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| Brooke and Max Screening |
I woke up on Friday, the last
day of the second week of field school, and frankly, I was pumped. It might
have seemed like I was still in a sleepy haze all throughout breakfast and
while we were breaking camp, but in actuality my mind was back at the control
unit my crew and I had been working on the whole week. That CU was like the
white whale of field school, barring anything else that may come up later. We
started off at a great pace, managing to back stake our unit pretty quickly,
but as we all kept taking turns digging different levels, we realized that this
was no ordinarily stubborn hole. In the end, it took a week worth of digging to
get past the compacted clay, tree roots and other obstacles our inexperience
presented. It was amazing though;
I never really anticipated just how much
technique could go into digging a perfect 1x1m hole. The more times one of our
esteemed crew chiefs would stop by and drop a casual remark about an easier
tool to use for whatever we were doing, the faster each lever seemed to go, all
the way up to Friday, when we only had the smallest bit of digging to finish.
We quickly set to work after the van ride up to the site, and squared away the
bottom of the hole, did a column test, and took lots of pictures. It was a
beautiful moment, and then we had to fill the hole back up. It may sound
simple, but it turned out that a lot of the buckets of screened dirt we had
sent to the wet-screening crew took about 20cm worth of dirt away, so after we
thought we were done, we had to fetch more dirt. All in all, I never thought
it’d be so much fun to finish one hole, not that the digging wasn’t fun, but
the completion of this hole was a big deal to me, and even now, I can’t wait to
dig something else.
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| Sasha knocking out a level |
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| Dusty helping with the unit |
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