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| Our main camp in an old blowout in the sand dunes |
We flew to Tugidak by Helicopter and had a base camp, but we still had to keeps things 'minimalist'. The helicopter can carry something like 800 pounds, but the space inside is very limited - especially with 3 people in there. So we had to keep gear and food to a minimum. Keller the pilot told us that we were actually lighter and had less bulk than a group he had taken into the mountains for an overnight camping trip a few days earlier. What's amazing is that we actually took 2 camps with us - our base camp and then a whole other small teepee with wood stove and tiny tent for our 'spike camp'. I also thought it was a good idea to have extra tents in case we had a bad storm that destroyed stuff!
We did some of the archaeological survey from the helicopter, but we did most of it on foot. Keller and Molly on the days we got dropped off and picked up took the helicopter and checked on various places we were not able to get to on foot. While they flew I hiked.
And then it was all hiking on the 4 days in between the drop off and pick up. We covered a lot of ground. We also made the most of our foot coverage. We'd separate and would each hike a parallel beach ridge, creek bank, lake shore, or terrace edge. We communicated by radio and could often see each other in the distance in our bright orange High Visibility vests. So we covered twice the area we would have if we had stayed together.
Patrick
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| Our spike camp - we hiked a long ways to this camp |
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| Molly gathers firewood for the stove at the spike camp |
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| We might have got there using a helicopter but we certainly did a lot of hiking |
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