Autumn OTZ

 There's really nothing like a crisp autumn day to go outside and do some fieldwork.  Last week Pika and I headed up to Kotzebue for a late season field project.  For once I was working in snow that was not on a glacier.  How novel.

 The fun part of being in a 'town' instead of a remote village is that equipment comes from down the street instead of off a barge or plane.  It also means there can be novel ways of getting small equipment to the jobsite, like using bigger equipment......

 Pika and I were almost done jarring dirt when the afternoon jet took off overhead.  That meant that we had some time until the evening jet.  After we had all the samples packed up and checked in at the airport we had a walk around town.  We have been through here a couple times this summer and already seen the majority of the changes around town (they paved 1st Avenue!!).  The view never changes though; I still feel like I am standing on the edge of the earth when I look out towards the ocean here.  You can hardly tell the sky from the water most of the time.

 The view from the flight home is nothing like the small plane from Bornite a few weeks previous, but it is impressive.  The evening jet goes up to Nome before heading down to Anchorage, so we caught part of the flight in the twilight.

And there I am, partly decked out in safety gear.  The excavator was gone, so we didn't need hardhats anymore and we were done digging holes so we didn't need safety glasses anymore.  But my vest has better pockets than my jacket, so I opted to leave it on while we were taking our final field measurements.