Hammer Time

The fires still burn.  The smoke still lingers.  The crap that comes out when I blow my nose is shocking.  We’ve had 2 solid days setting up our plots in the fen/bog complex and I’m afraid the crew may only have one more good day in them before we collapse into big piles of strained muscles and exhaustion.  Thankfully, that may be just what is necessary to get us to where we want to be and then we can then move on to the next step.  We have moved 800 2”x6”x10’ boards plus another 400 (?) Or so 4”x4”s 100m over upland… another 350m through the fen and now need another 200m or so through the bog.   All along we have been building boardwalks with these splintery bruising boards.  My hammer arm is back, but I’m still slow at it.  While some of the longer armed guys pound in the 5” nails with 4-10 strikes, I’m still swinging usually at 15.  Sigh.

Anyway, it has been a long few days and the end is in sight, so that is good all around.  The site was a little smoky this morning as you can see from the picture to the right (taken from the mostly charred upland with a view into the fen).  It was generally hazy all day, but I suspect the smoke was actually from the Fort McMurray fires to our north as the respiratory situation improved with a shifting of the winds to a more easterly direction later in the day.  Fires are still burning everywhere, though they have Slave Lake mostly under control.  Fires are still north, west, and south of Slave Lake and so roads are still closed to the town and to our sites.  I found a detailed map of fire coverage tonight and if my map-reading skills and memory of site skills are all ok and fires chill out, then, our site may have been spared.  Oddly, I wouldn’t have minded if it had burned for the sheer science potential of it all, but it is a site I really like and so that would be painful, for sure, to see it in such a devastated state.  I look forward to seeing how things look up there when this all blows over.

  And so one more full out hammer-and-move-boards-till-my-arms-fall-off-day and that should get us somewhere good.  Days are a little cooler and it has drizzled on occasion, so that has helped with the fire containment.  I haven’t heard of anything around the field station of late and so I think for now things are good.

Early to bed for me today.