Tech Support Weekend

February 28th & March 1st, 2003

Lake Lucerne
We arrived on Friday. The night was cold and clear. Lawn chairs were setup on the ice to gaze at the stars and watch the snowmobiles crossing the lake.
Lake Lucerne
Orion, my favorite winter constellation, was directy overhead, slowly moving to the west as the night passed..
Lake Lucerne
Dawn saw a low level fog covering the lake shore. As the sun hit the vapor it went away but not before creating some hoarfrost, natures frocking.
Lake Lucerne
It covered pine trees.
Lake Lucerne
It coated weeds.
Lake Lucerne
Almost everything was blanketed in the stuff till the sun hit it. It was all gone in about 2 hours.
Lake Lucerne
Our fort from the bottle rocket war still survives though the sun is taking it's toll on the structure. Only one ice butteress endures and the entire cidadel is smaller.
Lake Lucerne
Jeff's fort also stands. Man fears time but time only fears Jeff's fort (or something like that).
Lake Lucerne
Attention was paid to the weather station. The temperature sensor was shaded to make the readings more accurate. The software controling the data stream was fiddled with and all seemed fine. It fooled us. I'll fix it in two weeks.
Lake Lucerne
With the weather station seemingly fixed the only thing left to do was to measure the snow and ice depths. I did not look forward to the manual drilling of the hole in the ice (I heard the ice was thick).
Lake Lucerne
The snow on the lake is only about 6 inches.
Lake Lucerne
The ice is almost 26 inches. It has been reported that the frost in the ground goes down 6 feet. This has got to be some sort of record but that's little consolation to those poor souls with frozen drains to there holding tanks.
Lake Lucerne
Saturday was such a nice day we really didn't want to leave but the forecasted cold combined with the call of our jobs won out. We'll be back in 2 weeks!


-Nemo