Chemistry sampling in the pits

Today was another long one. We performed a melt experiment for Gifford, who wants to look at how chemical signals in the snowpack may be alteredin the presence of melt. The day started out at 5, getting up to be out on our snowmachines (loaded, fueled, with some food in us, ready to go) by 6. Gifford and I went out to our site and applied some "artificial melt", snow that he had collected from this site the night before and melted inside the heated structure. Then, since we needed to give the melt time to percolate and refreeze before we sampled, we came back to camp for breakfast. Following that, we went back out and dug a large pit, took near infrared photographs to record the stratigraphy, and collected snow samples to be analyzed for chemistry- one set where melt had been applied, one set in an unaffected region. Above, Gifford and I sample in tandem. It was a long process- we "broke ground" on the pit at around 10 am, and were filling it back in after we'd finished our work around 5pm. We arrived back in camp after dinner around 7:30, ready for a nice hot meal.