Road....well, Sky Trip!!

This weekend I was able to go on one cool trip. As some of you might know, on Thursday a group of 8 people from both Canada and Germany flew into Alert in a DC3 from Greenland (originally from Germany). Today they continued on to Eureka to the south, and their eventual destination is in Alaska. They are doing IPY (International Polar Year) research...everything from measuring aerosols to solar radiation to ice thickness. Their plane is basically our lab with wings.
Anyways, on Saturday, their engineer didn't need to fly along on their daily excursion, so the seat was tossed to their hosts...Adrienne and myself. Adrienne was super nice enough (THANKS ADRIENNE!!) to let me go along, as long as I took lots of pictures and filled her in on the details.

We took off and started with doing spirals at 500 foot intervals over the station to do some radiometry work. Below is a picture of station that I captured. It's not the best, because they were using the lab and the station as their baseline, so we were always right over them, but it was still fun to see from the air. I also got a picture of the same hills that I've been putting up all winter with the sun....but from a slightly different vantage point!We then flew WAAAY West to the western edge of Ellesmere Island. That in itself isn't too cool, but what WAS cool is that we did it at about 200 feet above the ice dangling "the Bird" below us at about 50 feet off the ice measuring thickness. I got some great video that shows the ice just rushing past.

We then came back East, and flew over Ward Hunt, a camp that's even more North than us (although not permanant) and got some more pictures. Finally came back to the Station and got some other pictures of a Twin Otter that had just landed.I'm leaving in a week and a half now, so there will likely be only a few more Alert posts. I'm anxiously awaiting the golf season...but I'm really sad to leave,

Graham