Blessed Little Curse!

The cat that 5 weeks ago was a blessing to our shovel weary souls has since become an albatros dangling from our necks. This place is beginning to look a lot like New Orleans, we have our own Ninth Ward and a French Quarter at the other end of town, only here the dikes are working in reverse: they are holding the floodwaters in. After we had dug most of this place out what seems so long ago, our expeditor started sending up boxes and bags from our warehouse that were marked for camp. One of the first that arrived was a bag with 4 lifejackets. At the time I thought it was a bit of a joke, now I am worried that we don’t have enough.

What was once a tidy white paradise (I wasn’t thinking straight not long after the shoveling ended) has since turned into something resembling a redneck ghetto. Half garbage dump from what was left of our corebox walkway of last year and the other half swampland dotted with pallet mangroves. There is very little in the way of dry ground within the confines of camp but venture to the other side of our dikes and the snow is melting rapidly, the runoff quickly absorbed by the thawing tundra. Meanwhile back in the barrio our water meets the snowbank and creates a nice ice interface further retaining the melt. This place has surely turned into Bizarro World; with our moat on the wrong side of the fortress walls the only thing that could possibly help our plight is if it never got above zero. Good luck with that given that June is but 4 days away.

Oh hey look!

… Its supposed to snow on Monday night and Tuesday...Perhaps?

Perhaps not.

If the rising tide wasn’t bad enough the rubber boots I bought before embarking on this adventure suffered a cracked shank and now let the floodwaters in. All of that work shoveling all of that snow put a strain on them that wouldn’t be realized until it began to melt away. Now by noon when the overnight ice begins to melt I begin to tread lightly because I know that even the slightest emersion means wet feet which right now is a real pisser when I am trying to shake the Sedna influenza pandemic.

One of the biggest disappoinments about the thaw is the loss of my mini-bar, but alas perhaps there is something positive that can come of all of this courtesy of the half-witted, inbred, trailer-trash, indigenous peoples of the Deep South. Eventually the lake is going melt, and the fish will be hungry. All we need is a boat, or maybe a hurricane and a little ingenuity will do?

The Snowball Effect

"Today's forecast is total crap."
-Strong Bad (downloads)

Snowball…

Pretty much sums up the last week in any number of significant ways: circumstance, situations and weather.

Now might be a good time to explain condition purple; It’s a mood ring and it is the ultimate representation of how field progress is going and whether or not it is safe to enter the office. Ironicly lately we have been in a state of yellow. Irony indeed considering the shit that we went through.

I should begin by saying that we were in an emergency state.

No Bananas!

The monkeys were restless and they are all in camp for any number of reasons, but they all revolve around one core issue: The weather sucks, and it’s the worst kind of sucks. Low cloud, fog and the threat of freezing rain. 3 days and counting… This has led to a few problems. The helicopter pilot won’t fly; this results in all crew changes for the drill being done by snow machine. As well as crew changes trips to the drill to check on progress are also done by snow machine. Throw in roughly six trips a day and we begin to suck up the gas and oil at a surprisingly rapid rate. Which now leads us to… A fuel crisis.

On top of the fuel crisis was a cigarette crisis, and a beer crisis(ongoing), and a cooks helper crisis and the already mentioned banana crisis. All because the weather is too shitty to fly in… or is it?

So there is also a water crisis and a safety crisis out at the drill. This was for a moment one of the most puzzling aspects of the last couple of days. The drill foreman wouldn’t allow the guys on dayshift to work because there would be no helicopter support, but during night shift when it’s dark there are no issues? And no problems with the 40-minute ride 4 times a day over the tundra for the last 3 days? Now we are dragging water out to the drill because of the distance to the nearest water source but there is a fuel shortage for the supply pumps and then there is some kind of accident where one water tank falls off of its sloop and crushes another tank so now there are no holding tanks for the water and no fuel to pump it and because the helicopter hasn’t flown in 3 days now the drill has run out of diesel and absolutely nothing is getting done.

With all of this we are in condition yellow?

So we got a bit of respite, beginning with a new pilot. The last one was real cautious and the drillers weren’t to secure with the idea that he was going to be working above them. The new guy flew more on his first full day then the last one did in his whole tour. In fact we had a Twin Otter fly into camp when the last guy wouldn’t go at all… it looked a lot more like a float plane than a ski plane when taxing around here as the snow on the lake was getting a little soupy.


So we get the gasoline the drillers load up the snow machines and water pumps, and while coming back to camp at the end of their shift. Georges escape vehicle dies 8 km’s from home. They drag out another one the next day and it meets a similar demise. Now we have no shortage of gas but 50% less machinery to pump it into. And still no cigarettes! Desperate days to be a driller and profitable if anybody had any left of their own supply.

The snowball keeps getting bigger because now it’s too soft to drag the drill anywhere and now we are starting to move it with a helicopter and the weather goes back into the toilet. We did have a little bit of good news though as eventually the boys did get their smokes.

For a little bit of chocolate sauce on our giant snowball… the new pilot got himself a little bug on the jet to Rankin. Worst cold he says he’s had in 20 years. Out there trying to move the drill with a foggy head and at the same time it is literally in the clouds. The drill hasn’t moved too far as a result and with so much time spent in camp the last couple of days he has sprinkled the camp with his infection.

Mmm… Sars

Looks like we are going to have another shitty morning. With so many bad things happening we have no choice but to drink away the evil…Again.

How does a Buckleytini sound?

Herb Alpert

The Poindexter Adventure Club left town yesterday. We couldn’t have been happier to see them and their fearless leader, who I had dubbed Martin Prince for his know it all been there done that attitude as well as likeness to the smarty-pants fat kid who nobody cares for, leave. An incident occurred not long after dinner that resembled a similar event last year.


Total population Sedna Camp: 12

4 people currently at the drill, 2 night-shift asleep, 2 kitchen crew doing kitchenny stuff. The other 4 in various states of horizontal and semi-consciousness.

Condition Purple

If it weren’t for all of the snow and lack of trees I would think that we were in the heart of Borneo. It may sound odd but at times it feels as if we are surrounded on all sides by dense foliage and listening for the strange calls in the trees. The monkeys abound, even if you can’t see them you are constantly aware of their presence because of the tell tale evidence.

We are now a full week in with the whole crew, 17 people in total, and we have a grand total of 1 hole in the ground to show for all of our efforts. The drillers arrived last Thursday and then spent the next few days digging the drill out of its winter confines and then determining what they had in front of them.

Here is what they discovered:

No inventory
No functioning spare parts
No tools
No time sheets, which might not have been too much of a big deal because…
They had no clue what they were being paid.

Fortunately they are a good hard working lot, they persevered to get the rig started up and ready to drag out to the first set up and along the way the bastard fell of the skids because the gibbons that left it “assembled” at the end of last season decided no to secure it to its skids. Then when all seemed rosy the hydraulics went for a shitter just at the end of the hole, so rather than risking having issues like we did the previous field season, the drill head office told the boys to stop all further work until new parts and a mechanic could get into camp to put everything together properly… Which of course takes time; stand by time, and who is going to be paying for that.

It would seem that down there at the drill office in Flin Flon, orangutans staff the shipping department. They are fully aware that there are important parts to send to camp, in Rankin Inlet, so they figured the best way to get them to us was to send them to Thompson “Hold for pick-up” and hope that someone would know how to get them to us. Well being that we are 500+ miles from Thompson , it was not looking good. Fortunately we have a pretty good zookeeper (expeditor) down there that was wondering the same thing.

Then there are the baboons that put this camp together, I have mentioned that they worked ridiculously hard given the circumstances but they certainly weren’t thinking very long term when they got everything sorted. First off there was the back-up generator, just big enough to power the office and a couple of fridges should my girl act up again. Well as soon as the big girl was up and running they just forgot about the little power unit. It wasn’t until they were just about out the door that it was revealed that our back-up power source was encased in 6ft of snow and ice.
I don’t even want go too deep into detail about the tarps on all the tents that might as well have been held on with thumb-tacs considering how little time it took for them to be ripped from the roofs during the first decent blow since they were attached.

Pass the bananas!!

Which brings us now to poor old George our cook’s helper, I mentioned him earlier and last year I documented just a couple of days of his escapades last year . Things were going pretty good for George up until last night. When not helping out in the kitchen he works on his carvings, and lately he has been offering a trade of a “shot” for a carving. One of our drillers took him up on the deal and one mickey of rye later poor George was howling at the moon and firing up one of the snow machines at 1am ready to light off for Rankin.


Unfortunately for George he didn’t make it too far, as well as being a little polluted it seems that the light may have been a little flat during the night, because he didn’t see the snow-bank that stopped him dead in his tracks…

The snow bank was only eight feet high on the other side of a trough dug out by the cat two weeks before. George lit into that thing at full speed; the tracks didn’t even hit the ground before he hit that wall of snow. The only evidence of his attempted escape apart from the 550 Polaris augured into the snow was a bottle of Gatorade, a jar of peanut butter, a bag of crackers and his towel left scattered at the scene, that and a little pool of blood.

George didn’t emerge from his tent for a few hours after that; bags packed and ready for a more comfortable ride home.

Lucky bastard found his way out of the jungle

The sky's the limit.

This just in...

After 10 long years, all of this digging in the North may not have been in vain.

Looks like I will have a new JOB after I am done with my contract here.

Training will begin sometime in June.

Exams to be done online over the next few weeks...

The knees are still shaking.

D.

My 25Kw bundle of joy

Believe it or not I now know what it's like to be a parent. I am the proud adoptive papa of a 1000lb 1-year-old girl named Genny.

She is a special little infant this one. You see she is very demanding. No disrespect to all of the new moms out there but my little bundle of joy never sleeps (not on purpose anyway) and is always feeding.

Now before I signed the adoption papers last year I was told that she was a little temperamental. However in our time together she was the sunshine of my life. Now I am none to sure about the growth stages of children but I think my Genny may be approaching the terrible twos or, has a form of gastro intestinal distress. You see, my girl may feed on nothing but the finest diesel fuel, but lately she has been getting gas somewhat fierce. Roughly every three hours she lets out a big fart and the power goes away for a second.

This one-second is perhaps the most dreadful second I could possibly face. You see in that one second our wireless router goes into a temporary hibernation mode and ceases to function properly and leads to my now most hated phrase. "The wireless isn't working..." Which raced to the top of the charts pushing aside: "When is the plane coming?".

Now sometimes the girl lets out a real big fart and goes to sleep. Something akin to combustion engine crib death... The only positive to this unfortunate malady is that everyone is aware that the wireless isn't working and I don't have to be told or asked about it.

As with most children it is usually something in the diet that causes such terrible distress to the parents. In this case the food is fine it’s just that the child ingests a little too much air with her diet of liquid bang and has to be burped every three hours. Being trapped in a small Northern community isn't helping matters out a whole lot either as the doctor is a long-distance phone call and a long plane ride away. Many phone calls are made to diagnose Genny’s tummy troubles and like a good father I get up every three hours night and day to burp the child when I know that she may be feeling a little bloated.

I talked to another specialist this morning, and all going well we will have all the medicine my little girl needs to keep her fat and happy. But as every parent knows, we will be the ones all fat and happy with a good nights sleep.

Live From the Icy Grip of Hell It's Saturday Night!!!

By the time that this finally get posted it will have been a week since I was ripped from the comfort of a somewhat sleepy little community and plunged into the cold bowels of hell.

In case you may have missed it. Hell has in fact frozen over; it’s an annual occurrence that happens roughly this time each year except in 2004 when I was in flight school. It’s mobile too. That Satan likes a change of scenery. I almost managed to avoid it in 2005 but when I decided that I wasn’t cut out to sling G&T’s for the Little Billionaire I managed to catch front-side of the return to the inferno.

Anyway, seven days ago I was a normal human boy, now some million plus shovel loads later I am but a poor representation of my former self. A broken, babbling incoherent wretch, truthfully not too different from how I present myself down south save for the extra 4 inches of clothing.

The record of the inquisition began well enough but then just turned into stream of consciousness, or is that semi consciousness?

By the time the satellite is set up and the porn machine… err I mean my portal to the World Wide Web, is up and running again I will soon return to the well informed socially conscious gentleman that I once was.

Until then…

The Horror:

April 29, 2006

At some point I have to wonder if it is all worth it? Is it for the money, the experience or to see something new? Or am I just a masochist? I can’t so much as look at a shovel without getting tendonitis in my elbow and just the idea of wind is enough to give me a migraine.

Pictures can only do so much to give any sense as to how bad conditions are here. When packing up this place last September there was considerable thought given as to how best to protect the infrastructure both from the weather and any possible visitor. In the end it was to good for the visitor and not enough for the weather. I am not convinced that anything short of removing everything down to bare floors would have prevented the snowdrifts from accumulating as much as they did. But the extent of the burial was incomprehensible.

Now after a solid week of digging all the tent frames have been uncovered and skinned with canvas, and not a moment too soon. Currently all six of us are holed up in our individual abodes and we are all armed with buckets to deal with natures call and shovels on the inside of the tents to help get us out in the morning. It doesn’t require too much traditional knowledge to realize when the shit is going to happen, just a keen awareness of the sudden shift in wind direction. It changed twice in the last 24 hours and none of them were any good.

Originally we had crew of three contracted from Yellowknife to open the camp. 9 hours of digging just clean out one sleep tent for them and a call was made for re-enforcements. Four more guys were brought in from Rankin Inlet to help out, 2 days later there were 2 tents up and functioning. Conditions were such that the wind would blow in snow almost as fast as it could be dug out.

We were fortunate to have been allowed to bring in an excavator to help with the removal, one bucket full from the Cat was pretty much the equivalent of an hours digging. Within 24 hours of the machines arrival 7 tents were cleared out and covered up, spirits were tremendously lifted… for about 8 hours and then a good system blew through and many of the through ways that had been cleared between shelters were filled in again and when the weather was good enough to leave the comforts of “home” half a day was spent just digging out the Cat and the rest of the day reclaiming the lost ground. That’s when I showed up, last Monday, more than happy to help all I asked for was a smoke free tent.

I was fortunate that all nine of the sleep tents had been finished but that still left the five worst: the office, TV and core tents that are the same size as the sleep tents
as well as the kitchen and dry which are more than twice as big. The three recruits from Rankin were beginning to show signs of exhaustion and by Tuesday we were down to two. If you’re paying attention you may be wondering about the fourth, well it seems that our old buddy George (you may remember him from last year) had a hernia operation a few months ago. A few days of digging and he wanted out, so badly in fact, rather than waiting a couple of hours to hitch a 30 minute ride in the helicopter he opted for the extra bouncy really cold and windy four hour ride with a group on snow machines back to town.

By Thursday the last the last of the original crew had given in and we brought in one new piece of fresh meat in to help with the last two tents. Before the first of the two was completed Friday morning he was looking to get out on the plane we had booked for the afternoon. Last night we were down to the original crew of three that began the ordeal: our cook, the boss and myself.

We have been quite fortunate for the past five days. The sun has shone and the temperatures have been neither too cold nor too warm. We have had plenty of wind but not strong enough to deposit any fresh snow to hinder progress and for the two biggest tents it was near dead calm. And then there is today…
The wind stopped sometime last night and stayed that way long enough to lull us into some sense of comfort, roughly one cup of coffee, abruptly changed 90+ degrees from the south and increased to about 80+ Km/h. Strong enough to whip up any snow that hasn’t already packed itself solid send it all at us in the form of freezing rain, and to add insult to injury taunted us with blue skies the whole time.
In my ten years in the North this is bad as I have ever seen the weather and currently without the sat system set up no way of knowing how long it may last. All we have left to do is inside work and conditions are so bad that we have to make sure that everything is still functioning outside before we can do any of it. And if that wasn’t demoralizing enough there is going to be a hell of a lot of digging to do in the morning.

I must be doing this for the money because it surely isn’t for my health.


April 30, 2006

8:30 AM

Couldn’t have seen this coming:

The winds shifted of course, the sun is shining and temps have dropped about 10+ degrees. This would all be decent news if the shit that blew through last night didn’t punctuate its finale with about five minutes of honest to goodness rain. Not only do we have to resume the big dig but now it has a thick crunchy coating with a glassy sheen of death.

Tried to quit again this morning. I’ve tried four times already. The boss won’t accept my resignation. I am sure that there is a law against such cruel and unusual punishment.

1:00 PM

Half drunk with exhaustion.

4:00

Got a visit from a big group of the Cold Cousins heading North by snow machine. Complained that they had been going for 4 hours and had no water.

“Don’t you have any tea or coffee?” Asked one of the women. Her name was Bo Derek, the only Bo Derek in Nunavut. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t picture her running down the beach with a head full of cornrows.

No. No coffee and no water either. Now scram unless you got shovels in those kamatuks and are willing to use them. Then maybe we will discuss coffee or tea.

I believe that the same words might have been uttered during the Franklin Expedition. Right now it feels as if our journey could have the same conclusion.

5:00

Mostly drunk with exhaustion, wind has died and it is good and warm outside, don’t want to sit out there for fear that I might be accused of slacking off. Too hot to sit inside, my only option is to go and dig out some furniture.

Saw a shotgun in one of the tents. I get to wondering how a fat hunk of lead would go down right about now… thinking it may be tough to wash it down with ale though.

I might hold off for another day.

9:01

The wind changed again, southeast now, the only thing out that way is Hudson’s Bay Another front on the horizon too. This can’t be good. I walked down the end of tent line, any of them that didn’t get the door hung after the skin was put on have a thick layer of the white stuff on the inside as a result of the weather event we had yesterday. I have pretty good idea where the next Mexican backhoe adventure with will be.

Pro: Sheltered from the elements for this next slate of excavation

Con: More shovelling.

Caught another glimpse of the shotgun… Gonna lick a pencil before I go to sleep and see how I like the taste.

May 1, 2006

9:08

For once it feels like spring, definitely going to have to break out the sunscreen. Mother Nature Pulled a fast one on us last night threatening us with eminent doom only to relent a little.

Today hopefully marks a milestone for the camp running water. Seven whole days since my last shower, that puts me in fourth place in the how dirty are you camp mobilization Olympics. Two Newfies and a Frenchman have taken the medals with a whole week more endurance than me. It wasn’t exactly a contest I was hoping to participate in.

All going well we may even have some form of communication by the end of the night or first thing the next morning.

2:04

How’s this for irony?

Having spent 10+ days shoveling snow out of the tents, I get to pick one to put snow back into. The boy’s decided they needed a tent in which to service all of the oil stoves. They chose the First-Aid tent. The floor is black as the ace of spades and covered in carbon and soot. In the absence of a Home-Depot to purchase some green sweep I have to use the next best thing… White sweep.

4:48

Telecommunications technician arrived a couple of hours ago. Might have phones and the Internet by nightfall. Amazing how the mood of the southerners picks up. Spring has been with us for almost a whole day. The tundra on the other side of our castle walls has browned up tremendously today.

So far very limited use of the shovel today, feeling much better about that.

May 2, 2006

4:10

As expected… We achieved connectivity before the showers were installed. Still a good 3+ hours from cleanliness, a few of us are pretty excited about that. The cook is just happy to be able to get her email.
Good news… Low shovel usage day again, though I was given the bad news that the back-up generator is under about 6 feet of snow in the general vicinity of the shit house.

People arriving on a daily basis now, the heli crew arrived lastnight(without the much needed plumbing supplies) and a drill crew arrives tomorrow(Wednesday). We are almost in regular operation.

7:33

The much needed plumbing supplies arrived, well almost all of them. Someone(me) neglected to order ABS cement for the drain lines. I should be back in campguy mode by sometime tomorrow.

I hope