Digging holes and my 21st birthday

June 19th, 2010

Today was our fourth day of deployment in the Ruby Mountain area.  We have been working in teams of 3-4 and most teams get about 2 stations installed each day.  Today was especially nice for my team as we got to install a station along the summit.  The dirt road leading to our site was pretty treacherous, winding, steep, and very bumpy, but when we got to our site it was absolutely gorgeous (see pic below).  It also had amazing soil that allowed for the easiest hole digging I've had so far.  Installing a stations is fairly easy once you know what you're doing.  So far it's been easiest to assemble the solar panel first and align it facing south and then plan out the layout of the site.  When we can, we've been building our fence off of an existing fence but we usually make a triangle when this isn't impossible.  Of course there is a lot of hole digging to be done (my least favorite part), and then a lot of protecting the cables and instruments from weather.  We are doing a direct burial for this project which means that the sensor is not in any kind of vault.  Instead, we place it in a long plastic bag and then put that bag with the sensor inside another nylon bag to protect it and then put the hole thing in the ground.  Leveling and orienting the sensor is the trickiest and most important part.  Actually today we messed up on one of our sites because the declination on our compass was set in the wrong direction and we weren't reading the compass correctly.  As a result, we ended up orienting our sensor in the direction of magnetic north instead of true north.  Still don't know if we are going to have to go back and dig it up or if they will just rotate the data (I hear this is a pain).  Anyway, the finishing touch is to build the barbed wire fence.  By the time you get to the fence, you really just want to get it over with, which may be why most of our fences are less than perfect. Also, I have never been so dirty in my entire life.  I took a picture to document the filth (see below).  

In other news, I had my 21st birthday in Elko, NV.  We all went out to dinner as a group and I got the most gigantic piece of carrot cake I've ever seen in my entire life.  We literally had to pass it around the table 10 times w/ everyone taking a bite in order to finish it... soooo good though! Then a few of us hit up the Elko downtown.  Let's just say, you only turn 21 once so I couldn't really go easy just because I had to wake up at 6 am the next day to do physical labor in the desert.  We stumbled (literally) into a bar that had karaoke and my graduate student advisor and I belted out Don't Stop Believin' to a bunch of biker men.  My encore to that was "I Like Big Butts".  I think they were pretty confused.  More shenanigans took place but overall it was an epic night.  The next day: not so epic.  I pretty much died.  While I managed to get up and dressed and head out with my team, I found the desert sun and my massive hangover didn't go well together so I had to sit out for some of the first station.  Luckily my team had four people so it wasn't that bad.  By 4 o'clock I recovered and helped with our last station.  

More station installs tomorrow (and every day after that for a week) but also a free Uncle Kracker concert at the Elko motorcycle rally! Should be a good time!

Ruby Mts

Working on the action packer

Dirrrrty