The days blend into one...

The last few weeks I have been working hard to try and get everything done before I leave for Florida in early August. This picture is from one of my many field visits to the Anaktuvuk River Burn. The bugshirt is sadly very necessary- see the mosquitoes flying around my head?

This is the plexiglass chamber and infrared gas analyzing system I use to measure the net ecosystem exchange of carbon dioxide at the burn. We are studying photosynthesis and respiration from plants and soil to better understand how the tundra's carbon balance recovers following a fire. All this is pretty exciting until a mosquito flies into the machine and the numbers start to go a bit crazy!

I took this picture from the helicopter in early July. The white border visible beyond the lake is due to an abundance of Cottongrass (Eriophorum vaginatum) flowers within the footprint of the 2007 fire. Just this week the folks I will be working with in Florida and my current boss published a paper on this fire in Nature. If you are on a university network, you should be able to access the paper here... if you don't have access to the journal, the BBC has a nice article on the fire here.

A very shaggy caribou I came across near our site in the Imnavait creek watershed

Late summer thunderstorms make for some very dramatic clouds over the Brooks Range

Double Rainbow?!?

Brave hikers wearing shorts for traipsing across the mosquito infested tundra on our Sunday off

Crossing the Sagavanirktok River

My what big paws you have?
Sidenote- I hope you all appreciate the hot-pink nail polish I am rocking up here

Beautiful view from the top of Longo's Pyramid

Will Daniels does not fit in the backseat of the truck very happily

The following Sunday (gasp, two off in a row?!) a group of us went to climb Flattop Mountain. Pretty awesome scenery!

Moss garden near the top of Flattop, looking west towards the Dalton highway

Mid-July at the Burn and the Cottongrass flowers have already begun to die down. The open space and bright sky at this site always make me think of the prairie.

Cloudberries (Rubus chamaemorus ) are edible, but I think they taste awful

Nasty f$^*@(s

Site marker at the Burn