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The work involves weekends, 3:00 in the morning, whatever it takes. But once the instruments are programmed and deployed, some team members get a little time off. A bike ride up the road by Nooklikonnic Creek brought Dave Thomas to a quarry; now this is a Batholith, up close and personal! |
| Sometimes it's OK to take everything for granite. This pretty Coast Mountains batholothic granite is a mere 60 million years old. |
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The area is home to the Nuxalk Nation (pronounced Noo-hawk). Here is a totem pole next to the restaurant block of Bella Coola, B.C. |
| The Nuxalk Nation greets visitors to Bella Coola. |
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The Bella Coola field center was an aircraft hangar operated by Malcolm "Mac" MacKenzie, shown here with his daughter Ariel. They live right next to the hangar, so the PASSCAL crew tried not to make too much noise while preparing instruments at 3 AM. |
| Education and Outreach: PASSCAL's Pnina Miller gets Ariel's help to deploy a couple of sensors for some above-ground/below-ground comparison tests. It's never too early to start training that next generation of seismologists! |
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Several PASSCAL staffers and grad students took advantage of a day off to hike to the falls behind the local school. Here, Pnina Miller makes the steep ascent at the upper falls. |
| On our way to the Falls, the team gets to do some more hand-specimen petrology on a batholith. |
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The view of Hagensborg from the Falls was spectactular... |
| ... as were the Falls themselves! |
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PASSCAL's George Slad used his private plane to travel to Puntzi Lake; here he is, making a trip back to Puntzi from the Bella Coola field center. |
| A birds'-eye-view of the Bella Coola field center, taken from George's airplane. |
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The team flies over several glaciers on their return to Puntzi Lake. |
| The incredibly beautiful Hunlen Falls of Tweedsmuir Park were too remote for us to take off several days to hike there, but George's plane was able to fly right over them. |
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The Puntzi Lake team finds creative ways to spend some of their off time. |
| Mike, Michelle and Meghan hang out at Howdy's Lodge on the shore of Puntzi Lake. |
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Back in Bella Coola, Galen Kaip regales team members with tales of his difficulties with an "eco-activist" who deliberately tried to stop the experiment. Galen had to risk life and limb in order to repair the damage and make the shot happen - the only safe way to dispose of the explosives once they'd been set in the hole. |
| At 11 PM, several team members went on location to "feel" one of the seismic detonations. We definitely felt this one, at a distance of only a couple of hundred meters. At greater distances, the rumbles are quite difficult to detect with the senses. |
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