Alaskan Dinosaur Expedition

Into the Wilderness

July 19:

We arranged for a pickup truck to bring all our gear to the boats. Bob Rosencrantz, who runs the Nuiqsut Trapper School’s power plant, and John Stames, one of the guys from Nuiqsut construction helped. We left Nuiqsut at 9:45; the fog was heavy so it made for a cool start.

We had a fair amount of difficulty getting upriver; we are at the top of the delta, so picking the right channel became a challenge. At times we were drawing only six inches of water; it took us an hour to go maybe two miles upriver. Once we cleared the hazards we could finally get the boats going fast enough to outrun the mosquitoes. They are relentless.

My sense of euphoria is wearing off now that we’ve begun to deal with the realities of being here, but this is how the real story develops:

Our first stop was at Old Bone Beach, where Linda found a theropod toe. It was an outstanding find, especially since she spotted it in the first five minutes after we landed. Other great finds of the morning included two jars of juvenile hadrosaurs (duck-billed dinosaurs), unfortunately without teeth. While working there we were obviously near a rough-legged hawk nest, and one dove at me close enough that I felt the breeze. Several dinosaur specimens were also very interesting with respect to the bone features on their surfaces; one bone, for example, had a nice row of impressions on it that looks like a perfectly good bite mark. There are also numerous rib and limb bones here; several additional bones had possible trample marks, making me think that this site has an interesting burial history.

We had lunch, cataloged about two dozen specimens, and moved upriver. Traveling up the river offers a welcome relief from the mosquitoes; I find squishing them in large numbers a major task during lunch. In the afternoon we arrived at a river bar named "Poverty Bar," in the Liscomb quarry. We made camp by the river on the upriver side of the bar. After setting up my tent, Roland took me up to Sling Point Quarry, then on up to the tundra.

The tundra is in bloom and full of beautiful flowers. The patterned ground is difficult to walk on. The willows seem to mark the hidden trenches, and once you recognize that, it is easier to avoid tripping into them. (Patterned ground is the result of the freezing and thawing that occurs on the permafrost closest to the surface – from the air, you can see the trenches that this forms in the shape of polygons.) The small ponds are very shallow, and aside from the river bluffs, the only significant topographic features are "pingos" (a large frost mound of soil-covered ice; most of these were about 60 feet high) in various stages of development.

Nearly a full day of fighting the mosquitoes is testing my patience. The citronella-based insect repellents are useless here; I am glad at the last minute I bought a bottle of DEET in Fairbanks and threw it in my pack. That seems to be the only thing that works here. I am now finding it enormously satisfying to squash as many mosquitoes as I can.