All Photos Have Been Posted!

All the pictures Kate and I have taken from the drive and the first couple of weeks in Fairbanks have been posted to my Flickr account.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/leepetersen/

If you haven't used Flickr much before, I have organized everything into sets (usually on the right of the page).

There you can find such classics as:

Drive to Alaska

Our First Alaska Home

Creamer's Field

Tanana Valley Farmer's Market

Museum of the North

And much, much more!

The Trip, (continued) LAST DAY!

Whitehorse, Yukon to Fairbanks, Alaska!

Driving was getting tiring, but the scenery was unbelievable. I think we had been driving alongside big mountains for about a thousand miles. We left pretty early in the morning to try to arrive in Fairbanks by 5 pm and saw a few herds of Elk on the side of the road. Sorry, but there wasn’t sufficient light yet to get good pictures of them. The same thing happened when Kate and I were hiking in the Olympics. Someday, though I will get a good picture of elk.

After an hour the big mountains got bigger and we started seeing lots of snow and glaciers. The funny thing is, these are the foothills to the mountains in Kluane National Park and the Wrangell St. Elias Mountains.

Then we touched the edge of Kluane National Park and the Kluane River. I cannot describe this landscape, so here are pictures.

Then, all of a sudden, we were in Alaska!

From here there was about 5 hours of driving to the cabin. We were trying to make good time, and didn’t stop to take many pictures. I figure these places are close enough that I will have plenty of time to photograph them while we are living here. So you’ll have to wait. But, it is beautiful.

We arrived in Fairbanks, met our landlord and moved into our cabin!

The Trip, (continued) Day 6

Fort Nelson, British Columbia to Whitehorse, Yukon Territory

Enter the Canadian Rockies. It’s a lot like the U.S. Rockies without the people and places. In other words, they are very nice. Today starts a stretch of trees and mountains like I have never seen. We can drive for hours at 70 mph without seeing any signs of civilization other than the road we are on.

Imagine driving through Rocky Mountain National Park, only when you get out of the National Park, instead of hitting towns and ski resorts completely surrounding it, you simply find more mountains and trees. We only see another car about every 10 minutes or so. Every few hundred miles there is a gas station/lodge. We even find an airport here!

I guess you can land pretty much anywhere you find a windsock.

The first real wildlife we saw today was Caribou. There was a family of three up on one of the passes. They didn’t care too much that we were there. Next we ran into (I think) three buffalo herds.

Otis also watched the Buffalo. But, I do not think that he liked them.

Then all of a sudden, welcome to the Yukon and the whole landscape changes again. This is kind of a Wyoming or Utah meets the Lord of the Rings and Antarctica. We stayed in Whitehorse which is the capitol city. It’s kind of a neat town; I definitely want to explore this area (the whole Yukon Territory) a sometime in the near future.

The Trip (continued), Day 5

Edmonton, Alberta to Fort Nelson, British Columbia

Today we drove through land that reminds me very much of eastern Montana or Wyoming. There are very dry, rolling, slightly rocky hills and very few towns. The main difference is that when you get out of the car it is 70 [deg F] not 110.

Then in Dawson Creek, B.C. we hit the Alaska Highway. A couple hours later the Alaska Highway hit us back as I said in an earlier post. A few hours into the Alaska Highway the landscape changes again to black and white pine forest and the hills get a little bigger as we go.

Fort Nelson is mostly one main street. It kind of has the feel of Riverton, WY for the two other people who have been there. Kate and I have noticed that in this part of Canada, they really just call things exactly what they are. There’s no creative naming or playing with words. Our favorite was the amusement park, Waterfalls and Dinosaurs! I cannot describe how much I want to go there.

If you come here, prepare for high gas prices. When we left New Hampshire, gas was $2.59/gallon. In Fort Nelson we paid $1.21/liter or $4.84/gallon.

The Trip, (continued) Day 4

Regina, Saskatchewan to Edmonton, Alberta

We finally get a short day of driving. Accordi

ng to AAA Tripticks it’s only going to be about

an eight hour drive. Since the odometer hit 3500 miles today, it’s also a good day for an oil change in Saskatoon. Unfortunately, the oil change in Saskatoon set us back 50 bucks, and I’m pretty sure they didn’t do anything.

Saskatchewan is a mixed up province in my

eyes. It is a gorgeous place, except for a few/many horrific scars in its landscape. There’s a lot of oil being pumped from the ground, which I am ok with to a point. They typically only take up a few tens of square feet of land on a farm. Even though they are unsightly and not environmentally friendly, they are at least a temporary source of revenue for the st

ressed farmers. Given the current situation with deepwater drilling, this seems a bit more ok in my eyes. As I stated before, the real horror is in the oil sands or tar sands operation. I don’t really know how to describe it. It looks like they took about two or three hundred farms, turned the land upside down, about 30-40 feet deep, scraped as much oil as they could and left it to move on to some more farmland down the road. The remaining oil/tar is left to run off into the local rivers and streams.

Other than that, Saskatchewan seems to be mostly canola fields (1st picture), grasses and old farms (2nd picture). The canola fields really a quite pretty green and sparkling yellow

in the Sun.

The mills and grain elevators are really cool to look at too.

Arriving in Edmonton I was a bit surprised. It didn’t look like

the beautiful city in the ads. Rather, the foreground oil

refinery completely blocked the view of the city. Edmonton itself didn’t look so bad, but holy energy production Batman, Midwestern Canada is much different than I had expected.

No Internets Right Now

Sorry folks, internet was scarce in the Yukon, and we have yet to obtain it in-house. It will probably be sometime next week that it gets turned on, so I'll wait to finish up the rest of the amazing trip in then.

However, we are in Fairbanks now and getting settled into the cabin. You'll find out more later.

The Alaska Highway Fights Back

It's day five and we have arrived in Ft. Nelson, British Columbia. After finally arriving on the Alaska Highway after a little over 3000 miles the car took its first hard hit. Coming down some big hill in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies a construction (or oil) vehicle threw a rock into our windshield and smashed it pretty good. We can still see out of it, but it's a bummer that now our brand new vehicle is going to need a new windshield.

After getting on the highway we both noticed there were a lot of trees. They seemed to stretch on forever, like nothing I have ever seen before. There wasn't much else. A black bear ran out of the woods, up to the side of the road opposite to us, looked around and ran back. I think he moved thirty feet in three leaps.

Next we ran into some construction, and the road became dirt for about 10 miles or so. In about 30 meters of roadway we saw the squiggly road sign, with 8% grade, and loose gravel, and moose crossing, and extreme dust, and probably other warning signs we couldn't see because of the dust.

Those are the big things that happened today. I'll post some more about the trip in general later.

Day 3, 2, and 1

So it is day 4. Say what? I wanted to write every night, but it turned out that I would get to the hotel and pass out every afternoon. So today I'll cap off what's happened so far. Kate and I are currently in Regina Saskatchewan.

First of all, sorry to all my friends and family in Ohio, Minnesota, and Illinois who we blew right past. There simply hasn't been time to stop.

Day 1: Dover, New Hampshire to Elyria, Ohio

I think this day was totally uneventful. We saw a lot of New York, a lot of big vineyards, Lake Erie, and Cleveland. There was a fawn unattended on the side of the highway and a few hawks making kills next to the road. Ohio still looks like Ohio, except there are even more stupid subdivisions being built.

Day 2: Elyria, Ohio to St. Cloud, Minnesota

We saw a lot of farms. Then dingy Gary, Indiana. Then we went right through Chicago. I took I-94 because Kate hadn't seen the city and driving in there were no cars or traffic so I said "sure". Then funny enough, there was no traffic. We got a little stuck once for a broken down vehicle, and traffic was a little slow coming out of the city.

Then, we saw more farms. Wisconsin was still pretty. Kate did not let me stop at casinos. The weather was about 95 degrees which was unpleasant. MN was beautiful as always. We had a Tornado warning in St. Cloud and had to take Otis into the bathroom which he was not happy about.

Day 3: St. Cloud, Minnesota to Regina Saskatchewan

Gorgeous morning weather. Cool breeze and big clouds with lightning to the west. I love open skies! We get on the road, drive through something that looked like it could have been apocalyptic if we had left an hour later seen from the hotel to the right.

After passing through we say a moose walking through an alfalfa field. We reached Fargo, North Dakota pretty quickly. Holy sunflowers all over. There were hundreds of sunflower fields. We finally got off the highway and on to route 52 after about an hour and moved north and west.

We passed through some serious tornado damage to a farm north of the Des Lacs National Wildlife Refuge. It looked pretty bad, a giant combine was completely flattened, trucks overturned and flattened and homes/barns destroyed.


Then we crossed the border into Saskatchewan. Right over the border was oil fields, coal fields, and oil/tar sand operations. These are disgusting. Anyone that thinks that tar sands are a viable way to get oil needs to visit Estevan, SK. This is nothing short of rape of the land. And they don't just sit in one place and dig. They just expands and destroys everything they dig. There are just sand dunes, still covered in oil and chemicals left to drain into the local environment. This was once great farmland, now it will never be anything again. All for a few kilowatt-hours per acre. Sacrificing an acre of land (forever) for a few hours worth of power should not be any real way of obtaining that power.

After all the energy crap, the rest of Saskatchewan (so far) is fairly pretty farmland. Flat though. Wow, it is flat. More of this to come today though. And at some point we need to get the oil changed. So, I'm off to get ready.

Still Packing

Two days left to go! No, we are not finished packing and no, I have no idea when we are going to find the time to finish packing. I love moving, but I hate the stupid process.

For those of you that are pack rats like us you need a new rule that says: when you walk into the house with something in your hand just say, 'what if I had to move to Alaska in two days?' Then properly throw that thing in the trash. Oh, you may think you need it, but I guarantee you'll completely forget you had it. Then comes the time to move and you say 'ooooh look what I found'. Then you spend an hour playing with it when you need to be packing. It is a vicious cycle.

At least I have come to the point when I finish playing with whatever toy I found I throw it in the goodwill box or the garbage.

Today

 The house is slowly emptying; boxes are piling up.  The morning air has finally cooled; ragweed allergies are atrocious.  Wednesday August 11th is falling on us like a rock.

 Kate and I were married on July 2nd of this year, a three day long festival that was probably the most memorable event in my life.  However, on the fifth day of July the party ended and we had to return to reality.  Since then, this hasn't really been a fun summer.  Besides going to Rangely, ME for a day there hasn't been a break.  Moving to Alaska is hard work.  Kate and I will be leaving our home in Dover, NH early in the morning on August 11th.  We've had to sell off most of what we own.  A few furniture items will be stored at her parents house, a few things will be going in our new car, a few things will be shipped to our new Dry Cabin in Fairbanks, Alaska.

 I'm really excited to get there and take and post many, many pictures of the place.  Yet, I'm getting really tired about the moving.  I'm at the point where everything is packed that I really want, can't I just throw the rest in a pile and have a going-away bonfire?

 No, that's not environmentally conscious or legal in Dover.  I checked.  Somehow in the next four days we must finish packing, say so-long to friends and family, finish my paper on the detection of interstellar neutral neon (my last hoorah with UNH and the culmination of my last two years of research there), get the cat in the car, and drive for eight days.

 Oh yeah, did I mention we're driving with a cat?