Two weekends ago I found myself skiing out to Mary Shields’ cabin with Martin and Dana and their 2 year old daughter Sonja, and Keith (another glaciology professor). This was the second time that I’ve made the trip (see February 2006). It was a lot of fun and mostly uneventful, except for one near disaster… On the way into the cabin on Saturday we encountered a long stretch of overflow that had not yet frozen. (Overflow occurs when a creek freezes to the bed, but there is still water being fed into the creek. The water pressure gets too high, and it squirts to the surface through cracks in the ice, the result being that there is water everywhere.) We managed to get through the overflow with little difficulty – just wet feet, but that wasn’t a major problem because it was quite warm.
We met Mary at her cabin that afternoon; she had spent Friday night there and was just about to head back to Fairbanks. She was surprised to learn that there was so much overflow since she hadn’t seen any the previous day. It turns out the by the time she got to the section of overflow (with her dog team) the water level had risen to above her knees. Her only choice was to take her team through the overflow, which took her two hours and she must have become nearly hypothermic in the process. She was naturally quite concerned about our ability to get past the overflow on Sunday, so she came out to the trail to meet us. By the time we got there the overflow had already frozen, so we didn’t have any problems. She claimed that crossing through that overflow was probably the second most dangerous thing she’s ever done with a dog team, which is a lot coming from her: she’s mushed thousands of kilometers throughout Alaska. She wouldn’t tell me what was the most dangerous thing that she’d ever done.
No comments:
Post a Comment