After completing the installation of the ALISON site at North Pole, we headed for Delta Junction. After an uneventful drive down the Alaska Highway/Richardson Highway (the name you choose depends on whether you live in Fairbanks [Alaska Highway] or Delta Junction [Richardson Highway]. As far as Delta Junction-ites are concerned, the Alaska Highway ends there while it is the Richardson Highway that continues on to Fairbanks. People can become agitated over such minor things.

Kenna Dubois kindly invited us to stay at her home and we enjoyed an evening chatting with her husband, Steve (wildlife/game biologist) and daughter, Kristy. It was cold and unusually calm by Delta Junction standards when we arrived at ~7 pm. When we left the house 11 hours later at 8 am it was a little warmer and much windier. Neither of us was looking forward to being out on the ice in cold, windy weather. We needn’t have worried.

The pond that Kenna and her colleague, Barb Parker have chosen for the ALISON site is in Big Delta and it was almost calm there when we arrived at about 9 am. The ice thickness was about 0.15 m, somewhat thinner than at North Pole. Just the four of us set up the study site in no time at all and we were back at school soon after 10 am to meet the students who will be joining Kenna and Barb in making the measurements.

A view of Spengler Lake, near Big Delta (mosiac of 2 photographs).

We spent the rest of the morning introducing the students (seven juniors and seniors, all young women) to ALISON: what it is; why we study lake ice; how we study the ice; what we are learning thanks to our growing network of K-12 teacher and student partners. Pizza arrived just as the discussion was winding down, and after we had finished eating we took the students out to the pond to show them how to make measurements. Once again we were lucky and there was only a very light wind.

Unfortunately, after working just fine in the morning, when the air temperature was about -18°C, the digital reader that we depend on for measuring the snow temperatures decided that it would be a good time to fail (later, Kim took it apart and found that a soldered wire had come adrift). So, we measured snow depth and took snow samples, and only simulated taking temperatures. We also demonstrated taking ice thickness measurements with the ice gauge that we had installed in the morning.

Once the practice session was over, we all went back to school. The snow samples were weighed and entering the data into the spreadsheet was demonstrated. It was a shame that the digital reader failed. It is always a little frustrating when something like that happens and the conductive heat flow can’t be calculated. Still, we have our first data for Big Delta and the Delta Cyber School is ready for its first winter of ALISON data collection.

Teachers Barb Parker (center - brown hat) and Kenna Dubois (far right - green hat)
with their students from the Delta Cyber School at Spengler Lake on 8 November 2005.

We were back in Fairbanks by 5 pm, which meant that Kim made it to her Web design class in good time, and I was able to spend the evening working on a proposal until Kim’s class ended at 9 pm. It was a long but satisfying day.

2 and 3 December 2005

After leaving Hughes late in the morning on Thursday 1 December, I was able to spend the afternoon in the office doing useful things before leaving for Mentasta on Friday 2 December. Shortly before leaving the office I checked my e-mail once more and there was a curious message from Kenna Dubois in Delta Junction. She, Barb and the students had visited their study site that day and found the ice fractured and hummocked and apparently collapsed into the lake. Since the Delta study site is on the way to Mentasta we decided to investigate. So there we were at about 9:15 before sunrise on Friday morning looking at a very odd ice cover that was all that Kenna had described. What seems to have happened is that the water level in the lake has fallen as the water level in the nearby Delta River has fallen, and much of the ice cover simply subsided as the water level fell. Very peculiar. We haven’t seen that before. (See our visit to Mentasta.)

We left Mentasta at 7:30 am on Saturday to return to Fairbanks via the Big Delta pond and its subsided ice. We were there just as the sun was rising and were able to take photographs, and confirm that there is water under the by the ice thickness gauge. We also think that there is water under the ice at most of the wooden stakes. So, the study site is still viable.