From wrasslin’ trout to nearly burning down our tent, today was eventful.

As one way of paying for the project, we’re doing some contract work for Golder Associates while we’re up here. Golder is currently conducting baseline and environmental impact assessment work for Miramar Mines, who is in the permit process for a new gold mine. (It was while working on this project that Heidi had her wonderful, awful idea that brought us here this summer).

An exploration drill near camp.

Well, this work brings some luxuries: such as, staying in the Miramar camp at Windy Lake for portions of our work. A heated tent! A cook! A crazy gay Newfie medic! (feel the magic, Donovan). A heated tent, you say? How is it heated, exactly, when you are far above treeline? Ah, the wonders of diesel. Fumes and environmental impacts aside, we are not displeased with our diesel stove and insulated tent – it has been hovering around 4 C and rainy for much of the time we’ve been here. Unfortunately, our stove proved to be a wee bit on the not-so-happy side… Fortunately for us, someone happened to be walking past and heard the smoke alarm, and turned our red-hot-and-smoking-madly stove off before any real damage was done, so we have not lost our warm woollies, our data, or – heaven forbid! – our weeks of dehydrated food. The gods have thrown so many obstacles in Heidi’s path that Kathryn sees this near-miss as an endorsement for the project to proceed (else the gods would have burned our tent to the ground).

This work with Golder and Miramar also puts us at a fish fence monitoring charr movements between Robert’s Lake and Robert’s Bay (youngsters moving out to eat at sea, adults moving back to spawn). Boy, there are some big fish around here! Fiesty, too. We have rather an amusing video of Heidi wrestling a 28 lb lake trout onto a measuring board (perhaps I should have been helping instead of filming?).

We also, today, discovered a fascinating new type of field conditions. Now, we’ve all been out in the rain. We’ve all been out with lots of bugs. Today, we discovered rainy, WITH BUGS. And I mean lots of ‘em. In fact, once it started raining, there were MORE mosquitos than there had been before. We can report that rubber jacket with bug shirt is not a comfortable combination; we tried a few variations – Heidi preferred rubber jacket with bug shirt on top. Kathryn opted for rubber jacket on top. After several hours of testing and analysis (spreadsheet available upon request : we are, after all, scientists!), our recommendation, should you find yourself in this unusual heavy rain with heavy bugs situation: get indoors. Quickly.

Note the heavy swarms all around!