Gobble, gobble.

Thanksgiving at the Lake Hoare Camp is a major event!

People from all over Taylor Valley hiked in to camp on Thursday to share Thanksgiving dinner with us, swelling our numbers from 6 to 30! We definitely needed the help to polish off the feast: a 28 lb. turkey, sweet potato casserole, stuffing, cornbread pudding, cranberry sauce and homemade chutney, gravy, pumpkin rolls, green peas, and 8 homemade pies.

I should add, we don't eat this well every day.

We've all heard of going "over the river and through the woods," but my heart goes out to the members of the snow patch project, who hiked over the Canada glacier to get here for dinner--and then hiked back the same night! (While the rest of us napped and digested).

It's not all feasting these days, though. I've been hard at work with Andrew Fountain, the chief of the project I'm working on, collecting soil samples in wet and dry portions of the permafrost. We're keeping these samples frozen once they're collected, so that colleagues of ours in Virginia can count the number of nematodes and microbes in the soil to see how the biological community responds to the underground streams I've been working on.