If I Can See You, I Won't Kill You

If you are wondering about the title, look at my Twitter account. :) Tonight as I write, I am tired. Therefore, all of the pretty pictures are at the front (what the pictures are should be explained in the post, but ask if you are wondering about a certain one)! The blog formatting takes a bit of time, and instead of putting off a blog completely, I thought I would just sort of take the easy route. It is rainy and chilly here right now, so I don’t feel so bad skipping out on the in-town fun that some of the others are leaving for soon.

Speaking of in-town fun, last night was great. A group of us headed in after dinner to the small, local bar called The Pit. It looks exactly like you would imagine. Quite the pit. There was a band playing, and I soon learned that the band actually plays 7 nights a week, 365 days a year. Seriously. The previous band leader, a local icon/hero known as Walrus, unfortunately passed away earlier this year, so the band is still trying to adjust with new people. I enjoyed it, while some of the others thought it was lacking. A pool game between one of our crew and a very drunk but happy local ended our night at the Pit. On the walk home, we passed Diamond Tooth Gertie’s. This fine establishment is a small casino and bar with a olde-time can-can type show playing three times a night. It is actually owned by the Tourist Bureau, and all of the profits go directly back into the community.

The next morning began innocently enough. We had breakfast and started the trip out to the sites. The road is narrow and windy, and the miners use extremely large equipment for moving earth. On various occasions they need to move from mine to mine and they send a truck ahead, warning oncoming cars about the approach. This morning we were waiting for a large piece of equipment to pass and were parked behind another waiting truck on the side of the road. Suddenly, the truck in front of us went in reverse and began backing up, and promptly accelerating right into us. Luckily, everyone still had on their seatbelt, the airbags did not deploy, and the car still ran. Unluckily, the front bumper was cracked and bent in many places and will definitely need to be replaced. This may make for some interesting juggling of vehicles, because it will probably mean that the car will need to be driven back to Whitehorse (6 hours one way) soon.

As we continued to the sites, we saw a moose and her calf! Very cool.

The site we worked at today is called Dominion Creek. We are looking for early, early bones here, approx 80,000 years old. There are only 3 people, a family, that run this mine: Laurie, his wife Sandy, and adult son Mark. They are extremely nice people, and we had a great time today with Sandy as she was in charge of the water monitor (the high-pressure hose). She is working away at the frozen permafrost to reach the payday dirt with gold. We would search the mud and surrounding areas for any fossils that were uncovered. It was fun!

The mine also has another constant visitor. There is a fox, named Jim, that will come and get scraps of food once a day from Sandy and the men. Mathias and I named him Slim Jim the Feral Fox. He was cute, but sort of scraggly too, and obviously still wild enough to keep a 3 foot distance.

In terms of fossil collection, the day was extremely successful. We were able to get many bones “in situ” meaning, where they were still stuck in the permafrost, not washed down. A few interesting finds were a mammoth vertebra and an ancient arctic fox jawbone. It was so tiny compared to the other things we’ve been collecting!

After another incident where I was stuck in the mud AGAIN at Lucky Lady site, we returned home. National Geographic actually “retweeted” a picture of me and asked a question about it, so I am on the National Geographic twitter page with some cool bones! Our first video blog may be posted on their main website tomorrow.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow, to being able to wear my awesome new rubber boots that so many of you heard about! Will post pics of them tomorrow. Wow, that is a lot of "tomorrows" in a short period of time.

Cheers!