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.

Denali National Park in the summer

*I will be adding to the flickr set over the course of the summer. Check it out later. There are still a few hundred more pictures to go through at least!

Kate's parents, Dave and Sandi are in town and we took a little trip and tour in Denali National Park the other day. I'm not sure what I think the highlight of the trip was. We started at a little before 4 in the morning. Kate and I were at the hotel a little after 4:30 and just a few minutes later we were on the road. The Sun was already up and we saw a moose within a minute of getting on the Parks Highway. We saw another moose a few miles down the road. At 6:45 we were at the park and right after 7:30 we were on the bus into the park.

Our first stop was at the Teklanika rest area on the Park Road. This is where Jason, Kate and I drove to during the Spring opening. It's closed to public vehicles in the summer. We saw a bear from really far away; just a little dot down in the river bed. It wasn't that exciting, but we had no idea if we would see anything else so I tried to soak it in as good as I could. Then a mile down the road we saw our second bear of the day:


Brown bear in the Teklanika riverbed.
So now we were all pretty happy to have seen a grizzly pretty close up. Then we saw another. Then another, and another with cubs.

So, rounding a corner we see some stuff on the hill to the south of us. It looks like wolves. We get excited about wolves. It is a wolf pack eating a caribou that they killed earlier in the day. The alpha male was working pretty hard on the rib cage while a couple of others fought over the head and antlers. We watched them for about 15 minutes before we had to move on.







A little ways down the road there were some Dall Sheep sitting on a little ridge.


At this point I think we were all feeling a little overwhelmed with all the animals we had seen. It was hard to even notice sometimes that we were in a place that looked like this:
On the Toklat River looking back at the Park Road and the Alaska Range.

And this:


There were also a lot of sleeping bears on the hills.


There was a willow ptarmigan family crossing the road. I hadn't seen any this summer yet, only in the winter when they are all white.


Willow Ptarmigan waiting for its chicks to cross the road. It's the state bird of Alaska.

Coming around a corner and some dips in the road there was a bus stopped in front of us by a pond. There were some ducks in a pond. Mallards. We were stopped for a while. No one could figure out why they had stopped for ducks. The other driver made an 'L' sign with her hand and our driver shouted lynx. Sure enough, stalking the ducks on the other side of the pond was a good sized cat. It walked around in the bushes and I really wished I had a 500mm lens:
Lynx are truly better to watch than ducks.

The summit of Denali was covered in clouds, but we still saw quite a bit of it:
The Park Road winds around the rolling hills surrounding the tallest mountain in North America, Denali ('The High One' in Athabascan). We couldn't see the summit this day because it was a little too cloudy and hazy. Denali towers over the park at 20,320 ft (6,198 meters).

There was a pretty good sight of a moose in a pond:


After getting to mile 92.6, we got to walk around a bit near wonder lake and Kantishna. A park ranger gave us a history tour of the old gold mining town and people from the area and then it was time to head back. On the way back there was a little more Sun poking through the clouds so the scenery was even cooler.





There were more sheep,


caribou,


and there was still one wolf left on the kill.


Right when it seemed like it couldn't possibly get any better, out pops a grizzly bear on the side of the road eating soapberries.



After 12 hours it was all over and we were heading back home. Our driver said that he has been doing this for 17 years and this was by far the best day he has ever had in the park. I think we were pretty lucky. Kate and I were definitely smiling the whole time.

Been a while . . .

The trees are enjoying the Sun and the blue sky, again. I love walking out the front door to this sight.

Wow, it's been almost 15 days since my last post. I haven't been busy, I haven't been working, I haven't been chasing down screaming kids or arguing grades with college students, I haven't been driving all over the state . . . I've been mostly sitting, staring, reading about glaciers, cooking, and taking some pictures. It's been hard remembering how to relax, but after about a week and a half I have it down pretty good. I'll be posting the huge backlog of photos below.

The Sun is under the horizon a full 6 1/2 minutes more every day. Kate noticed the other night that it was actually almost dark at 3 am. We keep hearing about heat waves in the lower 48, but here we've been having highs of 70, maybe. Sometimes its a little hotter, we had a week were it almost never got up to 60 and the nights are around 40-45. When I wake up in the morning I can sometimes see my breath when I go outside. In July.

Kate and I bought a canoe last week and went out on it for the first time on Chena Lake. There are so many different kinds of duck up here it's really pretty amazing. They all had babies except for a common loon that was splashing like a fiend back in one of the slough-like parts of the lake. Other than that there aren't really any other updates. We've been planning future canoeing adventures and getting ready for Kate's parents to visit in a few days.


American wigeon at Chena Lakes. We got too close and it flew back and forth a few times before we could get some distance away.

Common Loon at Chena Lake

Common Goldeneye with chicks

We've spent some time at Creamer's Field and also took another trip out to Angel Rocks. Both are really different than we've become accustomed to with the summer greenery.


A few Sandhill cranes have stuck around this summer. Here are a couple just chilling at Creamer's Field on College Road in Fairbanks. They have a really cool distinctive call that really distinguish them from other kinds of cranes. They are also fun to watch dance in the fields.

The old Creamer's Dairy Farm. Now part of the migratory bird refuge and connected to the Alaska Bird Observatory. Great for walking in the summer and skiing for the other 8-9 months of the year. The farmhouse in front is now the visitor's center.

Out at Creamer's Field on College Road.

Wildflowers bloom everywhere in July. Just another shot from the trails at Creamer's Field in Fairbanks.

Angel Rocks near Fairbanks, Alaska out off of Chena Hot Springs Road. A nice little 3 mile loop to the rocks and back from the north fork of the Chena River. The rocks offer a fantastic view of the Chena River valley that you don't normally get to see when you're just driving out to the hot springs.

Little yellow flowers precariously growing out of one of the granite summits of Angel Rocks off Chena Hot Springs Road in the interior of Alaska.

After hiking up about a mile you come to the first granite outcroppings of Angel Rocks and you get the first nice panorama of the area. We had nice blue skies with fluffy white clouds until we arrived at the top. Then we got thunder and hail.

Otis protests going inside by stubbornly sitting in the road. He's been getting pretty adventurous in the yard lately.

Otis hunts mice and butterflies in the thick of the backyard. Not at all a successful endeavor, but fun anyway.