The six of us (Isabel and Jacquie from EOL, Reva and Kim from HESS, Ali and Rosalyn from UCAR comms) arrived in Crested Butte yesterday evening and stayed in Mt. Crested Butte.
This morning we left the trailhead at 9:30 and got to Crystal Cabin by 11:30. We skied and snowshoed in with Ben, the RMBL caretaker, so got a chance to hear about what else is going on at RMBL. There are some fairly recent wet snow slides on the face of Gothic Peak, so we were glad to be traversing under the avalanche-prone slopes while still in the cool of the morning.
After lunch we visited the site, arriving about 1:30. We got some good probe and shovel practice excavating the barrel!
We climbed at D to clean the K&Z radiometers, done at about 2:15. I could feel air from the ventilator fan on all four radiometers.
We then moved on to looking at which sonics we could lower now that the snowpack is decreasing. At UE and D it looks like there's still too much snow to move the 2m sonics back down to 1m.
At C, we did move the former 1m sonic back into its spot (from where it had been stored on UW). Steve's recommendation was to move it back, even though we then had to dig a bit to clear snow away from where the sonic head would be. It is now sitting with the bottom arm of the sonic just about touching the snowpack:
Once we added back a bulgin cable from dsm to 1m EC100, we are getting data from the 1m sonic again. While at C, we also checked on the tubing inlets for the snowpack barometers. Three of them are still buried in snow, so we left them alone, and we taped over the end of the tubing on the fourth.
Back at UW we moved the remaining sonic boom and clamp back down to 2m, exactly 1.02m below the 3m sonic as measured off the avalanche probe (if there's a measuring tape in the barrel, we couldn't find it). We made that switch between approximately 3:30 and 3:36. We cleaned the NR01 at UW at 3:40.
Last activity on site was switching out Ethan's lidar USB sticks at D (about 3:52) and UE (about 4:02). Back to the cabin a little after 5 to enjoy Ali's meal of fancy ramen.
It's been a great day getting to share some of what we've been up to at SOS this winter. Thanks for coming, comms and HESS folks!