Permafrost outreach 2009

Holy Cross has a hill right behind the school.
From this hill you can see most of the village.





The school was clean and neatly organized.
We stayed in the library where we found a lot interesting Alaska related books.
There were quite a few pictures and art placed in the school.










As we were leaving, principal Kay flew back from Grayling, so we were able to meet her at the airport.
Thanks to John we had a good stay.







The trail from Holy Cross to Russian Mission was one of the least traveled section on our trip. We saw some old tracks heading down the river but nothing clearly marked the trail.






The reason was soon obvious to us. This stretch of the river was either ice or sand, with very small patchy islands of snow the entire way. Our snow machines were more like "sand machines" today.




Without clear markers, it was important to look around for directions, but it was pretty much the same no matter where we went, icy, sandy and bumpy.








If it was ice, the back end of the sled would want to slide around. In some areas the ice looked dangerously slippery and thin. Fresh ice and old signs of overflow was here and there along the way.



Riding in sand is not that great either. It's like dragging the breaks as you're riding and everything gets sandy. But Kenji likes the desert so I'm sure he was having a good time...



We had hopes to reach Russian Mission in a 3 to 4 hours, judging from the distance we were travelling up until today. But it took us more than 4 and a half hours. We realized how well we had it on the Iditarod trail.



When we got into town we headed up the hill to the school, but the roads were so ice that we couldn't make it up.
This whole area is lacking snow this year, and the roads are like polished so slippery that you can slide down the hill with boots.





Once we parked our snow machines and sleds, we examined todays damage. (Usually something lost or broken) We found that the case for the steel pipes was broken, and also the Keel on the sled was completely bent.




Even after this long trip, Kenji successfully drilled another bore hole and established another permafrost monitoring station.