Left Boulder 8:30ish, to Gothic around 2. Road to Gothic is in great condition, some compacted snow but easy driving. Helps that it's in the shade by 1:30 or so now. Stopped by the Barclay building as our reservation emails instructed, but nobody there. Eventually ran into Ben Schmatz who told us we don't need to check in and we don't need a parking permit. Stopped by the Maroon cabin to drop off some stuff, then out to Kettle Ponds. Road is only patchily snow-covered, with 2 or 3 inches of snow max. With the cold weather (19 f) it's frozen, not wet. Better driving conditions than last time either Will or I were here.
Got to the site at 3, right as we were losing sunlight behind Gothic Peak. We checked guy wire tensions (will add to page) and then added the new cable to the apogee at UE, so at least we could tell Chris if the cables were working. Had a very hard time detaching the bender cable end from the popsicle stick since the heat shrink on the popsicle stick board covered the connection, so eventually gave up for now and swapped in the spare popsicle stick Chris sent with us to go with the new cable, just so we could see if things are working. Looks like the apogee is reporting similar values as before the cable swap, so I'm assuming the new cables are good. We took the old cable and original popsicle stick back to the cabin, where we finally managed to cut the heat shrink back far enough to detach them. We'll put the original popsicle stick back in at UE tomorrow. Left the site by around 4, since in the shade and breeze it was getting pretty cold.
Site looking generally good, less snow covered than two weeks ago. Some of the snow pillows are partially bare. Looks like there are some fairly recent human footprints, mostly over by the power panel, as well as some animal pawprints through the triangle between towers. Don't they know to look at the walking path map??