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Happy New Year from Lake Hoare! We had a quiet evening here at camp which was quite welcomed. We celebrated the incoming year with a movie and ice cream, and to be totally decadent we left our dirty dishes pile up. Simple pleasures here after a busy week.

I have been steadily working on maintaining our meteorological stations. The LTER has a network of 14 meteorological stations in the Dry Valleys, four of which are located on glaciers. My tasks at each station are to download the past winter's data, troubleshoot any problems, and swap instrumentation that is in need of recalibration.
Maintaining the network gives me the great opportunity to travel through out the Dry Valleys. I posted a few photos from my last trip to the Wright and Victoria Valleys here. There was a moderate katabatic blowing which made flying over the Asgard Range a bit bumpy, but our helicopter pilot Paul navigated us through as smooth as possible. Our slower pace gave me more time to ponder the landscape below. The past week's exceptionally warm weather has swollen the Onyx River and produced runoff from some of the higher elevation glaciers. The streams are running higher than in any of my previous seasons, but no where near the big melt year of 2001. Lake Hoare now has a very large mote and has over taken much of the lower helo pad at the old hut. I am very glad that my work doesn't require me to be on the lake any longer!

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