We have had a number of visitors since my last report. This means I do not have as many "new" things to share, because with visitors I am more likely to show them things I know something about. However, a few new things have slipped in, and I am seeing delightful details in places I have already been to.

Visitors & Aurora

(photos by Will Smith)

Will, our son, and Sophie, their partner, visited us for the third week in February. This was followed eight hours later by Carrie and Yorke, friends from New Hampshire.

Months ago, when we were inviting people to visit us, Kristina made sure that they would come at the time of a new moon. A full moon can be so bright as to challenge and even wash out an aurora. The week Will & Sophie were here the aurora did not disappoint. In fact, when I was at the airport waiting, flights get in at mid-night, I could see the aurora despite the parking lot lights directly overhead.

Half an hour later we were at the Goldstream trail head and the light show did itself proud! It arced, then broke up, then danced! But it was very cold, so we were soon back and the cabin, eating chili next to the wood burning stove.

The next day, in the evening, Kristina wanted to take Will and Sophie to the Poker Flats Rocket Range. The Range is 30 miles north by northeast of Fairbanks and near its gates is the Chatanika Lodge. The lodge is a good place for a burger and a beer, but it doesn't lend itself to vegan. Sophie said the menu looked just fine to her, and Will added that this was the one place in Alaska that they had heard about since they were five!

At the lodge Will told Shirley, the owner, that for years they had worn a "Chatanika Lodge - Outhouse Race" tee shirt. Shirley laughed and said she had worn her own one just last week.

Once we are at Poker we turn the heaters on in the glass room and settle down to watch the show. It was a really good night with the aurora putting on two major displays and a lot of minor side shows. However, some of the auroras were so powerful as to move the display to the south. Since the glass room is north facing, we all donned our coats and wool, abandoned our warm nest and trundled out the south side of the building to see the show!

After midnight, things got quiet and so we packed up and headed home - only to be stopped three minutes later for an encore performance!

Yorke and Carrie were not quite so fortunate in there Aurora viewing, we had a lot of snow and overcast nights while they were here. We did make a trip to Poker and meet a Japanese film crew which is making a documentary about the aurora. Kristina has spent a few evenings with this crew, describing the aurora from a scientific point of view. Although how that merges with the overall documentary is not clear to us.

The evening after the Browns left was a spectacular display! KP-7! KP is a measurement of the energy in the earth's magnetic field. The scale runs from 1 to 9, but you can get good aurora's even at lower numbers. But one thing about high KP, it means the auroral "halo" gets pushed south. If you where in space and looked down on the north pole, you would see a "halo", a glowing ring on the earth. Although it is rare for it to be a full ring.

In anticipation, we drove out to Poker Flats. It has been snowing all day and the rocket range has not been plowed out, but we still tried to drive in. Most of the buildings of the rocket range are on the lower flats. Because there are no rocket launches this year, they have been postponed to next year, we are the only ones on the range. For the first mile of driving, across the flats, our bumper was scraping the top of the snow, maybe ten inches deep. But we are headed away from the launch area and up the hill to the science building with the glass room. Up the hill proved to be too much for our vehicle, an eventually we turned back.

Back on Steese Highway, we headed east-northeast. There is a pullover along the road about six miles away. The highway had been plowed, but not the pullover, so I shoveled enough so we could get our car off the road. Our car thermometer reports -27 F, and then the light show starts!

For 20 to 30 minutes there will be these great arcs, neon green bands which stretch from horizon to horizon. Sometimes over head, but more often tonight to the south of us. There are one to four bands of light, merging or splitting, or braiding themselves together. There are moving ripples that dance their way along the arc. The ripples will change from a stately waltz to a flashy tango. They can twist themselves in knots, then burst and desolve.

Occasionally the curtain of light will be directly overhead and you can look up the rays of the aurora in a configuration which Kristina calls a "Corona Arc". A twisting complex of light which reminds me of a super nova, or ghosted fireworks, or the bud of a finely filigreed flower as it is just starting to bloom. It is a magnificent sub storm.

The car is starting to ice up on the inside because we continue to breath and it is -27 F (-31 F by morning). So the best view, especially with the main attraction nearly overhead, is by standing in the middle of Steese Highway and staring at the sky. One car passes us in the hour and an half we are there.

Eventually we head home. But as we approach Cleary Summit, we view a second display. Half an hour later, and south of the pass, we stop and watch a third substorm! But it is very cold, and the data Kristina is monitoring seems to indicate that the aurora may have exhausted itself, so we finally head home.

Skiing with visitors

Sophie has not cross-country skied before, but she was game to try.

When people visit us one of the first things I do is take them to the UAF Rec Center Outdoor Rental Office and equip them for a week. So on day two of Sophie and Will's visit, with skis in hand we headed to the north campus trail system. Sophie has downhilled skied before and is naturally coordinated and so had no problem with long, thin slats on her feet. We skied about three miles, including across Smith Lake, and then a few more twisting and challenging trails.

Two days later we were at Birch Hill which, with its highly groomed trails, is a different experience. And finally we made a series of shorter outings from our house. You can get on the Skarland trail by walking up our road 100 meters. Or you can ski to Perl Creek Park by taking a left across our yard.

Yorke and Carrie may have had less Aurora, but probably more skiing. Twice we went to Goldstream. Once Yorke and I attempted to telemark down a big slope on campus, only to nearly drown (or so it seemed) in chest deep snow. But I think the most memorable outing was when Yorke and I skied on Murphy Dome.

Murphy Dome, as I have described it before, is a wind swept place, an alpine tundra. There is more snow on the ground then when I visited a month ago. And a lot of the snow is wind packed, which means you can ski on the surface. That is until you get too confident in your reading of the snow and you hit a soft spot and sink in to your knees, or more.

Today, not only is it windswept, but it is also windy! We visit a few rocky tors on our way our, and then settle to the lee of one of the tors. Here the snow is soft and if you step off your skis you sink in up to your knees. So Yorke and I construct a "park bench" by placing our four skis next to each other, slats to sit on. And then trampling down the area in front of us for our feet.

We are enough out of the wind to be comfortable for a while, but not enough to really enjoy our lunch. However, we have a thermos of tea. So we sit, talk and sip for half an hour. Both of us are fans of epic journals like Shackleton's "South" and Cherry-Garrard's "The Worst Journey in the World". As we sit out here in the balmy (+6 F) it is hard to imagine how those explores could just keep going on and on.

Eventually we strapped on our skis and headed back to the trailhead. Just as we were driving off of Murphy Dome the weather broke and we could see the Alaskan Range a hundred miles away - magnificent and towering!

		Photos by Yorke & Tim

Chena Hot Springs

When Sophie and Will were here they went out to Chena Hot Springs, but that is their story and you will have to ask them about it.

A week later Kristina, Carrie, Yorke and I headed out there too. To get there we drive out of Fairbanks on Chena Hot Springs road to mile mark 59, which is also where the road ends. It is snowing and the road is getting filled with the white stuff. After passing Two River / Pleasant Valley, where I volunteered for the Yukon Quest, the road was reduced to just two wheel ruts, yet Kristina piloted our car through another thirty miles. The highway is a lonely road through the state park, occasionally crossing the Chena River, deep in a spruce and birch forest, with high hills walling in the valley.

The Hot Springs form an island resort in the midst of a vast forest and hill land. It is easy to imagine miners who struck gold a century ago coming our here and squandering their coins. Or at least it is trying to feel like that, but only working its way back half a century or so.

At the hot springs we pay to go in, and then rent a locker, change into shorts and "bathing attire". It is a short, but very cold walk from the locker room to the springs. It is snowing and about +15 F.

The basin, or rock lined pool, is about 20 meters by 10 meters, and about 1.5 meters deep (4+ feet). So if you stand, half of your torso is out of the water - and freezing. Instead you tend to semi-crouch/semi-float with just your head out of the hot water.

There are definite hot spots, painfully hot, but only in the top inch. So you can cross these regions by stirring and mixing the water with your hands.

What do we do for two hours? Float, sit on submerged rocks, watch the snow, watched other people, moved from hots spots to warm spots and back again. There are about ten to twenty people in the basin and occasionally somebody reaches up on top of the surrounding rocks and pulls in a clump of snow. It is a kind of oxymoron to float in such steaming water with snowflakes in your hair and a cake of snow in your hands.

Afterwards we sat at the bar for awhile. I am a bit sleepy after the float, and my body is but a limp noodle. And I would like coffee and soup before driving home. Fortunately the snow has stopped and the return trip is easy.

(I have no photos of the hot springs, since none of us wanted to take our cameras into the water.)

Short Items

Ice Festival

Just a quick word about the Fairbanks Ice Fest. We have gone to see it twice. One afternoon with Will & Sophie, when it was just being set up. And then one evening with Carrie & Yorke when many of the big sculptures were finished. It is half an art expo and half a carnival. The sculptures tend towards the fantasy-warrior theme, dragons and surreal images. The sort of things you might see tattooed on the rider of a Harley. But then there are also ice-slides and pieces of whimsy. I love watching the people. It really is cold (-18?) , yet kids are running around loosing hats and mittens, like kids everywhere.

At night, watching a sculptor with a chainsaw create a cloud of ice caught in a headlamp, is unreal. And most of the sculptures are build on top of multicolored lights, so they are illuminated from within.

Musk Ox

When Sophie & Will were with us, we finally went on the tour of the UAF Large Animal Research Station. We have seen the musk ox from the road, but this time took the tour through the pens and barns and various enclosures. Our guide mainly talked about the musk ox, because that is what most people are interested in. But she also talked about reindeer and a bit about the wood bison. The wood bison belong to the Department of Fish and Game, and so are more like guest here than subjects of study.

They have reindeer instead of caribou, because reindeer are smaller and easier to handle. But apparently reindeer and caribou are just breeds of the same species.

The musk ox is not an ox, in fact it is more goat than anything. With both fur/hair and wool, it is well adapted to the arctic. Our guide handed us some "qiviut", musk ox wool. It is amazingly warm! The musk ox was native to Alaska, but was hunted to extinction. There is a re-introduction program, where musk ox from Greenland have been left on an island off the coast where they can breed without their natural predators (wolves), and these are from that island breeding stock. Kristina is continuously amazed as to how small their feet are. I now think of them as a big goat with a massive fur coat. And horns designed by Dr. Seuss.