The old camp 2003-2010

The original camp at Cape Bounty was on a low ridge overlooking the West Lake.  We chose the site in May 2003 because it was free of snow in the spring, and the rock surface was very durable and relatively flat.   It was a good site with a great view, and it was close to most sampling locations, which is important when you are doing it every day for 6-8 weeks.  Even after seven years of foot traffic, the site looks untouched.

The problems though, started to mount as our research group grew.  Drinking water became scarce in some years in late July as the land dried up, and moving equipment to the airstrip down at the lake (on the far left of this picture) required an ATV or a lot of heavy hauling. Finally, the wind was much worse at this location than elsewhere. It all came to a head in August 2010 when the main tent was blown down the hill in a severe wind storm.  The tent, salvaged from an old mining exploration camp, was destroyed, and we decided it was time to move the camp.

This photograph was taken in June 2007 in the late evening (around midnight) from "latrine hill".  No one will miss having to slog up the hill for privacy, or to suffer in the wind when the weather was poor. Still, it was quite a view when the weather cooperated!

Camp- our home away from home

In 2011 we moved the camp from the hill north of the West Lake to a site at the air strip closer to the lake.  It is much better location that makes moving equipment in the summer possible without vehicles, and it is much smoother for sleeping on the ground.  Another important benefit is the close proximity of the lake and river for drinking water later in the season.  It is definitely less windy!

The camp is composed of a main Weather haven tent for cooking and meeting, and a smaller Weather haven tent for the latrine.  Moving to this location close to water meant that we had to install a propane-fired incinerating toilet.  It is not nearly as awful as it sounds!

We also set up temporary sleeping tents for each person about 200 m from camp.  You can see the "field' of the yellow tents on the left.

 Flights into CBAWO are either with ski- or wheel-equipped Twin Otters.  The lake ice provides a good landing site for the ski planes until early June.  The summer strip is marked on the tundra with white bags filled with rocks and is aligned with the prevailing northwest winds.  It looks quite soft, but it is actually river gravel with a soft moss cover, so the wheels of the plane compress it but do not sink in.  You can see in the foreground where we have had to fill in a frost wedge with gravel.  Each year, the wedges are settling more and this needs to be dealt with.

We leave the Weather haven tents up over winter and remove all food and cooking equipment from the site to avoid attracting animals.  Of course, the tracks and scat suggest we get frequent winter visitors.

It does not snow much in the High Arctic.  There is usually 20-40 cm of snow on the land, but it gets blown around and drifts extensively.  In the spring, our tents have caused massive snow drifts.  Thankfully, digging out was not too much of an issue, as long as we remember where everything is.  For this reason, we photograph the site before leaving in the summer, and we keep important things like tools, shovels and some fuel inside the main tent so it is easy to find.

Research infrastructure

Autumn is a time when we are hard at work analysing the data from the past field season.  We also have to start to plan for the next season with many applications for funding due in November and permits to renew. Plans for 2014 are coming along nicely and we expect to be at CBAWO for almost three months.

A big part of operating a long term research program is to carry out basic, systematic measurements that are needed for all kinds of work.  These include weather, river, soil and lake measurements and they are the cornerstone of our efforts at CBAWO.  In this region of the Arctic, there are no systematic river or lake measurements taken by government agencies, and the nearest weather station is 300 km away at Mould Bay, so we really need to have good quality data for our research.  

This map shows the current primary measurement network.  There are a number of weather, river and lake stations that have been in operation from the beginning in 2003, and some like the small streams and soil stations that have been added since that time.  There are many other locations not shown here that are sampled regularly but this network is the core of CBAWO.

In the last two years, we have added time lapse cameras to this basic network.  We have two located on a plateau edge to provide images of the ice cover on each lake.  This is very important for us as we are not usually there when the ice forms in autumn, and in some years (like 2013), the ice comes off the lakes after we leave as well.  The cameras perform well but can be buried by snow, so we miss much of the winter.

We installed a time lapse camera on the West River station in 2013 as well, looking down stream at the river and lake.  The goal of this is to provide some visual indication of what happens at the river in our absence.