BRRR!!! Midsummer Cold Front

BRRRRR!!!
We just had the longest day of the year, and this morning it was 34 degrees Fahrenheit (that's barely above freezing -- around 1 degree Celsius for you Europeans) at the river below our house (we woke up to a balmy 38 here!) Needless to say, I put on an extra sweater --staying in bed was not a choice this morning, but that's what I really wanted to do!
The mountains across our valley were covered tonight with a fresh dusting of powdered sugar /nay, snow.
Note: the mountain is Eagle River Overlook, the same mountain as on the Borealkraut header above, photographed from our front porch (poor us, having to look at that every day!) -- the rainbow picture was taken another year, later in the summer.
Cheechako (or newcomer) Alaskans call this kind of snow "termination dust", because it typically occurs around September "terminating" summer -- but let's not call it that! This is merely a cold front in mid-summer, and there is still plenty of summer left!!!
It was really quite beautiful today, and it did warm up to somewhere in the upper 50's -- yeah, I know that some of you may not exactly consider this summer! One of the Out-of-State visitors on my guided hike today asked if we even knew what an 80 degree summer day feels like. I said, yes, that's what I call too hot!

Mt. Redoubt volcano erupts

Last night, Mt.Redoubt volcano erupted, and again tonight. Don't worry about us -- it's far enough away(about 100 miles) that the main thing that might happen is that the ash starts blowing this way, and then we can't go to work or school, or use our computers!
The biggest concern is for airplanes -- volcano ash is terrible for engines! I have a jar of volcano ash collected in Anchorage from when Mt.Spurr erupted in 1992: it is a fine gritty sand, quite dark.

Read more at the Alaska Volcano Observatorywebsite, including webcam pictures. The picture I'm posting now is from the last major eruption, which was around 20 years ago -- this time around there's not been as much ash as in this picture.

The National Weather Service website makes daily ashfall predictions. For now, the Anchorage area is not predicted to receive any ash, but the Susitna valley North from here has an ashfall advisory in effect at the moment.

Winter Sunshine -- and nearly all is forgiven!

A rant, of sorts, about the weather

The sun is shining! This may not be news-worthy where you live, but to me, this is BIG. You see, since mid-November I've not seen very much of the sun at my house or my workplace. This is a beautiful valley, but valleys have mountains, and they do have an annoying tendency to block out the sun.

I've often thought about getting a petition getting going where either the month of January or February is abolished -- I'm not asking too much, am I?

This weekend I taught an outdoor class at the Nature Center, and the sun ACTUALLY shone on us during the whole walk. Even though it was barely above zero Fahrenheit (-17 Celsius) when I went to work, the sun managed to warm the air up to the teens! One month ago there was NO sunshine in the low-lying areas, and daytime temperatures did not vary much from the night.

I saw a coyote crossing the road on my way in, a bald eagle was perched on a tall cottonwood when I took my group outside, and the snow just sparkled in the sun! It felt great!
Later I'm sitting on the couch in the living room, and sunshine is streaming in and illuminating all the dust bunnies. Dust - Schmust! Right now I'd rather have sun than a clean house!

This winter has been cold (duh, it's Alaska!) But really, here on the coast there are some years where we get rather mild temperatures, AND, our bane, warm winds and rain!
We did get some of those warm rains briefly in mid-January, right when we returned from out vacation to sunny California. We had left right after New Year's Day and it was something like minus 20 degrees F, but when we returned to Anchorage in the upper 40's with wind and rain. As you can imagine, all that rain over snow and the road were TERRIBLE. Like most Alaskans, we have 4-wheel drive and studded tires on our cars, but we still could not get up our driveway when we got home. I took a picture of youngest pulling a sled of groceries up the driveway a few days after we got back. Not to complain, but it was impossible to walk on that driveway without some sort of grippers or crampons!
But then, thankfully, cold temperatures returned, and we got some snow to cover the nasty ice, and now I can walk and drive up and down without risk of injury. Sooo, as much as I can complain about the lack of warmth in Alaska during the winter, when we get unseasonably warm weather in the middle of winter, then I complain about that even louder!

Here's a children's book by Elsa Beskow, an author I remember fondly from my childhood. I was so tickled when I found a couple of her books at the local Waldorf School.
This one is called "Ollie's Ski Trip": after Ollie received a pair of skiis for Christmas, he wants to go out and use them. He meet King Winter, who's responsible for nice cold snowy weather. But along comes Old Mrs. Thaw, who threatens to melt all that snow away. King Winter manages to chase away Mrs. Thaw for now, and Ollie gets in some more skiing. But eventually, when Spring comes, Mrs. Thaw is welcome to chase away Winter.

Wolf has felt a bit like Ollie under house arrest. When he injured his lung in December, he was told not to exercise for at least 6 weeks, which included no skiing in Tahoe! Poor kid. By the time the doctor cleared him for skiing, we had had that visit from Mrs. Thaw... It did eventually snow again, but not enough to build up much base until this weekend. So my Ollie will finally be able to strap on his Cross-country skiis and get out there -- and hopefully it will still be a while before Mrs. Thaw shows up again in our part of Alaska.

And I guess we don't need to abolish February --it's a short month after all!

Betting on Break-up, Alaska-style

It's that time of year in Alaska that we dare to start thinking about SPRING -- or at least about BREAK-UP.
And that has nothing to do with relationsships, such as boyfriend/girlfriend or marriage -- it's the river ICE breaking up, dummy!

Nenana Ice Classic tickets have just gone on sale! The Nenana Ice Classic was started in 1917 by some bored Railroad employees, who just couldn't wait for the river to break up, and therefore winter to be over! The town of Nenana is located where the Nenana River flows into the Tanana River, which is in interior Alaska not far from Fairbanks. My first spring living inFairbanks I remember taking my little boy (then 3, now 14!) down to the Tanana River to look at BREAK-UP. It's impressive: HUGE chunks of ice floating down the river, where only yesterday there was still ice from shore to shore!

So for over 90 years, Alaskans have been betting: for $2.50 you can buy a ticket with your guess as to the exact time of break-up. When the black&white tripod finally falls, it triggers the official clock, and that clock time matches your bet, you can win the whole pot (or share it if others guessed the same time). Last year's winner made over $300, 000 as the single winner, but a few years ago, 48 winners shared the pot, only making a few thousand bucks each. Alas, the luck of the draw!
So, what's your guess for this year? Break-up dates have varied from late April to late May. I'm not the betting type (to me, a lottery is just a "tax on the mathematically challenged"), but if I were the betting type, I'd bet on the first week of May. But now it's only February!!! They haven't even put the tripod on the river yet --that's done the first week of March. For your information, the thickness of the ice is typically somewhere around 4 feet. So we've still got a long way to go, baby... But you can dream, and bet...

Here's an interesting article for anybody who wonders if/how Climate Change is affecting Alaska. Scientists from the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks looked at the climate record of Nenana Ice Classic Break-up dates since 1917, and there is a real warming trend in when interior Alaska rivers break up.

As the old saying goes, "Breaking up is hard to do", but here it is a welcome sign of spring!

SNOW: The Case For It and the Case Against It

And now a guest column from the Prof, my dear husband:

FOR—There is no denying it, the stuff is pretty in a wholesome, clean baby, fluffy kitten sort of way. I have seen 3 inches of fresh snow cover up the horrid remains of a month-long midwinter breakup like a clean bottom sheet covers up the worst mattress stains. It even smells fresh – not like the in-your-nose way that a thunderstorm does, but rather so softly, like a tentative Chopin nocturne. And in the ultimate testament to the possibilities of evolution, the boreal forest ecosystems nurture themselves on the seasonal snowpack in a life-giving thermodynamic Dance of the Hours.



Acoustically, snow is again a wonder substance. It is eery(sp) to wake up in camp in the morning and find all the noises strongly damped by five inches of snow where there was none the afternoon before. Someone seems to have gagged the squirrels, and the monotonous highway whine of tires that kept you awake last night is now just a whisper of places you haven’t seen. And the Leatherman you accidently left out overnight has disappeared just as efficiently as the raven’s cries.


And then there is skiing. Ah yes, skiing! The infinite wonders of physics adapt crystalline water to the vagaries of ski base, producing a ski/snow interface that is balls-to-the-walls, gut-wrenching, gonzo, totally tubular. Well… if said snow is on a steeply sloping surface, that is.


AGAINST—Snow feels COLD, no dodging the fact. And it is not just that winter is cold anyway. Actual contact with winter’s snow brings out the real meaning of the phrase “butt cold”. For example. Sometimes I get up to “check the stars” as men are sometimes wont to do (a rural living experience only, I’m afraid) in the middle of the night. My version of this sport typically involves a quick jaunt across the deck in bare feet, summer or winter. Let me tell you, the trip is a vastly different experience when there are 4 in. of fluffy new snow. The old dogs cool down mighty quick as those flakes melt like bacon grease on a hot grill. One gets down to business real quickly! No dawdling to actually check the stars. No way, no how!

And then there is that darn downside to the slipperiness thing. Due to an under-regarded phenomenon known as “regelation” (whose derivation is well beyond the scope of this course), ice and snow get a LOT more slippery when subjected to high pressure. Ever wonder how ponderous glaciers can move or why ice skates glide so fast? Works with shoes too, sometimes, wouldn’t ya know. And bare feet on the deck, too. Not to mention car tires. (I warned you not to mention them).

DENOUEMENT— White, clean, wholesome. Cold, slick and dangerous. How to reconcile such disparate properties of a single substance? In Alaska, one tends to be in the FOR camp, at least for most of the winter. Or else why in the world would one live here? “Outsiders” (that is, Lesser 48’ers, those that hail from outside the “Last Frontier”) frequently fall in the AGAINST camp. Not all, mind you. There are several Outsiders that think they are in the FOR camp, but that is because they do not have to live the FOR life 24/7 for 6 months. And then there are those Outside who truly prefer flakes over snakes (as do we). This group rightly comprises honorary Alaskans, even if their values are a bit skewed.
And then there is this last group—the AGAINSTERS-- who only like their flakes frosted and drenched with a dose of cow squeezings over the whole mess. No time for snowblowers and roof rakes for them, they have a golf date with the front 18. The only thing slowing them down is that bowl of increasingly soggy flakes.
I’ll take my flaky problems over theirs any day.

After the windstorm

The weekend after the BIG WINDSTORM is for CLEAN-UP.

Electricity went off and on (and only to part of the house, as not all phases worked), so it took us most of the next day until we realized that we really weren't pumping any water from the well after all... No wonder, look at the damage to the wellhead, before & after we got the tree off!

Well, first things first, gotta get the tree down OFF the well before we can call in the electrician. So after de-limbing the tree, which now makes a great climbing object no kid can resist, our good friend came over to help with the task at hand. Note the fashion: hubby & friend are both wearing the quintessential Alaskan "uniform": Carhartts!

But where to start? After some thinking and discussion, it was decided to start with an undercut below the well head. Even after the trunk was completely cut thru, nothing moved, as the tree was still resting on 2 sturdy limbs. So after some pushing & heaving, they finally got the first part out of the way.


As the forester, I had to get in & count the rings, of course. This cottonwood was about 65 years old. Ok, now the job can proceed.

Next came a high cut between the well head and the fence. Phew,that's done -- now here the guys are trying to pull the tree trunk from the fence -- alas, it took pulling with the 4 wheel drive truck to get it unstuck.

Now "all" that remains is to cut the tree into rounds for firewood. Wolfman got right to work at the chopping block. You know what they say about heating with firewood: "it heats you up twice: first when you chop it, then when you burn it."

LUCK: what are the chances?

This is what we woke up to this morning -- the winds were just howling here! The Prof estimates we had steady 50miles per hour winds, with gusts to 75 mph (120km/hr). Measurements of wind gusts in town ranged from 60 to 98 mph.
The big cottonwood tree fell right on top of our well head, but it's made from such sturdy steel (plus the fence caught some of the brunt) that we were extremely lucky it was not destroyed. It was amazing luck to not have taken out the new camper!


We started this week out with our first snowfall: here's the professor BBQ-ing with his best buddy. (Alaskans dont let a few snowflakes keep them from using the grill outside -- not to brag, but we do use it even in the depth of winter).

By the next day the deck was covered in wet snow, but quickly melted within a day...