polar bumble bees expedition day 10: back to the arctic circle

Day 10 Franklin Bluffs to Arctic Circle 7/7
This morning some red foxes came to check out our camp, likely attracted to the smell of oatmeal and previous experiences of scrounging food from people camping there. They were beautiful, and one was still shedding its fluffy winter coat from its tail. From here on out we’re southbound, retracing our steps and sampling at previous sites or new potential sites depending on what we collected on the drive up.
We also added our first caribou to the wildlife list, a lone female whose graceful travel through the tussocky landscape awed us all now that we’ve all stumbled and lumbered through that uneven, lumpy landscape.
We made a brief stop at Toolik for some coffee, internet and water, then continued southbound. After driving through Atigun Pass we stopped at Chandalar Shelf just south of the pass (or as we like to call it, the Shelf of Chandalar – it has a certain fantastic ring to it). Bees were aplenty, and we collected and processed the bees there in the parking lot. Not bad scenery for field work and “field-sterile” sample processing. We even found some bees with dark, funky-looking guts and some very weird possible nematodes in one of the collection tubes. More stuff to investigate and figure out when we’re back in the lab.
We also collected bees on fireweed, yarrow (Achillea millefolium) and white sweet clover (Melilotus alba) in the Coldfoot Camp parking lot, a spot we’d stopped before but hadn’t collected. Finally we ended the day back at our camp in Arctic Circle, taking full advantage of the picnic table to process samples and experience what felt like rather plush (and relatively mosquito-free) camping at this point.