 by Ned Rozell December 06, 2003
Tytgat did not enjoy the long night he shared with 420 pounds of batteries, an antenna and seismic equipment, but he is thankful the little gray hut was there. Tytgat is a geophysicist with the Alaska Volcano Observatory and for more than 20 years he has installed and repaired seismic stations across Alaska, from 14,000 feet high on Mt. Wrangell to Umnak Island on the Aleutian chain. He was on Umnak Island last summer when he had to spend the night in an equipment hut. 
Last August, Tytgat was on Umnak Island to finish up a seismic network on the flanks of Okmok Volcano. While working on a station lower on the island, he noticed that the rim of Okmok crater was visible, with blue sky in the background. A hut on the rim needed solar panels installed, so he jumped in a helicopter for a ride to the top. The helicopter pilot dropped him near the hut on the crater rim. Tytgat pulled out the solar panels, his toolbox, and a waterproof bag full of survival gear. The pilot then took off and found a less precarious place to park the helicopter. A dense fog crept in while Tytgat worked on the solar panels. When he finished, he called over his radio to the helicopter pilot, who gave Tytgat his GPS coordinates and told him to hike over to the helicopter. Before Tytgat could reach the helicopter, the pilot took advantage of a gap in the fog to descend from the slope. By that time, about three hours after he installed the solar panels, Tytgat was wet, cold, and not sure he could reach the helicopter by dark. He then made the difficult decision to retreat to the hut for the night. His GPS guided him back to
the hut, which was streaked with rain and vibrating in the wind.
He creaked open the door, stepped in, pulled his dry-bag inside,
and slammed it shut. The hut was watertight, but condensation dripped from the ceiling. Adding to his anxiety were memories of two huts that he had just visited-lighting had struck and destroyed one, and the wind had ripped another out of its cement footings and blew it over a cliff. As his mind raced through scenarios, gusts of wind rattled the tiny hut. "I was pretty nervous," he said recently at his office at the University of Alaska's Geophysical Institute. "Either I could get hit by lightning or blown off the mountain." After a retched night, Tytgat crawled from the hut in the morning to see nothing but fog. Knowing he needed to make the most of his daylight, he leaned into the wind and started hiking along the rim of the volcano, staying on top so he wouldn't get lost. Through a marginal hole in the fog, the helicopter pilot landed and retrieved him. Tytgat spend much of the day warming up by a woodstove at a family's ranch on the island. Looking back on his night in a box, Tytgat said it confirmed a few points-scientific fieldwork in Alaska is often more of a challenge than it seems, and a field hand's best friend is his survival bag. "I wouldn't go out without
it," he said.
Source of Story & Photograph:
|