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.
