Believe it or not, the last day of our stay here in Seida has finally arrived! These past few days we spent with packing and doing inventory. Not all of our equipment can stay in the green cabin over winter and a lot of things we moved to a storage place in Seida. Our sensitive electronical equipment and measurement devices will be stored in a warm place in the city Vorkuta. All of our samples – result of this summer's field work – will first go to Syktyvkar, where Maija will prepare them for customs.
From there they will be sent via cargo to St. Petersburg, where we will hopefully pick them up in mid-September and transport them across the Finnish border, to safety. Let's keep our fingers crossed that the sample transport will go as planned. Especially for our frozen and cooled samples it is critical not to get stuck in Russian customs.

As the vehicle that picked us up was scheduled for Monday afternoon, we were on a tight schedule. Many small things that were left over the summer still needed to be done before leaving the field. We were able to finish just in time and enjoyed our last ride on a fully packed vehicle back to Seida. And just as we thought everything was done and were looking forward to our last "Banja" of course the vehicle broke down in the middle of nowhere. Luckily our drivers could fix it and Banja was back on.

And for us it provided a nice insight into what the inside of a huge tundra vehicle looks like, everyone was certainly very interested as you can see on the picture.

The rainy August weather has disappeared and last week was sunny and warm, as if to make it hard for us to leave.

Tundra is blossoming in beautiful autumn colors and shining in shades of red, orange, yellow and green. Thus, on the one hand we feel a bit nostalgic about leaving this place, which has been our home for two months. But on the other hand we of course look forward to enjoying the luxuries of the civilized world again, starting from water, that doesn't have to be fetched from a well first. Oh, what an experience it will be to just open the valve at the sink and have warm water! Only a few more days until the first shower within two months.

Now, in Seida, we have already packed everything and are waiting for the train that will take us to Moscow.

Having been almost two full months in the field now, our departure date is getting closer and closer and we are currently doing our last full week of measurements. We plan to have finished those by tomorrow evening and after that we will be very busy with our end of season preparations. This includes packing of course, but also reading out of data from our new soil loggers and the weather station, as well as some more installations for next year.

As thawing depth has reached its maximum now, we will be able to install some more soil sensors in greater depths, which will then be ready for the next year's field work. We will also put a finishing touch to our bridges and try to make the weather station reindeer-proof, for the reindeer-herders will pass through our tundra site in autumn.

Our lovely green field cabin, which at the moment is about 1.5 kilometers walking distance from our main research site, will be moved there during the winter. We are looking forward to next year, when we can skip the daily walk to and from the site and everything will be a little easier. More about our end of season work and the last days here will follow in the next posting.

The last week has been quite busy and rather interesting. We already mentioned our many newcomers and their drilling work during last week's post. Most of them left by the end of last week, but Laura and Toni stayed in the cabin until last Sunday. And because they had quite many samples and a lot of equipment and luggage we enjoyed a ride on a tundra vehicle to pick them up as the picture shows.

Unfortunately it started to rain during the drive back and when we arrived in Seida we were all totally soaked. Walking back to the Tundra after a day off in Seida wasn't at all as easy as the vehicle ride there a day earlier, as two weeks of almost non-stop rain have rendered the road very muddy. Walking there is pretty heavy and now and again people lose a rubber boot, when it gets stuck in the mud...

For the last week here we have returned to being a very small group again and all of us (Igor, Richard, Carolina, Natasha and Ivan) will stay until the very end. Christina and Tanja have returned to Kuopio in Finland today, after checking in on us and having dealt with the "official" stuff. Christina also provided us with a welcome distraction, as she brought some movies and we were finding ourselves watching a horror movie during our stay in Seida village. Luckily not a too creepy one, otherwise the lonely tundra and the one-of-a-kind Seida scenery would have provided a very scary setting.

The weather here also seems to be improving towards the end and we had sunshine with almost no rain today, which felt very nice for a change.