Field Journal: Déjà vu all over again
Vince Patton, Producer/Reporter
Monday, February 18, 2008 — We enjoy our jobs, but let’s just say we’d really rather not have to do everything twice.
But sometimes technology fails. When you’re 6000 feet up Mt. Rainier, it’s an especially bad time for the camera to quit working. It wouldn’t show us a picture. It wouldn’t eject the tape. It just stopped doing everything. All we had so far was 10 minutes of video and we were still 2100 feet in elevation and 2 miles from the elusive ice worms we so wanted to see.
Videographer Michael Bendixen carefully spread out a tarp and opened the camera body to see if he could see anything obvious. (He was only able to do this because there wasn’t a breeze in the sky; no risk of dust flying in.) But it became apparent an engineer would need to fix the malfunction.
Cell phones barely worked there. After 18 or so calls (often abruptly dropped) back to OPB, our gurus sent another camera our way. That meant a hike down and a drive to meet the courier half way between Portland and the mountain. It also meant a full day's delay to make the journey to the glacier.
Worse, it meant repeating the hike – and convincing our scientists to repeat it as well. I don’t normally heap effusive praise here, but this time it’s so richly deserved: Professor Peter Wimberger and Univ. of Puget Sound graduate Ben Lee are troopers of the highest order!
They both had relatives with them who wanted to see the ice worms, so they continued up the mountain to show them. Then they returned the next day on their own to re-join us to do the long, steep hike for a second day in a row.
Other photos here.
Actually Wimberger went so far above and beyond the call of duty it’s hard to thank him enough. He actually made hikes up to the Paradise glacier twice earlier in the week, simply to scout out the best locations in order to insure our finding the tiny worms.
That’s four trips in one week!
Peter, we bow to your generosity, your gracious attitude and your climbing calves of steel.
