First field trip
Transitioning from the lab to field work was a learning experience - A first outing to Crook Glacier in the Central Oregon Cascades served as a worthy shakedown for the new instrument for glacier characterization
Shakedown, step 1. On a beautiful Monday night, I invited the lab’s graduate students over to my backyard for cider and science. The objective: Measure the distance between the fire pit and the shed using a photon-counting LiDAR that cost more than my car. But I had calculated that it would take light about the same time to make it across the yard, get scattered of the side of the shed, and back to me where the detector was standing, as it would to traverse a couple meters through bubbly glacier ice. Turns out it was about 50ft. We confirmed the measurement that we carried out with a photon-counting LiDAR with a $15 tape measure. But that wasn’t the point really. I had packed everything in hardcases, put it back together in my backyard, taken “data”, and nothing had broken so far.
Shakedown, step 2. Bouncing photons around the backyard is fun, but lacking a few things we would encounter on a real glacier. It wasn’t cold or wet, and we didn’t even know if glacier ice behaved the way we thought it would. So a compromise had to be found. We set out sights on Crook Glacier on Broken Top near Bend, Oregon. It’s a tiny, sad, debris covered glacier surrounded by steep rock faces. Not a prime objective for science, but at least it’s only two miles from the trailhead. Not a lot of wasted time in case something didn’t work.