Day 4

Hi there, The Marymount bunny has made it to the arctic's edge. It is a rare sighting, but I was lucky and managed to get a picture.

Today, we went for our deepest pit yet: 248 cm.
That is about 8 feet deep. Just to give you an idea of what this means. Yao Ming is 7 foot 6 (in high heels he might approach 8 feet) and the average NY apartment has 8 foot ceilings. Makes digging out the car in NYC feel like child's play. It is, however, surprising how much you manage to sweat in -16 degrees C when you are digging a very deep hole in the snow. The hardest part is throwing the snow out each time without it falling on your head. As you can tell from the picture below, I wasn't always successful and ended up with a head full of snow on a few occasions. Once we finished we set out to do the scientific part. Measuring the temperature every 5 cm meant we had to get 50 different readings. Interestingly, the temperature goes up the deeper down you get, reaching about zero C at ground level.
Surprisingly there were only two layers of snow: pukak and III-A-3 (I'm sure you are as excited about that as I am). The whole job took the three of us about 5 hours of intense work.

Life in Churchill has a very slow pace. You eat,
you dig holes and do all the scientific things, you eat, you dig, you eat, you sit through a lecture, and you go to sleep. And so it goes.

Finally caught some Northern Lights last night. I didn't manage to get a good photo because they were rather faint, but it looked light a rainbow of light across the sky. Sometimes they have colors, but we weren't that lucky.

Friday is our day off from digging and we will be taking a trip to town . There is the option to do some dog sledding, but it is rather pricey (80 Can$, or about 65 US$ for 20 minutes). I'll have to see what the "realness" factor is before deciding on that one. For most people in Churchill, tourism is the main source of employment and right now there are virtually none here because the polar bears are way out on the bay. Dog sledding is the only attraction in town now and they do have a bit of a monopoly. Not like we go to the next town for better prices.