Back to Haines

I got up at 3:30 and got dropped off at the airport with a few other kids. We were all on the same flight, although most of them got off in Anchorage, while I went to Juneau.The captain of our plane was Captain Kirk, which I thought was funny.

I got some nice views of glaciers on the flight from Anchorage to Juneau.

I also saw some more glaciers and other views on the way to Haines from Juneau.

Upper right, overlooking Juneau and the Mendenhall glacier. Upper left, overlooking the Valley of the Eagles golf course in Haines.

When I got back, some friends of ours from Bellingham were visiting. That night we went out to Chilkoot River and saw a bunch of bears. On our side of the river was a mother with two cubs, and on the other side of the river was a male bear. The bears were climbing on a fish weir, which is used to count fish coming down the river.

The Southeast Alaska State Fair was in progress when I got back. The day after I got back, I helped operate the dunk tank to raise money for our DDF (Drama, Debate, and Forensics) team.

I had my dad enter a few of my photos in the fair as well, and all but one got first place, the other getting a second place. Since I was in the Junior division, there weren’t a lot of entries, meaning it wasn’t that hard for me to do well. I also submitted my rain video, which won first place, but since it was the only video, it didn’t have much competition.

In case you’re wondering, the below picture, which is also my blog background, is of my cat Cyrus.

The one below got a second place, because there was a very nice flower photo entered by a friend of mine that won.

Day 12- Presentations

The presentations of all the modules were  today, all 15 or so of them, so we sat in  the auditorium from 9-3, just listening to  presentation. I set my computer to render it  again, and finally, during lunch, about a  hour before it was our turn to go, it  finished. I put it on a presentation  computer and got it to work.

Images by Peter Johnson

The presentation went very well, and we had  a funny Q&A session afterwards. If I can, I will try and post part of it.

I said goodbye to my classmates and teachers  that night. All but one of them was leaving  that night, while I didn't leave till the  morning. We had burgers for dinner.

McIntosh, the remote dorm, wasn't rented for  that night, so they gave me a new room all  to myself in the Lathrop dorms. It had very nice new furniture.

That night I played games and ate popsicles.  I played Apples to Apples until 11:00 and  then I finally had to go to bed (but not  before eating another popsicle!).

Day 11- Paleontology and Presentations

We worked on the presentation all day. At  1:30 we went to the museum of the north and  got a tour of the paleontology department.  We got to see a huge "vault" of shelves full  of specimens. It was down in the basement,  and it almost felt like a Indiana Jones  mysterious vault. We couldn’t take pictures of the vault, but we did get to see some reproduction specimens.

We also practiced our presentation, although the video wasn't rendered yet, as I kept  getting errors.

That night I started rendering the final  version at 12:00, then set my alarm to wake  me up at 1:00 so I could check it. But I was  so tired that I slept through my alarm,  which I've never done before, and didn't  wake up till 6:30. I found the render had  another error, and I was starting to worry  that it wouldn't work. I could always play  it from my editing program, but it would be  jerky and slow.

Day 10- Back at the Lab

The next day, we took a bunch of our rock  samples down to the lab and prepared and  analyzed them with some of the cool equipment. First we prepared the samples,  either cutting them up, grinding them  smooth, grinding them into a powder, and  coating them with carbon. Then we stuck some of the various samples into a X-ray analyzer. This  was like the handheld one, except it operated in  a vacuum, so it worked much better and gave  a full analysis. It was also cool because it  used a robotic arm to move around the sample  (see the clip in our video when I post it).

X-Ray Analyzer on left, SEM on right.

Next we used a carbon coater to coat some of the rocks in carbon. Then we stuck them in a SEM  (Scanning Electron Microscope) and looked at  magnifications and analysis of the elements.
While other people were preparing samples, I  worked on the video for a while, editing and helping Kelly, a classmate, write up a  script for our presentation.
We had decided to do a newscast. The news  anchors would sit in the auditorium and  report on the news, news backgrounds and the  video segments would appear on the  projector.
I worked on the movie all that night, and skipped activities to finish it. I stayed up till 2 and got a preliminary version finished, then set it to render.  When I got up at 5, I found the render had a  error, and I had to start over.

Day 9- Back to Fairbanks

The next morning we packed everything up and  left around 10. We stopped at Savage River  again and climbed up a small hill. At the  top was a amazing view of the valley and we shot a segment of me explaining glacially  formed valleys. We also shot a segment where  Peter, a classmate, used a radio to talk to  Jill at the bottom of the hill. We used this  as the final sequence in our video.

We climbed the pointy hill in the upper left hand corner, which is where the rest of the pictures are taken.

We left the park and drove into Nenana  Canyon, which is right outside the park.  Everyone started calling their parents. As  they did, they realized that  many of their  parents had been worried about them. While  we were in the park, a group of 7 students  and 2 instructors (almost exactly the same  as our group) had been attacked by a bear  near Denali. This made national news, and a  few of the parents thought it might have  been us.

On the way back we stopped at the Stampede  Trail, which is where the guy from into the  wild was staying in a bus (Or so Emily told  me). Emily was slightly, just slightly,  obsessed with the book and movie, and  narrated the whole story to us in about 3  minutes. I recorded it, and although we  didn't have time to put it in the final  video, I think I will put it in a version  for all of the parents. Anyway, we stopped  and took a picture of the sign, which just  said Stampede trail.

Next we stopped at a canyon near the Usibelli Coal mine in Healy. It was a  beautiful canyon, with visible sedimentary  layering in the walls. There were a few  veins of lignite coal, which stood out from  the rest of the layers. We found a bunch of  fossils, and also did a video segment about  layering and sedimentation.

While we were there, a bunch of kids started jumping and sliding down scree slopes. We nicknamed it “screeing” These were some of the best pictures I got.

We didn't get back to the dorms to eat  dinner at the cafeteria on time, so we  stopped at a burger joint and ate dinner.  Then we drove back to the dorms and  unpacked.

Day 8- Bears and Fossils

In the panorama above, we were planning on hiking to the red circle and we started around the corner where the blue arrow is pointing.

We started out the day by going on a hike  along the East Fork of the Toklat River. We  wanted to hike out into a big, wide, flat  glacial valley below Polychrome Pass. From  Polychrome, we had seen a big (maybe as big  as a house) rock in the middle of the  valley. Since there were no other boulders  around and this looked distinctly out of  place, we decided it was a glacial erratic,  meaning a rock that was carried and left by  the glacier.  We parked off the road, then  had to climb down a steep, rocky slope to  get to the river.

On the other side of the river was a wolf den, so the Park Service had closed the area  around the den. The closed area reached to  our side of the river, so we walked over in  the bushes to avoid it. After a few minutes,  one of the module members, Emily, found a  cool rock. Since she already had a sample,  she let me have it for my official sample.  Here's a picture of it I took back at my lab (aka my bedroom floor).

The rock, as you can see, has been  compressed and folded, so the layers look  bent. I gave the sample a name, took a GPS  point, marked the time and date, weather,  etc.

Since it was sort of brushy, we were being  careful about bears and yelling "Hey bear"  every 30 seconds. A few days earlier, Emily,  who knows some Latin, came up with the Latin  translation of "Go away bears", which is something like"Abita ursei". The non plural version sounds a bit better (abita ursae), but I guess is grammatically incorrect unless you alter the "abita" part.

Anyway, we were walking through the woods  calling "abita ursae" when Jill, one of  the instructors, saw a bear. It ran off into  the bushes as soon as it saw us. We all  bunched together, made a lot of noise, and  slowly backed away. We saw moving through  the bushes up the hill side, so we continued  to back up. We got out into the open and I  changed to my zoom lens so I could get a  picture. Looking at it on the hill, we  realized that it was pretty small, and was  actually a young bear cub.

Now, mother bears are very protective and  getting between them and their cubs is a  easy way to get attacked. This was worrying,  so we backed up more. Soon we came to the  signs around the closed wolf area. When we  told the story later, we said we were stuck  between wolves and bears.

The bear cub started running back down the  hill. At the bottom it disappeared into the  bushes. A second later we saw a bear cub 30  feet away. It appeared that there was  another cub, but we weren't sure.

We decided that with two cubs, one of which  was directly in the path of our hike, and no  mother bear, we decided that it wasn't safe  to continue. We turned around and hiked back to the car.  We ate lunch there, and I did a segment  about our bear encounter.

After lunch, we decided to hike the other  way down the river, to a good fossil site.  We hiked along the river for a ways, then  had to "sidehill" along a few scree slopes  (A scree slope is made  up of loose rock  chunks. Its almost like a sand dune with  bigger grains of sand).

As we got to the canyon with fossils it  started to rain and I had to put my camera  away, so I didn't get many pictures. We  continued up the canyon, which had scree  slopes and outcrops and each side. We  climbed up one to look at some footprints,  then climbed another to look at the angle of a dyke

(In the upper right picture, you can see layering at about a 50 degree angle.You can also see a protrusion of rock that seems to crosscut that layering. That is the dyke, or magma intrusion, that we climbed up to look at.)

It stopped raining and I got a few pictures,  then we headed back to the car. On the drive back to camp, the sun shined through the clouds and created a almost surrealistic scene. But as we turned the corner, it started down pouring. But the time we got back to camp, it had stopped again.

The paleontology group had left that  morning, so we had the camp to ourselves. We  had pasta and played a volcanology card  game.

The night before, Sarah and Jill, our  instructors, saw a lynx walk by their cabin.  Our guide had also seen lynx in the area  before. We decided to do a timelapse with my  camera of the path and see what walked by on  the path. I did 15 seconds intervals and it  lasted until 4 in the morning, when my  battery died. But out of the 600+ pictures,  only one had something in it, and that was Jill walking by. Oh well.