Greetings From Missouri!

Have I mentioned lately how quickly my schedule can change?

I'd been expecting to get called back into the field soon but the call I received last Sunday evening from American Resources Group, Ltd. was not one that I anticipated.

The phone rings at about 6:00pm and by 8:00pm I'm on the road to Carbondale, Illinois. I arrive there about 3:30am Monday morning, catch a quick nap in the hotel room they had waiting for me, then met with the boss at 7:00am. Three hours later I'm on the road again for another 4 hour drive to where I am now.

Which is a little place called Mexico, Missouri.

We're here now because there will be an oil/gas pipeline coming through the area and we need to excavate and document this site before it gets destroyed. Its a rather small site and wouldn't take long at all to deal with under favorable conditions. Too bad we don't have them.

This particular project was intended to last for only 5-6 days but before the first day was over we were already behind schedule. The problem here isn't rain, which is what caused us the biggest headaches back in Tell City. No, now its too blasted cold to get anything done properly. The soil is freezing faster than we can work through it!

The site itself is a small circular area, roughly 30' across, pretty much at the center of the photo above. It wasn't until the end of the day Tuesday that we could actually see it. The tree-cutters who came through earlier to clear the pipeline path had felled a huge honkin' oak right on top of our site and left it there! We had to call them back to clear out the limbs (you can still see the tree trunk to the left in the photo) before we could begin our primary excavations. To bide our time we dug a series of shovel probes around the tree to confirm the size of the site. And thats when we first discovered the joys of working with frozen ground.

Here's a photo of our first unit after nearly 2 full days working on it.

That pile of chunks in the very foreground with the flag in it is the frozen layer of topsoil that we chipped out to get us that far. See those tubs off to the right? We placed them directly in the unit, lit fires in them, and used that to soften up the ground enough to get our shovels into it. [I have photos of that trapped on my cell phone camera. Because of the crappy phone service out here I can't get them out. I'll come back and post them later once I can retrieve them.]

Once past the frozen surface we were able to make some decent progress for a couple of hours. But then the temperature began dropping even further and screwed things up again. Dirt was freezing in our screens faster then we could screen through even a small shovel-full. By the end of the day Wednesday, the newly exposed soil surfaces were freezing at the rate of 1cm/15 minutes (yes, we actually timed this).

Today we didn't even attempt to excavate though we did have to make an obligatory drive out to the site to "confirm" that it was too cold to work. With a temperature of 2 and a wind chill of around -30, yep, its too cold! Today was paperwork day instead which suited me just fine.

Tomorrow we'll try again. Its supposed to be at least a little bit warmer. And we are getting tents to shelter us from the wind which will be a big help. We'll be working into (maybe through) the weekend, which is supposed to be even warmer still, so maybe we won't be too far behind schedule when we finally get done.

We have two 1x2-meter units to complete, like the one pictured above. Both of those are nearly done. Then we have another 2 units of the same size to dig at the base of backhoe trenches. The backhoe came out and did its part yesterday. It, of course, had a much easier time digging the frozen ground than we did.

Here is one of the trenches. We'll be excavating where the black plastic is layed out.

Once the trench units have been completed, we'll be done. Can't say how long it will take for sure but with decent conditions (and provided we don't find any time-consuming surprises) it shouldn't be more than a couple of days.

And after this project I'm off to ................... Nebraska?!