I got out to Nuvuk today for the first time today. The ARM project that we support want to put a flux tower at the Point to measure flux off the ocean during the open water season. The thing is that the ideal spot for the tower is on the ridge where the Nuvuk site is.
In the past, other folks wanted to put flux towers there, but there simply wasn’t room for a tower in an area where we had already tested and recovered all the burials, and we didn’t want to chance disturbance to a burial. Now we’ve gotten a good way ahead of the erosion, so it seemed that it might be possible. However, I didn’t want the tower to be on top of the possible Ipiutaq structures, just in case funding for their excavation is available. Since the tower installation involved moving a little gravel, it was important for me to be there just in case something showed up.
It took a while to get out there, since the ARM Kubota is on tracks and can only go about 15 miles an hour. We quickly got a spot picked for the tower. After that, I spent most of my time looking around for bears while the others started putting the tower together. I spotted 2, a mom and a cub, who were heading to the bone pile.
We decided to use sandbags for the guy-wires and then added some more on top the tracks on the base plate. To minimize disturbance to the site, we decided fill the “sand”bags with beach gravel, and bring them up with a four-wheeler.
After the tower was assembled and the instruments were on, the instruments needed to be wired up. That took a while, but I had to sick around since one of them needed to look down are gravel, so we needed to cover the plywood base plate, which meant more digging.
That gave me time to check out the area where we salvaged the Ipiutak structure last fall. Good thing we did that last fall, because that area is gone. There is a big notch in the bluff there, and that’s it. It would have been a pity to lose that, because we found some very interesting things in the field and in the lab.
While I was getting to play, the crew was working away in the lab. They have finished floating and sorting the materials from the fall salvage, and are moving on. Over the winter, we’ve had several sets of visitors on short notice, which required some materials to be cleaned off benches fairly quickly. As a result, there were a lot of miscellaneous boxes around the lab. The crew has reorganized several cabinets and gotten most of the boxes emptied. There is plenty of bench space, so we are moving on to cataloging and marking.
Out of Ice and Time 
Really nice to see this kind of project in your area – it is so different than my natural habitat on the NWCoast. And it is heartening to see ARM happening in the more distant corners of North America.
I love the contrast to my recent field trip in Haida Gwaii – in comparison it was vegetation as an obstacle. And the bears are not so worrying.