Wandering through the Alaska Range

Jason and I took off for the mountains south of Delta, part of the eastern Alaska Range on Friday. My guidebook, Outside in the Interior: An Adventure Guide for Central Alaska
describes the hiking in the area as "limited only by your imagination". I'm quickly discovering that this is really the only way to describe most backcountry travel in this state. I think we both expected more of a "trail" here, but after searching for and failing to find an elusive cairn described by the book we just took off in an upward direction.

A great day and night

Fairbanks has been having absolutely perfect weather the last few days: 65 and sunny. On Sunday a few clouds scattered the sky, it was totally gorgeous and the air felt awesome.

Kate and I went for a walk in Creamer's Field. The cranes are still flying around practicing their oh-so-awkward landings. Also, there is a dead moose carcass there, although now it is mostly bones.
Three sandhill cranes land awkwardly at Creamer's Field. For such pretty birds they lack a little grace on the landings.

Moose carcass; not decayed enough to not stink yet.

When night finally came (it actually is getting dark again) the sky became perfectly clear and you'll never guess what happened next -



We saw the aurora again! It was a stupidly ridiculous display too. Imagine, I had to sit outside on a beautifully clear night watching and taking pictures of this for an hour:









Of course there's more:

Walking

Yesterday I walked a lot. I walked to campus from home (about 5 miles) since Kate got called to babysit at 1:30 in the morning and had to take the car. It was a gorgeous morning and the air felt great.

Ballaine Lake on another beautiful day in Fairbanks.

I've been walking and running pretty frequently lately since I decided I'm going to "run" (walk) the equinox marathon on September 17th. It's kind of like a normal marathon, only with a 2000 foot climb up Ester Dome. There is ten hours to finish from the start of the race until the finish line is closed, so I hope I can do it in under 10 hours.

Anyway, later in the afternoon I saw a facebook post from the Alaska Bird Observatory that said, "On the refuge today: 2520 Sandhill Cranes, 1405 Canada Geese, 12 White-fronted Geese, 350 ducks!! A great day for a walk!". So naturally Jason and I took off to walk around and take some pictures. Joe came with us and another TA from last year, Robin was there too. We took a walk around the Boreal Trail and I took more pictures of leaves and mushrooms than I did of birds. It was a pretty nice day.

Sandhill Crane family at Creamer's field.

Mushroom stack on a tree at Creamer's Field. There are lots of mushrooms all over Alaska this time of year.

Very still water with some film on the surface with fallen birch leaves disrupting the surface. So far the changing seasons in Fairbanks has been very pretty, with nice weather.

Fallen, yellow birch leaf rests on mushrooms off the Boreal Trail.

Deborah, Hess, and Flock of Cranes

, a photo by Lee Petersen on Flickr.

It's that time of year again when the sandhill cranes and geese are on the move and the mountains are coming out of the clouds to play. It's pretty exciting because of all the wonderful views offered from Fairbanks, but sad because soon it will be very, very cold.

Oh no . . . it's all over!

I go back to work tomorrow. Vacation is over. The sky gets dark again. I saw a sky full of stars the other night. We are losing almost 7 minutes of daylight every day. The Sun is noticeably lower in the sky even though we still have almost 16 hours of daylight every day. Just think, in 4 months we will have less than 4 hours of daylight each day.

As of last Wednesday we have lived in Fairbanks (with no running water in the home) for a full year. We've braved plenty of -40° outhouse trips in the dark with moose staring us down, but personally I would take that any day over the mosquito-ridden outhouse trips in June. Not only have we been here for a full year, but I never left the state the whole time. I think that's a record for me.

Besides the rain this weekend and a few other days, the weather has been absolutely gorgeous this last month. Highs of around 65 almost every day and lows of 45 at night. A few nights have dipped into the 30's and I know up in Livengood they hit 28° F in the beginning of August. Oh, and don't look now, but fall has arrived.

The birch trees are turning yellow already in Fairbanks!

Even the mosses on the ground are also changing colors.

Vacation from Fairbanks

What follows is a seven day road-trip through Alaska. There are a lot of pictures and this is a long post. You will want to come visit Alaska afterward. Of course, the nice thing about living in Alaska is that it's really easy to vacation in Alaska. I'm not posting all the pictures on the blog because there are too many (although I'm posting a lot). With about a thousand still to edit I won't have them all up right away anyway. I have a dedicated set on flickr here.