Accessible by offroad vehicles, with a normal vehicular fine-weather road to within 400m.
Distance From Road:
400 m
Type:
Natural heat island, 300 m above floor of an Arctic valley. In winter several degrees warmer than the valley bottom and slightly warmer than the valley top some 500 m higher.
The immediate vicinity of the instruments is an open deciduous forest on a well-drained ridge with rather regolithic soil. There are patches of forest where the conifers are dominent, within sight, both on and just off the ridge. The boreholes are in a natural meadow, covered with grasses and small shrubs, of dimensions about 30 by 50m.
Landform:
The site is on a ridge about 1/3 up the North side of the Mackenzie River Valley. At this location, the valley has a plain some 50km wide to the Southwest of the river, reaching toward the Mackenzie Mountains. On the near, Northwest side, the valley slopes up locally to a ridge about 950m high. The river is at about 40m ASL locally.
Morphology:
Land slopes away to river valley 200m below to South, and into a small valley 40m below toward the North, beyond which is a longer slope up to a small mountain 650m above the site.
