Never skip leg day

It's been a long while since I regularly did weight training, but a half-joking statement was to never skip leg day. I definitely paid for several skipped leg days today as we climbed up and down 145 floors worth of topography. I swear, the mantra of this deployment is, "Hey, see that mountain in the wilderness? Climb over it, then walk another kilometer and install the station." Suffice to say, my legs feel like lead weights after today. But we got to 4 stations, successfully downloaded the data, and added protection from critters who like to chew up our cables. This was our absolute hell day though. We did all 4 stations from one parking spot and they are by far the most desolate. They mostly work as a set because they are all at the north end of a big wash valley, but getting between them usually involves losing 400 feet of elevation and then gaining 800 feet of elevation. Did I mention there are no trails in the wilderness? Yeah, because there are no trails in the wilderness. Tomorrow we are taking it a little easier as the forecast suggests quite a bit of rain, but 13 stations are done and just 6 more left to go with two more work days!

Data recovery has been pretty good. A couple stations needed a little fix to the power system, but that's why I'm glad we're out here again after our October service. A little data was lost, but we should be good until the pull out in March 2020. I haven't checked the data that we've collected since October, but we have been doing some preliminary analysis on the data we collected in October. I can't really go into detail, but noise performance is good, crustal structure is amazing, and mantle anisotropy will take a few repeated analyses before we can say for certain. 


Definitely got my steps in today.





We walked down that...














What is this cactus doing growing straight out of the rock!?!?!?!?!?!


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