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The glacier hovercraft

May I present: The glacier hovercraft. Patent pending. Our long discussion solution which ended up working absolutely amazing. We felt like big idiots walking up the glacier with that thing, but it turned out marvelous on the way down. Far too much water up there at the moment. Some of the channels are probably up to 2 m deep, filled with icy slush. The lake has been filling rapidly within the last two days. I had a nice pole, sticking 2.5 m out of the ice, several meters away from the lake, just two days earlier. A nice GPS mounted on it. Well, now I have an underwater GPS, as the pole is completely submerged and the water keeps filling the lake. We did our last laser scan of the area, before hauling the instrument down. My task was to be the donkey, hauling the wagon with the heavy instrument behind me. Given the amount of water everywhere, we had to open yet another new route, had some interesting crossings and in the end went into amphibious mode with our hovercraft, loading the wagon on the wheel, dressing in wadders and roping up to cross the glaciers. A lot of fun, at least for the two persons in the front with the wadders. We walked straight through the deepest water pools. Unfortunaltey we had only two pairs of wadders, leading to the last two persons on the rope ending up in deep and icy water all the way to their hips. Well, as I wrote earlier: No Arctic fieldwork days without wet feet, sorry hips.