As part of my job I manage a project which operates a North Slope climate monitoring site for Sandia National Laboratory. It can involve shotguns (although I don’t normally act as a bear guard), so every year we need to requalify. Long story, but we go to Fairbanks to do it, so that’s where I am.
We use the range on South Cushman, where we have to do two runs with a moving bear target on a sled. It doesn’t count if you don’t get enough shots in vital spots on the bear to stop it before it would get you (assuming it was an actual bear).
Afterwards, we clean the guns before they get shipped to Barrow. The bore snake, pictured below, is an awesome invention, which I wish someone had thought of when I was a kid. The seemed to be a new sort of solvent, which seems to work well, but it doesn’t smell like the old stuff. Cleaning guns & the smell of solvent always brings back memories of my dad & Farfar ( his dad) when I was really little. Farfar came over visiting from Denmark, and they went hunting a lot, which meant lots of gun cleaning. One of the first words I said was apparently gun (only I apparently pronounced it “guck”).
In the small world department, it turns out that one of the project scientists from Fairbanks has been reading this blog for a while. She only just put together that I was the Anne on the weekly project calls!
Out of Ice and Time 