Toolik field station

Well I'm up in the arctic and last night was my second night up on the Dalton highway, the road was built back in the 80's by the Aleysken oil pipe line company and was the idea of James Dalton who its named after, the road is about 500 miles long and runs from Fairbanks up to Deadhorse and your horse would be dead if you rode up hear in these temperatures, not a lot lives up here
once you get above Coldfoot and to a lovely small hamlet called Wiseman which is about as far north as you can to find animals like Martin which are caught up here for their fur which can fetch between $40 and $100 these kinds of practice are a necessity for people who live all year round and i loved seeing the small huts which have generators to power battery packs for lighting and the manage to either melt snow for water or have bored under the house to unfrozen water tables below the surface.
I stopped to have coffee with two families that live in Wiseman one couple that runs summer tours like hiking and wildlife and his wife who writes for a fisheries magazine and another family who have a very small gold mining company a small family business many people have rights to gold mining areas of land going way back to the early settlers and that is before the oil company moved in and put the road in. For the first time i saw Dog mushing in real life and all the fantastic healthy looking dogs they use to pull the sleds, children are home taught and live very close to nature.
I left Wiseman a 2 pm yesterday and drove up to Toolik arctic field station which took me about four hours and i passed by the turning as it was hard to see and off set about 1 klm off the road.
living on the road now is very different and the temp is so cold that it does strange things the engine temperature is running much cooler and as it is a diesel and diesels cool when the idle and petrol engines heat up so this means when i sleep inside my cubby hole in my sleeping bag that the front blower runs very cool even though i have the engine running 24/7, i really on having the back up diesel heaters which is a Webastow airtop 2000 and a Thermo Top P under the bonnet without these heaters it would be a lot harder and all my food in the car would freeze up, when the temp dropped to minus 40 they water pipes for cooking and washing froze and that in the car, as soon as i stop get my gear on to make tea the pipes freeze within a couple of minutes of opening the tailgate, its incredible, I know have to cover my face when outside and your eyes can also get sticky and can stick open if you don't wear goggles, take your gloves off and touch metal and its painful, i would have no way of working on the car in this weather, i am living on a knife edge at times, at least i have my emergency tracker and can run a petrol stove with the window open a bit in an emergency.
Being above the Arctic circle in the winter means no sunlight at all however you do get some light coming over the horizon for a period of time on the flip side is that in summer they have Sun all day long too.
The Toolik camp is by appointment only and i am very privileged to be invited by a scientist called Lesa Hollen from the Neuroscience Visualization M.S.
Dept of Biochemistry & Neurochemistry
University of Alaska Fairbanks
their is only three people here this week managing the site at any point scientist from all over the world come to gather all sorts of data even Nasa use it, its not open to tourists and i am so excited to be on site, it is everything you see in the movies about the Arctic it has Skidoo's and dome style huts all covered in snow bearded men and puffy jackets walking through blizzards,
The accommodation barracks are remind me of being on a ship and everything is well organized and water is a luxury so plates and cutlery is paper an plastic and you have to use out side long drop style toilets and if the heater has not been put on you can freeze your bum to the seat. Its all good fun and i am hoping to be shown around the site more extensively today.
From here later i will drive up to Deadhorse and the oil terminal at Prudhoe bay you can see polar bears up their too and they are massive the biggest of all the bears. The scenery is incredible and when people say their is nothing to see for miles they are wrong they must mean you can't see Mc Donald's or houses, but you see huge mountains with very jagged shapes very aggressive looking glaciers too it makes you feel so peaceful and relaxed, the climb up the Antigan pass where i climbed to nearly 5000 feet was a really long haul and the new oil cooler coupled with the low external temperature means its no longer over heating too. I'm going to go now and have a flannel wash and make some tea.
I want to thank everyone for being so kind to me on this trip it just goes to show how everyone helps everyone out here in the wild.