This trip was taken to service a recalcitrant GPS receiver near the summit of Mt. Olympus, in the Olympic National Park of Washington's Olympic Peninsula. The GPS receiver is part of the Pacific Northwest GPS Array, and was installed with funding from the SuomiNet project.  The receiver was positioned to fill in a major PANGA gap in the imaging of the rupture of Cascadia slow earthquakes.  The service trip entailed an 18 mile hike to the Blue Glacier, from there a ski up to the Blue Glacier Icefall, and from there a crampon up to the top of Snow Dome, where the reciever and telemetry systems are located near a hut used by glacier researchers over the last fifty years.  The receiver is now functioning properly.

click to enlarge

Panic peak and Snowdome on the left. The receiver sits in the notch between the two.

A topo map of the route to this site. Click image to enlarge, or here for pdf.

The approach is 18 miles of hiking through the Hoh river Rainforest. Green.

Day one sees us up to Elk lake and camping in the rain.

Day 2 gets us a first view (above) and onto the moraine (right).

Up the Blue Glacier to the icefall, turn right at Snowdome.

Skis, finally! And a rope for the glacier.

Up through the icefall (left), top out on Snowdome (above)

Descend to the hut, there's the receiver.

Receiver on the left, telemetry package on the right (above and below)

Open the box, swap out old for new. Weather's turning bad.

Close up the box and head home. End of Day 2.

Bad pieces left; heading down onto the glacier right.

And cross the glacier, load up the skis, and tomorrow it's 18 miles back in the rain. GPS reciever is now fixed! And some call this work.