Prudhoe Bay Morning 013008

Thursday was a gorgeous day, -30 or so and clear. The sun came up for a few hours. I'm glad I work indoors, but I find days like this just breathtakingly beautiful.

Our ice road is still under construction, and the wind last week pushed some rubble ice up against the island. So we asked our helicopter pilots to make a flyby of the island and take a few pictures we could send to the engineers in town. Stephan Hill took all of these, in fact there are another 20 or so I loaded into my Flickr photo album (you're welcome to go look at all of them, just follow the link on the right side of this page), but I wanted to post a sampling of them here.

Prudhoe Morning - this photo is taken on land, on the way out to Northstar. I'm guessing this is 'sunrise' and was probably taken between 11 am and noon.
Here is a picture of the Discovery Well monument. It marks the spot where the exploration well was drilled that proved there was lots of oil up here.

Here is a picture of our ice road under construction. The island is behind the helicopter and the shot is looking back toward shore. You can see STP in the background, it's located on shore, and a couple of pumper trucks strung out along the road.

Here is a close up of one of the pumpers. They have a big auger on the back so they can drill through the ice and pump seawater up to flood the area we want to eventually use as a road.

Here is another picture of the ice road, this time with the hovercraft headed back to shore with some passengers. Once the ice road is thick enough we'll switch to bus travel back & forth to shore, but for now we're sticking with the hovercraft.

Here is a picture of the island, it's 7 miles off shore. You can see all the ice rubble pushed up around one side, and then in the back ground you can see the pumpers on the ice road, and STP & the shore line.