12 September 2006 - Seismic Fieldwork

12 September 2006 - anyone for McCarthy?
I turned up half-way through the weekly seismic meeting, rather surprising a lot of people who thought I'd never get there - the visa had taken so long to come through. Rowdy, and old friend from my 1998-2000 time at AVO flagged up he needed an extra pair of hands down in McCarthy for some seismic fieldwork. Rowdy had told me all those years ago how it was his favourite place and he'd bought some land down there. So when my boss, Roger, asked me after the meeting if I'd go with Rowdy, I didn't hesitate. All I needed was a day to fill out the paperwork...

14 September 2006 - from Fairbanks to McCarthy

Loading up: The first stop after loading up the seismic gear was to grab a trailer of wood Rowdy wanted to get down to his land. So we swung by his cabin - the same cabin I had lived in many years before.






Driving down: The highway down goes through Delta Junction, Glenallen and as far as Chitina. Beyond that, its a dirt surface on top of an old railroad they used for copper mining. And there are lots of staples left from the track, so at least 2 spare tyres in a must.

Here is some typical scenery from the drive down, which took about 9 hours.

And here is a view of the Aleyaska pipeline which carries about one quarter of the US oil from Prudhoe bay in the north, to Valdez in the south. One of my main tasks is going to be to develop an alarm system which can alert the pipelines authorities to intense earthquake activity. One of our field techs, John, has been putting out seismic stations along the pipeline all summer.

The pipeline follows the road, until our turn off for Chitina.

This is the place Rowdy and I stayed at in McCarthy.

15 September 2006 - McCarthy town, and the seismic station

Waking up in McCarty was quite something! It felt like a living ghost-town on the frontier. Population - probably over 100 in the summer. But by winter, maybe a dozen. (A few weeks after we left, the only road into McCarthy - and about a 60 mile stretch of the nearby highway - was destroyed by unprecendented floods!)

The seismic station is located here. There is a beautiful home here too (not shown) where a family with 5 kids lives. And even the youngest of them knows more about living in the great outdoors than just about any adult I've ever met! On this day, the 8 year old daughter rode by, driving an all-terrain-vehicle, with a 33-caliber rifle slung across her back! The next day, the kids were out hunting bears!

Just imagine living in a place like this ... and waking up to that view!

Here is the seismic station. None of the poorly built sites I'd seen in Montserrat, with seismometers placed in leaky upturned buckets, and zip-ties being used to secure solar panels that were uselessly pointing north! Here the stations are really engineered, and built to survive the tough arctic winters!

The seismometer sits down in a deep waterproof crypt, with thick fibreglass insulation and a concrete base. The electronics along with 24 car batteries (!) is housed in a purpose-made hut (which Rowdy and I had the job of raising up to prevent flooding).

To charge all those batteries, an impressive array of solar panels is required. And then a V-SAT satellite radio uplink is used to transmit the data back to the lab in Fairbanks.

After all that hard work the meal in McCarthy was small and disappointing. We went to a party in a cabin just out of town at night.

16 September 2006

A second day at the seismic site ... followed by a trip to Rowdy's lot and a drop in on a McCarthy-style BBQ with a huge bonfire, miles out in the woods.

17 September 2006

After dropping off Rowdy's truck on the far side of the river where his lot is, we took a trip on another gorgeous day to Kennicot. This is where there was once a huge copper mining industry. And the only road to McCarthy is simply a pile of dirt and gravel dumped on the old railroad that was used to get copper out to Chitina.

Fortunately I was able to get an exclusive tour of the old copper mill, an extraordinary wooden building of umpteen different levels that climbed right up the hillside. The way in was pretty hairy, and it was something of an assault course once inside too.

Leaving Kennicot-McCarthy was difficult as it was a case of third-day, third-party ... but reluctantly we had to pass and make it on back towards some other seismic sites that needed attention along the road home. The trip back had an unauspicious start when we found the truck had a flat tyre even before we tackled the Chitina road - only to find the spare, jack and tire nut level were completely inadequate...and we had to wait for a passing stranger to come to our aid with a deep lug set.

18 -19 September 2006 - HAARP and Paxson

I got into the HAARP facility, some sort of military radio array that can apparently induce aurora, being told my UK citizenship was not a problem. But no sooner had Rowdy and I started work on the seismic station, than an escort came to take me off the premises. Word had come from above that "aliens" were not allowed on this site. So I got to surf the internet at a nearby lodge, while Rowdy worked. This work then had to be abandoned when we got word that a telephone engineer was waiting for us at another station about 30 minutes up the road. Unfortunately, neither site got fixed that day, so the next day was almost identical.

Then as we were planning finally to return to Fairbanks, we got word that the McCarthy site was down again. So we were contemplating driving the 4 hours back. Not real convenient as Rowdy was due on a helicopter trip later in the week to fix other stations, and needed to prepare for it. In the end, with just one spare tyre, a lack of tools to fix it, and already being somewhat overdue, we decided to leave McCarthy for another day, and headed back to Fairbanks reaching there about 10pm.

So a whole week after arriving in Fairbanks I'd managed to spend almost all my time in the field. Now I really needed to rent a car and start looking for accommodation...