We ventured up to Lake Mateus today, through the snow drift from the last couple of days, equipped with shovels. Our ice holes and staked out coring site was buried under a foot of snow but, with the aid of GPS we managed to find them and dig blocks of snow to make a snow wall barrier around our sampling site. We also needed to dig out the equipment bags and crates. It was hard work (let alone being a Sunday morning, post Saturday night/Sunday morning dancing …) and had started to snow again before we had finished but at least it should be easier to find next time …

Visibility was getting worse by lunch time so we decided our next step to take some cores and slice up the sediment in the field would be better put off until the weather improves (which is forecast to do over the next few days – we hope …). The afternoon was instead spent catching up on water filtering and taking water chemistry readings from the lakes within the base area – still quite an accomplishment given the continuously developing horizontal blizzard.