As you can imagine, the last day was entirely dedicated to cleaning up 14 days of hard scientific camp life. Taking down the lab went – maybe not too surprising – about 10 times faster than setting it up. We decided to bend the “do not leave any traces behind” rule a bit and did not shuffle the 10 t snow which we removed back in place. Guess Sysselmannen will be fine with that.
Malin documented every single piece of equipment with a picture before packing it down, Einar did the scooter stunt of the year, reversing the scooter back in the box, with 1 cm clearance and without chopping of his head, Miriam was extremely excited about finally shuffling snow again, Daniel collected all his cables and electronics, Janne tried to keep control, keep us all busy and tried to eat up all of the remaining chocolate and Josef took care of the LiCores, after a not so successful final light transect in the morning.
Now everything is ready for the pickup tomorrow and we celebrated with yet another fantastic sauna – to be the first field team ever to get back to town after two weeks in the field smelling fresh like Svalbard spring flowers. Now there will be a last extraordinary dinner prepared by Einar – Salmon with vegetables – and Malin – cake – and tomorrow we will be (weather depending) back in town for a beer or two and a looong shower!
(DV)
