Starvation Gulch at UAF

It's a really, really big bonfire. Actually it was 4 really big bonfires, each one bigger than the first. They kind of surround the crowd in a semicircle. It gets incredibly hot on the inside and you spend most of your time brushing hot coals off of people when they land on their clothes/hair. I have no idea how nobody caught on fire during this event!



Strangely, it was a lot of fun to watch and it took about an hour for them all to burn down to coals. Students set up the pallets and scrap wood in the morning.  Its kind of a contest between students to build the most creative pallet stack and get the tallest flames. It's been a tradition at the University of Alaska for 87 years. The tradition stone made a brief appearance and was quickly stolen amidst a 'king-of-the-mountain' style brawl on a pick-up truck. It was a good time. Check out the pictures in flickr.

Some More Pictures to Check Out

So, my friend, colleague, and classmate, Jason has been taking some great aurora photos here in Fairbanks. I strongly urge you to check them out on his flickr site here. He's also a really good photographer, so you should check his non-aurora photos too. He drove up here from Arkansas and took a slightly different route than we did on the trip and has some great sets from the drive. Just wanted to share and provide some motivation to come visit this great place when it's a little colder, you know, because it's light out all summer.


One of many great Aurora photos from Jason (click to be re-directed to his page).

Elusive Denali

I finally got a picture of it to share. It's pretty lousy, but still awesome seeing as its about 150 miles away. I took this picture outside the Reichardt Building at UAF on the morning of September 13th. It's hard to catch because it's usually too hazy and sometimes too smokey, especially as the day goes on. There have only been three days so far that I could see it, and only one that I remembered to bring my camera.

Last Week

Last week was our first really hard week. Lots of homework due, lots of class planning and grading, additional non-homework classwork, then there's the time spent just trying to figure out what is going on. It was truly an 80 hour work-week, culminating in one 18 hour homework cram session on Thursday.

Then this morning we had our first hard frost. Most of the leaves have fallen, and autumn is on its way out. It's still getting into the 50's and 60's almost every day. We have been here 1 month and 1 day, and the weather has been absolutely perfect. It should be in the 40's now, but its not. And don't get me wrong, this isn't a fluke. It is actually climate change, and I find it funny because it's not really debated as much here as in the lower 48. The climate is changing at high latitudes really fast. Permafrost is melting, glaciers are disappearing and sea ice is shrinking, winters are getting milder, summers are getting hotter, coastal villages already have implemented relocation plans, etc.

It seems that in the lower 48, change is much slower and seems to come in a form of unpredictability. At high and low latitudes its just getting warmer. Here is what is really scary to me, others aren't going to take this seriously until what is happening up here happens to them. By that time the world is going to be in a lot more hurt then it seems now.

Four Oddities of Fairbanks (from an outsider)

(1) So the last week has been (apparently) unseasonably warm here in Fairbanks. That being said, the last two days we have woken up to 32 [deg F] temperatures. Even though the mornings are crisp, the daytime temperatures have been reaching 70 [deg F]. The long term forecast has us going into the 20's next week with highs of 50 [F]. It is going to get cold fast.

(2) Since arriving, I have seen two nights of fantastic auroral shows. They are apparently small displays for this region, but already both have been more intense than anything I had ever seen in Minnesota. The filaments stretch straight down over our road while smaller curtains dance over our home. Someday when I can afford a better camera I will post pictures.

(3) Every day is different. These warm temperatures have also brought really clear skies. Every day I go in to work and have to stop and look south to the Alaska range. Every day we lose almost 7 minutes of daylight, and the Sun at noon subtends an angle of about 1.5 [deg] less in the sky. Every morning the range is struck by a different angle of light and it never gets boring to watch.


The Alaska Range stretches across the entire southern horizon. It also blocks any warm air that might think about moving in from the southern coast in the winter. I can't wait.

(4) We have lived here less than 1 month, and the day is already 3 hrs. and 8 min. shorter than it was when we arrived. We have another 11 days of having more daylight than New Hampshire does. It is getting noticeably harder to wake in the morning (although this might be exhaustion from work and classes.

Beautiful, Beautiful Denali National Park

Denali National Park is gorgeous. I will be posting most of the pictures on flickr (Denali Set) over the next couple of days, but for now I'll just share some highlight photos. We went on Sunday, September 5, and it looked like it was getting pretty close to the peak foliage color for the season. You can read more about the foliage on Kate's post. It was overcast the whole time except for a few instances where the sun shown down on parts of the valley or peaks. There was a 'river' of yellow aspen trees in the valley below that literally glowed when the sun shown on them.

I got to boulder for the first time in Alaska here on the Healy Overlook Trail. It was probably V0, or V1, but it was hard enough (or I was weak enough) that I had to take my hiking boots off.

 

Along with the many awesome sights, there was also plenty of wildlife. I had to stop and wait on the trail for a black bear to finish crossing the path in front of me. I managed to get up close to a couple big ground squirrels who did not mind having their picture taken at all. While driving home we had two wild, yet safe moose encounters to end our day.



Animal lessons are: moose are quite large animals and yield to bears. Actually, the National Park has a good rule. If the animal changes its behavior because of your presence, you are too close.

1st Day of School

My classes have officially begun! When Kate dropped me off today in front of the Reichardt Building (physics, chemistry, and geology departments) we were treated to a fantastic view of the Alaska Range. The building sits on Wood Creek Butte and overlooks the entire Tanana River Valley (between the hills north of Fairbanks and the Alaska Range). I could sit up there all day and watch the float planes flying all around against the mountain backdrop. On a clear morning like today Mt. Hayes, Hess, and Deborah shine in the sunlight. I'll say right off the bat, the pictures don't do it justice. Sorry, the quality here wasn't what I had hoped. Turns out the panorama software on the camera can't deal with the shadow created by the lens.

click for full size

Notice there are a couple light black V's in the sky on either side of the picture. Those are the Sandhill Cranes migrating south. Yes, the birds are flying south, the trees and groundcover are changing color, and the air is getting cooler.

By the way the crow flies, Mt. Hayes is (the big one in the picture) is 92 miles away, has an elevation of 13,832 ft., and a vertical rise (from the base) of 11,507 ft. It looks huge , even from this distance. On a clearer day than today we can see Denali (150 miles away and 20,320 ft. in elevation). It is spectacular, and I hope someday soon I will both see it, and have my camera with me.

On a physics note, looking at Mt. Hayes today was like glimpsing into the past. Approximately 4.9E-4 seconds (or approximately half a millisecond) into the past since light only travels about 671 million miles per hour. That's only half the amount of time of a typical photo flash!

September 1st, not quite a frost

But, it did get a little chilly. The car told me it was 36 [deg F] this morning. The leaves are more yellow when compared with yesterday. Yes, Autumn is officially here.

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.