you with the details (because by now you’ve realized I can turn anything into a dull novel), but it’s a 3 to 1 pulley system (meaning that we can pull 3 times the weight we could pull if we were directly dragging or pulling something up on a straight rope).  It works pretty dang well, and we’re getting lots of practice setting it up and using it with volunteer victims and/or Mr. and Mrs. Backpack.  It seems fairly complicated at first, but in practice it’s really not that bad – there are just a few places where it might be quite easy to royally mess things up (so the FSS are making sure we don’t).

That concludes the update on safety training from Camp 17.  Tune back in a few days from now to see how many of these things we had to put to use on the traverse from 17 to 10. Happy prusiking!

Virtual Field Environments Created During JIRP 2014

By: Frank Granshaw, Portland State University - Department of Geology & Portland Community College

Elias Brown and I are a team from Portland State University (that's Portland, Oregon, not the other Portland) working with JIRP students and staffers to create a virtual field environment (VFE) based on the 2014 JIRP experience.  A VFE is form of virtual reality portraying an actual place, that gives the user the ability to explore that place like they might do if they were actually there. VFEs are used in both education and research to prepare for and record fieldwork, as well as analyze data collected from a site. They are sometimes used in lieu of actual site visits, especially when getting to a place is logistically difficult. The JIRP VFE is intended for presenting JIRP and the Icefield to the wider world, as well as for the orientation for future JIRPers. 

While lots of people construct virtual tours, as indicated by Google Street View and the virtual home tours on realty company web sites, what is unique about the JIRP VFE is that it is being constructed by JIRPers rather than virtual reality geeks. This means that the environment will evolve as the journey across the ice field evolves. This is an exciting project for me because it is an opportunity to combine my background in glacial geology, with a love of teaching, experience with educational research and development, and fascination with digital technology and geoscience visualization. As I leave on my way to Portland I am eager to see what the Wizards of VFE (JIRP students doing the photography for the VFE) and others will produce.  

Watch for the public unveiling of the VFE in early fall!

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The wizards of VFE are prepared to document the sights on the Juneau Icefield.