Three-quarters of a century ago, before the great St. Elias Range and Mount Logan were protected in a National Park, an earlier wave of pioneers came looking for precious metals. Their record still exists at Silver City, a ghost town of old log cabins, built in 1925, that can be found among the trees near the Kluane airstrip where David Fisher coordinates the science of the ICE2001 team. In 2001, the St. Elias treasure is now in the form of tourists and mountaineers who come from all over the world to see this wonder of ice and snow in the southwest corner of the Yukon.

When things go well, they go very well. Two main hurdles are over at Prospector-Russell Col. The equipment from the lower altitude has been successfully delivered and installed at Prospector-Russell Col and the bugs have been sorted out of the main ice coring drill. Ice cores are now being extracted and stored at a great pace by two shifts, led by Mike Demuth and Mike Waskiewicz. As of today, 62 metres of ice core had been carefully stored, sealed and labelled in metre-long cylindrical containers. These will stay in the sub-zero temperatures at Prospector-Russell Col until conditions are right to fly them to refrigeration storage at a lower, warmer level for eventual transportation back to a refrigerated laboratory in Ottawa.

Despite the cold air at Prospector-Russell Col, it was warm enough that frost had to be constantly cleaned off the drill's inner barrel to maintain the gap that allows the ice chips from drilling to be deflected from the drill bit. Otherwise, the chips will build up and prevent the drill from continuing to penetrate downward into the ice.

The mobile team from the Quintino Sella Glacier is also enjoying good progress and will sleep at Camp 2 tonight and maybe make King Col tomorrow. Today, at Camp 2, they took samples from a three-metre pit. From the bottom of the pit, they also took out a hand-drilled core to a depth of an additional nine metres. All these samples taken from various locations on the Logan massif will become part of the growing record of the ice and snow in this remote part of Canada.