It was below 0C in August in my first two days here.
The North Slope of Alaska is flat and has lots of lakes and running water
Deadhorse, Prudhoe Bay, AK, is different from most other places. Deadhorse is practically devoid of women, and has zero children. I asked a friend who works here on the oil rigs what dating was like: "The same as working everywhere in Alaska. Get in line and wait your turn."
Deadhorse is a dry town. You can't buy alcohol here. If someone working here is found with alcohol, they are fired or kicked out. The workers here will occasionally buy cool-aid, throw some champagne yeast in, and brew their own awful alcohol that way.
There are no hotels here. Instead there are Man-Camps. There are no restaurants in Deadhorse, and no place to buy real food to cook. You eat at a mancamp. There was an outbreak of the flu here a few weeks back, and an entire camp was quarantined. From then on, every camp requires that you use hand sanitizer upon entrance, and you use disposable plastic gloves on top of that when you get your food. All the hangar facilities here also have hand sanitizer everywhere.
This is not a town, it's a construction site.
There is no pavement. Dirt roads lead everywhere. You get dust and mud on your boots (you don't wear shoes). Upon entering a camp, you rub your shoes on some aggressive mud-and-dust removing blocks. After that you are required to put fabric booties over your boots. You are not allowed to walk around in camps in sandals or barefoot. Everyone has big manly boots with fabric booties over them.
Bears roam freely through town. I wanted to take a picture of one, but I have been assured that a grizzly does not look majestic while rummaging through a dumpster, emerging with an ice cream wrapper stuck to its head.
The only passenger vehicle used here is a 4WD king cab diesel pickup. All trucks have heating blocks in them, because it is so cold in the winter that the oil in the engine would turn to a gel if left unheated. In every single parking lot there are dozens upon dozens of plugs for these trucks to keep warm during the forever night of an Arctic winter.
Every truck needs to be plugged in during the winter, or it won't start again.
Because of the bears, we are required to keep our keys in the trucks and the trucks unlocked. If someone is walking along, they need the safety of a heavy truck to dive into immediately, and be able to drive off.
No one is worried about theft here. We don't get keys to our hotel rooms. They are left unlocked when we leave. There is no black market here, so what would someone do with something they stole? We freely leave most of our possessions out, knowing that no one will touch them.
8/7-Research
Our plane has arrived. We had to make repairs to the cooling of the Laser Pressure Vessel (it is an airplane, so as it flies higher, the ambient air pressure decreases. A pressure vessel holds the instrument at one pressure to keep everything precise) on the methane detection instrument.
I forgot my boots at lab. My advisor is flying out on 8/8. He is putting them in his luggage. That's right, my advisor thinks nothing of carrying my hiking boots across the country for field work. He's pretty cool that way. Would your PhD advisor do that?
8-10
We flew!
8-11
We had some heat control issues with the laser system, and two of our three instrument overheated.
That's all for now. Thanks for reading!
- Jason Munster