Hello World!

How did it get to be March already! I thought winters were suppose to be sluggish seasons where all you do is huddle around the fire and wait for Spring. Instead this winter has sprinted by leaving me a bit dizzy. And our time in Alaska is starting to wind down, which means we really do need to do those things which you can only do in Alaska. And that means going to Denali, and flying to Eagle.

Moose in Perl Creek

A few words about our sighting of moose.

One of the first evenings I ran with Running Club North, towards the end of January, I had finished my run and was waiting for Kristina to return from the co-op food store. I walked around the parking lot of the Patty Center (University's Gym & Rec Center) for ten to fifteen minutes. But eventually I went back inside since I was sweaty from the run and with the air at -8 F, I was starting to feel a damp chill. I had been inside for no more than two minutes when Kristina came in and told everybody, "Now I know I am in Alaska, I just saw a moose wandering through the parking lot". And I missed it.

And when we drive back from Poker Flats at 2:00am, if I fall asleep (Kristina is driving), inevitably there would be a moose on the side of the road - and I would miss that too.

So this became a quest of mine - to see a moose. Preferably while out skiing.

We have made enough trips to Poker Flats that I have seen them on that stretch of road near Clearly Summit. But when you see them in the headlights they tend to stride over the snowbank and disappear into the forest. Those encounters are very brief and drowned in shadows. Headlights, bright snow, midnight black and the shadows of a hundred spruce work well to obscure a clear view of a moose.

Perl Creek is a park about half a mile down hill from our cabin. Between the park and our home is a shallow valley which is privately owned, but laced with publicly available skiing and walking trails. Since it is nearly indistinguishable from the park; spruce, snow and bog, I call it Perl Creek Park North.

Skiing at Perl Creek is the sort of thing I can do even if the rest of the day is busy. To get to the trails, I walk out the front door of our cabin, go half way to the car, put on the skis, turn left, and there is my personal trailhead. In a lunch time outing I can ski the perimeter of the park, three to four miles, in a bit under an hour.

So one day I was out there skiing. I was making a point of trying to touch on all the trails - there is a network of them - and had finally figured out where "Rabbit Run", "Thrill Hill", "Thrill Hill Bypass" and then "Castor" and "Pollux" went. Which left me heading home on an un-named trail in Perl Creek North. At one point I stopped because the trail ahead of me was chewed up with moose hoof prints. I then noticed that three meters to the right was a fresh pile of moose droppings - still steaming. Most of what I could smell was the droppings, but there was another smell in the air; the smell of wet fur! And then I finally noticed eight meters to the right a moose!

Ann has warned me to stay clear of moose, that they can become aggressive especially if they have a calf near by. She also tells me that the strategy to deal with an aggressive moose is to keep a tree between you and it. Their antlers can get tangled in the trees so you can out maneuver them. I have thought about this strategy a lot. Because I am not certain wether I should keep my skis on. On one hand skis are long and cumbersome and I may be tangled in the brush even more than the moose. On the other hand, without skis I could be wallowing in waist deep snow.

So what to do today, right now? The moose is watching me, just standing there chewing its cud. In the winter moose live on the twigs of willow & birch and I guess it takes a lot of chewing to extract something from those twigs.

I clearly have not startled it. Babies are born in May, so there is probably no calf to protect. But there are also no antlers to tangle it up in the brush. I decide to take a few steps pass the moose, to show my non-aggressive intention. And then I would take my photo, and then calmly ski home.

I'll admit that I've skied pass that same place several times looking for another encounter like that. But not yet.

Denali

Since we are into our last month in Alaska, and our remaining calendar is getting full, Kristina and I have been talking about what would we like to do before leaving, and can we squeeze it in. Denali had come up on our list, but visiting the National Park is not so simple. First off, it is a long trip. 120 miles one-way. And you can only get into the park a short distance. They only plow the first few miles of the park road.

Road Trip!

Entering the Alaskan Range

In the Park - mile 8

Denali - "The High One" or "The Big Mountain"

Across the Savage River Basin

Also, we have already seen Denali. In fact Kristina can often see it from her office window. And I have clearly seen it from Murphy Dome, 150 miles away.

So one Sunday morning Kristina pointed out that the weather was smiling, and asked me if I was still interested in a drive? We were out of the house in twenty-five minutes. We topped the gas tank, and laid in supplies of coffee, muffins and bagels at LuLu's and were soon on the Parks Highway.

The first fifty miles is along a ridge line. The Tanana river and valley are on our left (south and east) and Goldstream and Minto's Flats stretch out on the right (north and west). The Tanana valley is broad and flat, perhaps fifty miles wide. And a great deal of that is dominated by the Tanana river itself. It is a great braided river with numerous channels, gravel bars and islands. And beyond the river are a number of "sloughs", or oxbows.

On the other side, Goldstream is a simple valley, but Minto's Flats is a land of a thousand ponds and lakes, embedded in an endless bog.

When the ridge ends, the road drops and crosses the Tanana River at the town of Nenana. Nenana follows the common Alaskan practice of naming a town after the river which ends there. So Big Delta and Delta Junctions are where the Delta River joins the Tanana River, Nenana is where the Nenana River joins the Tanana, and the village of Tanana is where the Tanana River joins the Yukon.

Tanana is most famous for its "Ice-out Classic" Raffle. Buy a ticket and guess the time and date when the ice on the river will break up. The signature of this event is a black and white "tripod" which is build on the ice. When it has shifted 100 feet, the break-up has officially started.

Today is "Tripod Day". However, when we stopped the festivities had not really started. By the time we returned, the tripod was up and ready for Spring.

The next fifty miles is very flat, but the mountains are getting closer.

Finally we arrived at the town of Healy. Healy is the northern gateway to the park and here we go through a very fast transition from flat Tanana Valley into the very rugged Alaskan Mountain Range. There are essentially no foothills. Mt Healy jumps up 3,000 feet from the surrounding flats.

Once past Mt. Healy we wind along the Nenana, now a mountainous stream, and then turn and enter the National Park. On my map it indicates a winter gate at the ranger station about three miles in. Right now the gate was open, but snow moving equipment was busy there. So we stopped and walked around the buildings of the ranger station.

It is winter and all the building seem to be closed. But there is a sign pointing to the kennels which said, "The Dog Sled teams may be out, but an Interpretive Ranger is on duty". So we walked over to the kennels and talked with the ranger.

The ranger explained that the dogs here are bigger then what I saw on the Yukon Quest because these are cargo hauling dogs. Right now they are on a long trip into the back country to support a research project. Curiously enough, at Denali they use dog sleds instead of snow-machines because so much of the park is designated "Wilderness Area", and so off limits to machines.

Kristina asked if there was a good place to actually see the famous mountain. The ranger told us that the road was plowed to the 15 mile mark / Savage River Gate, and you can see Denali between miles 12 and 15.

So we drove west, climbing up the Hines Creek valley, then crossing into the Savage River basin. This basin is about seven or eight miles across and a similar distance wide. I didn't expect to be able to see Denali from here, it is still 70 miles away, and there are a lot of big mountains between us and it. But there it was!

When we saw Denali, we immediately recognized it. It is not that its shape is so unique. Rather, it is so far away that it is a different color, and it has its own weather!

Denali is a massif. Often that means it is a large enough mountain to have several peaks; South Peak, North Peak, South Buttress, East Buttress, Browne Tower. But I want to use the term to mean more than that. These peaks, this massif, stand separate from the Alaskan Range in that it stand above the rest of the mountains.

Denali is 20,310 feet (6190 meters) tall, and has the greatest base-to-peak height (18,500 feet) of any mountain, not an island, on earth. (By this metric, Mauna Kea, Hawaii is taller.) But that is hard to imagine. So let me try it this way;

We are standing in this long valley 70 miles from Denali. The floor of the valley is at about 3,000 feet above sea level. There are jagged peaks on either side of us, most at about 5,000 feet. You can travel 50 miles from here, to 20 miles from Denali, and still not be above 4,000 ft. At 60 miles from here, 10 miles from the peak, there are still places which are only 5,000 feet in elevation. At five miles from the peak you can be at 8,000 feet in elevation. And then in those last five miles you must climb 12,000 feet, over two vertical miles, to mount that massif. That island of rock in the sky.

When you look at a peak 70 miles away it is hard to appreciate this point. Closer peaks are also snow clad and white. But they are only 5,000-6,000 feet. Pygmies compared to Denali.

After we returned home and told people about seeing Denali, we were told that we were "thirty-percenters". Apparently 70% of the people to visit Denali National Park never see the peak because it is shrouded in clouds.

Eagle

Ever since we first started talking about going to Alaska, I've told Don that if he was looking for somebody to send out to a field site, to man cameras, or fix wires, or haul equipment, look no further than our cabin.

A few days before we went to Denali, Don asked me to go to the town of Eagle to install a StarLink system for taking data. So I spent a few days with Cameron, a graduate student in the aurora group, working with the equipment we will be installing.

The research group at the University of Alaska has an equipment shed in Eagle with cameras, magnetometers, interferometers and other things, all designed to look at the aurora. All this equipment is connected to a "HughsNet" satellite dish, which is how that data gets from Eagle to Fairbanks. The problem is that HughsNet has a very limited band-width, so not all the data can get through.

StarLink is another satellite based communication network which has plenty of band-width, but is not on all the time. StarLink will typically be on for 2-3 hours and then off for 1-2 hours, until the next set of satellites are overhead. So Don wanted us to install StarLink and a Raspberry-Pi/Speedify system. A Raspberry-Pi is a computer the size of a fat paperback book, and Speedify is a piece of software which switches between the two networks depending upon which one is working better.

Cameron, Don & I spent some time in Fairbanks making sure that everything worked, and double checking that we had all the tools, cables, bits of wood, screws and so forth that we would need in the field to install everything.

Cameron & Cessna C208B

Leaving Fairbanks Alaskan Range on Horizon

Yukon-Charley River NP

Pilot lines up runway

HughesNet & StarLine antenna & airport runway

Inside the "field station"

March 8th - Fairbanks to Eagle, Alaska

On Wednesday morning Cameron picked me up and we headed to the airport, to the Evert Air terminal. Flying a very small airline is such a different experience from large commercial air travel. One walks in and checks in without an ID. There is no TSA. The lobby feels well used with kids and dogs and piles of stuff. More like a neighborhood diner than an airport.

The pilot loads the cargo, including our luggage and equipment, and then invites us to climb aboard. There are just three of us today; the pilot, Cameron and myself heading to Eagle.

Our airplane is a Cessna C208B Grand Caravan. It could carry up to nine passengers. But today it is flying with just two passengers and a lot of cargo, including a few hundred pounds of dog food.

I find what I see in the first thirty or forty miles hard to understand and a bit depressing. Just east of Fairbanks is Fort Wainwright. But beyond that there are miles of mountains which all appear to have roads bulldozed along their ridge lines. Or are they firebreaks? Or access to prospective mines? Or something else? I don't see buildings, just these gashes through the forest.

However, after about twenty minutes of flying, about a third of the flight, we get beyond any signs of humans! The mountains have grown and become more rugged. The valleys are full of spruce, but the domes and mountains are all bare. At first we flew over high hills, or "domes", rounded topped hills. But after a while they became more jagged. With so much snow on the ground, with nothing to offer a since of scale it is hard to know if these are just jagged hills or if these are the Alps. I can see the altimeter on the pilot's dash board, and it reads 6,000 to 7,000 feet. Which means these mountains are the size of the Whites in New Hampshire.

Off in the distance I can see a broad valley opening up. "Yukon Ho!". That is almost a mystic name, synonymous with adventure.

The pilot lines us up with the runway when we are a few miles out, and then after passing over Arctic Dome, North Peak, Glacier Mountain (no glacier) we dropped elevation quickly above Mission Creek. The last few minutes before wheels down was a rough ride. The airplane rolled, pitched and yawed wildly. I could watch the pilot wrestle with the airplane's steering yoke, I was just a few feet behind him. I wondered if I should worry, at one point we are crabbing sideways. But in the last hundred meters the pilot got the plane level, pulled the tail inline with our momentum, and touched down.

"What did you think of that!", he called out over his shoulder as he glanced back at me. I gave him a thumbs up. Apparently Eagle is notorious for the cross winds coming out of the mountains. The last half minute of the flight was like when you are skiing down a long, fast but simple slope and then finding out that you are going to have to traverse a series of moguls before you get to the base.

Clara is already filling the van with mail and packages by the time Cameron and I disembark. There is a snow-machine with a large plastic cargo toboggan. Its rider is man-handling the hundred pound bags of dog food. And a few other pickup trucks are collecting various bits of cargo.

We ride into town in an ancient, well used van, full of a lot of Amazon boxes, as well as someone elses StarLink box. Clara drops us off at the hotel, and promises to return with a truck after she takes the rest of her load to the post office.

The hotel seems outsized for this town of 98 residence. It is a three-story structure. The first floor is half filled with the general store, and half filled with a cafe which is only open in the summer. The upper two floors contain about forty rooms, but we are the only guest tonight, perhaps the only guest this month.

Linda runs the place, a no-nonsense Alaskan a few years older than me. I gather that Eagle use to be a big summer fishing destination, but the number of salmon in the Yukon has fallen dramatically. Still life in Eagle continues somehow.

After checking in and dropping our bags in our room, Cameron and I go back out and find the pickup truck that Clara has left for us, with keys in the ignition. I guess people don't worry about theft when the roads are only plowed about a mile in any direction. I tell Cameron that the truck looks and smells like trucks I remember from the 1970's. He checks the registration in the glove compartment and tells me it is a 1983, Ford F-100.

We drove out to the equipment shed. Or should I say "field station"? It is about a mile from the hotel, but only 200 meters beyond where we disembarked from the airplane. There are two "sheds" here, each about 8ft x 8ft, and our first task is digging a path to them.

The first shed contains Don's equipment, as well as the electronics for a number of other sensors. The second contains Mark Conde's SDI (interferometer), something which measures the motion of the gas which glows in an aurora. Mark is Cameron's advisor, so Cameron's first job is to figure out why the SDI is not working.

My first job is to climb on top of the shed and mount the StarLink antenna. The roof is small and already crowded with cameras and domes and various other things. I pick out a spot with a clear view of the sky and started shoveling snow. Within an hour I had a cable laced through a conduit in the wall, the antenna mounted on a wooden platform, and that platform screwed to the shed so it can't blow away. Before going down off the roof I sit for a few minutes looking north and thinking about what a delight it is to do science here. The day is warmish - in the mid teens - but there is a steady wind, and it is time to do some work inside the shed.

Cameron has found a misalignment and thinks the SDI is now working right, so we can both work on the new network. We get the StarLink, Raspberry-Pi, HughesNet and some of the sensors plugged into each other, but we can't really test it until there is a satellite overhead. Since we have time I go outside and cut down some of the trees growing near the shed, which in a year or two would start to overshadow the cameras. In the process I manage to fill my boots with snow, and so when back inside the shed I find it best to go barefoot.

As soon as the satellites are overhead we have a connection and then start a back-and-forth with Don, who is in Fairbanks. Apparently there are two HughesNets and we have plugged in the wrong one! But this is not hard to fix, and we continue to test systems until we lose our satellite connection.

We have a few hours until the next connection, and so go back to the hotel. I find an electric heater where I dry my boots, and read for awhile. We walked around town in the twilight. Someone is having fun on a snow machine, followed by a bunch of yapping dogs.

In the evening we go back out to the shed, in part to finish our testing, but also because it is a good internet connection and we have email to deal with. Back at our rooms we cook our dinners in a microwave which Linda has left outside our door. Then I read for awhile, and then headed to bed.

View from my room of the frozen Yukon River. Eagle bluff on the left.

March 9th - Eagle, Alaska

Snowing in Eagle

Cameron, Truck & Field Station

Yukon-Charley River Ranger station

Older section of Eagle

Old Eagle Church

A Lead in the Yukon River

Yukon River

Eagle Library

The plan for the day is to be at the shed at 8:00 for a last testing session with Don. Then back at the hotel at 9:30 to check-out and return the truck. Clare will then pick us up a bit after 10:00 and get us on the airplane at 10:30. We should be back in Fairbanks by noon.

But that is not how things unfold.

When I got up there was a light snow blowing down the Yukon River from Canada, and it is clear that it has been snowing most of the night. By 7:30 I have had my coffee, oatmeal and dried cherries, and Cameron and I head toward the equipment shed (or should I call it the "field station"?) The truck works hard pushing a track through 6-8 inches of new snow. We again connect with Don and everything seems to work, so we head back to the hotel.

Downstairs the general store opens at 10:00, and I can hear Linda come in at about 9:40. At 9:50 she knocks on our door with news. Evert Air has announced a flight delay, which eventually turns into a cancellation.

The next StarLink alignment is at about 11:00, so we again head out to the field station to use the internet. We tell Don, Kristina and Abby (Cameron's partner) that we expect to be in Eagle for an extra 24 hours.

Since we have so much time on our hands I provided a diversion by getting the truck stuck in the snow for awhile. Eventually somehow (and I am not certain how) we got it unstuck and we got back to the hotel. Linda tells us that she is pretty certain that she can find us a room for the night.

At the store I bought a frozen sandwich, frozen chicken dinner, crackers and tea. This store is our only source of food in town.

So what to do with an extra day, snow bound in Eagle?

It just so happen that I am presently reading "Coming into the Country", by John McPhee. About half this book takes place in Eagle, and the wilderness between it and Circle and Central area. I am delighted to be reading this while I am snowbound in Eagle - it seems most appropriate.

I wouldn't tell you too much about the book, but McPhee describes and explains a few things about this place which make since when I look around town. He was here and writing in the mid 1970's, but a lot of things are still the same. For instance the population then, and now, is just under a hundred. Eagle, like Circle, is the end of the road. And during the winter it is one hundred miles beyond the end of the road. So it is a magnet for people who are trying to escape civilization.

McPhee follows a number of people who see themselves as a bit of Daniel Boone. But in the background of McPhee's book is this uncertainty about the future of this frontier or wilderness. In 1959 Alaska became the 49th state and as part of statehood the federal government agreed to turn a large percentage of Alaska which was federal land over the the state. But then the native Americans sued because they had been left out of the agreement. There are no "reservations" in Alaska, and the natives have usually just been left alone. Eventually an agreement was worked out, at least in general principles, between the tribes, the state and the federal government. But people were slow to actually draw lines on maps as to who controls what.

Slow, that is, until oil was found on the north slope. Now ownership really mattered.

Late in the afternoon I went out for a walk. It is twilight and still snowing and blowing. The waterworks, the old city hall, the power company buildings are as McPhee described them. But the hotel and general store is new; a flood had taken out the one McPhee saw.

At the west end of town I saw something which told me the end of McPhee's story. Something that didn't exist when that book went to press. I saw the range station for the "Yukon-Charley River National Preserve".

Originally the federal government planned a number of large National Parks in Alaska. But this was in conflict with the natives, who liked the idea of these large undeveloped swaths of land. But these were also their traditional hunting grounds. And you are not allowed to hunt in a national park. And so a new division within the national park system was formed, the "National Preserves", which are much like National Parks, but allow for subsistence hunting.

However a National Preserve would be in conflict with those Daniel Boon characters, now squatters in a national park.

But as it gets darker, with the wind still blowing and the snow still falling, I don't see any squatters. So I head to the library.

The Library is a cozy log cabin in the middle of town next to Amundsen Park (another good story - but not mine). And in the middle of the library is a wood burning stove. It seems to me that one of the most important jobs of the librarian is to get up every fifteen minutes and drop another log in the stove.

There are two other patrons, a school aged boy doing his homework, and an old-timer - my vision of a "sourdough"/prospector - who has mittens which go up to his elbows.

I read a magazine for an hour, nodded to the librarian, and headed back to my room.

Back in the hotel I microwave my dinner, and Cameron and I talk for an hour. Then more reading and then to bed.

Sunrise over the Yukon & Canada

At the airplane

Eagle from the air

Yukon-Charley River NP

Friday, March 10th

The first thing I noticed when I woke up was that the day is clear. From my bed I can look down river, north, and see mountains ten to fifteen miles away that I have not seen before. And up river, to the east, the sun is rising over Canada.

It is a slow morning, and I am grateful for the camping coffee Will gave me for Christmas.

At 9:30 Linda comes to find us and tells us that since the weather looks good, and she has not heard anything from Evert Air, she expects we will be flying out. She also mentions that it will be a full flight. The Eagle Village council is going to a tribal council meeting in Fairbanks.

At 10:15 Clara takes us to the airport where a big truck is still plowing the runway. There are a lot of people waiting for the plane. While we wait Clara talks with the couple in the car next to us. They are waiting for the arrival of a long delayed box of diapers. Their baby has outgrown his diapers, but fortunately their were able to borrow some from the neighbors.

As the community gathered and waited for the airplane there was much discussion of who was renting which cabin this year, and who had a job and who didn't. The local law enforcement was there, as was that snow-machine with the large cargo toboggan. And there was the Eagle Village Council.

"Eagle" is the "white town", whereas "Eagle Village" is the native town two miles up river, with the airport tucked in-between.

When the airplane arrived there was a lot of hugging and greeting. The seven passengers who disembark seem to be well known to everyone waiting on the edge of the runway. I expect that these are the passengers from both the Thursday and Friday flights. When a dog walks off the airplane, he seems to know the routine, since he walks over to the dog carrier on the snow-machine's toboggan.

The pilot, Ray, knows all the passengers except Cameron and myself, so "check-in" is but a moment. In fact we are the only white passengers today. A big, young woman, who is part of the council, announces that she is going to co-pilot today, and climbs up into the co-pilot's seat.

Ray climbs in and announces, "Morning everyone. Today your pilot is Jodi!" to which most people laughed. But one council member commented, "I think I need to get off this plane."

Within three minutes Roy has us airborne and after a big, wide turn over Eagle Village, we are headed west to Fairbanks.

Most of the flight back is over that snow filled white wilderness. In the valleys the streams wind with exaggerated meanders, and the spruce march half way up the slopes. Most of the slopes lead to high, rounded hills. Locals call them "domes", but I thick I might call them "fells". A few are more mountainous, with jagged cliffs and cirques or "cwms".

I check my GPS and see that we are flying at about 220 mph, and at an elevation of about 7,000 feet. So these really are New Hampshire Whites, or Adirondack size mountains.

Mile after mile.

For two-thirds of the flight back the land is unbroken wilderness. But then I see a solo cabin and can maybe pick out a snow-machine track. Is this a hermit? Or have we crossed into the Chena State Park cabin system?

And then we are back over Fairbanks and I can see the airplane's shadow getting nearer and near until it attaches itself to our wheels.