polar bumble bee expedition day 9: to deadhorse and back

Day 9 Franklin Bluffs to Deadhorse and back 7/6
 
We woke up early today to drive to Deadhorse so Bren could do the Prudhoe Bay tour. The Dalton Highway ends in Deadhorse, and beyond the town the road access is restricted to oil company personnel due to pipeline accessibility. Anyone wanting to see or touch the Arctic Ocean in Prudhoe Bay must pay for a tour through the oil field to get to the ocean. While Bren did the tour (and got a certificate for going in the water) we hung out in Deadhorse, collecting bees off of Oxytropis along the Sagavanirktok (Sag) River. We found a good number of bees and stuck around for a while to collect. After a gift shop stop we said goodbye to Jim and Katie, dropping our numbers to 5 – Hollis, Bren, Alan, Michelle, and me (Kristal). We then headed back through Dalton Highway construction to Franklin Bluffs. In a rare moment of actually receiving a radio signal we listened to John Denver’s song “Thank God I'm a Country Boy” – this song would surface repeatedly in the next few days, getting stuck in nearly everyone’s head for some time.
We collected more bumble bees off of Hedysarum a mile north of Franklin Bluffs, then returned to our campsite to process the bees from Deadhorse and the site we dubbed "N of Franklin Bluffs". We opted for a dinner of pancakes and maple syrup, and went to bed early – it had been a long day and the wind was really whipping. In the land of the midnight sun it doesn’t work to wait until dark before going to bed; instead you just have to declare a bedtime and hope that your eye mask blocks out the light and/or you are tired enough to not care about the sun shining through the tent.