^ That’s what it says on their license plates, at least.
Being awful at blogs, I’m not going to draw this out: if you have not been to Alaska, GO. The moment on the flight into Anchorage that we dipped below the cloud cover, we received the most beautiful view of “purple mountain’s majesty” I could ever hope to see. I was smitten. (I even texted my parents to alert them that Anchorage was going to be my home one day. We’ll see if that happens.)
The most beautiful sight!
The days since our arrival have been long (7 to past 10, in general) but even so, they pass by quite quickly. Our first real day in Alaska, “we” drove (Dr. “Jack Daddy” Jackson did the driving; we were quiet and sleepy passengers on the 1.5 hour drive) to Whittier, a curious little port town whose winter residents number in the low hundreds. There are no single family homes; rather, residents all live in a single apartment building. We took a glacier cruise with an enthusiastic crew and few other passengers in which we were privileged to see a bit of calving and an abundance of “pure Alaska” wildlife. (Seriously, a bald eagle swooped down to the water as an orca breached the surface. AMERICA.)
Our second and third days were spent on the Matanuska glacier, our nights in the Sheep Mountain Lodge. The glacier travel was taxing, to say the least. I found out midway through the second day that the outdoorsy-type boots I had gotten for the trip had far-too-little tread, which explained much of my slipping and sliding on the loose rock (“moraine”, debris leftover after a glacier has receded) and ice. It was fairly frustrating to be the slow-poke in the group, as I felt like a burden; apparently my mood was transparent to my fellows, as I quickly earned the nickname “Sassafrass” for my short comments and responses. But the spirits of the team (even mine, thanks to them) remained ever-high as we trekked into the glacier, harnessed up, and found a semi-flat plane on the ice for our flux tower. Just as we began to set up, the weather turned cloudy, cold, and windy, which made the two-ish-hour process fairly harrowing. But we made it (with other nicknames “Thin Skin”, “The Cable Guy”, “The Glacier Bandit”, and “Mama Downing” being generated along the way)! Our tower, with instruments to measure and record wind speed and direction, temperature, and heat radiation, stood tall and steady throughout the day and night. We managed to find it again the next day to get the data and take down the tower. We had extra time to have a snowball fight and to explore more of the snow- and ice-covered glacier terrain. One of our members had a close call with a hidden snow bridge; he fell through to the waist and revealed quite the crevasse, earning him the nickname “Crevad-ass”. On the way back from the glacier, half our team successfully attempted a “polar plunge” in a glacial lake.
Bruised and sore, we traveled to Fairbanks, a 6.5-hour drive from Sheep Mountain. We made it in time for dinner and a trip to the grocery store, then settled in to Wedgewood Resort, where we will stay until Saturday morning. Today, we listened to four lectures related to Climatology; one about Atmospheric Heat Transport (AHT) and its effects on polar amplification, another about Marine Ecology (specifically her work in using climate models coupled with models of plankton to predict various paths and outcomes), the third about Snow Pillows and using satellite data to model snow cover, and the final about Micrometeorology and a permafrost-based black spruce forest. We visited a flux tower in that very forest & climbed to its 16m-high top. We lunched at a vista from which we could see, far in the distance and fairly obscured, Mount McKinley! We visited a dredging vessel which had been used to dredge for gold, and later had dinner with the Triplehorns, an OWU alumni couple who moved to Fairbanks awhile ago (both of whom worked at the Geophysical Institute). They drove with us to a spot along the Alaska pipeline to point out the “pig” (the pipeline cleaning vessel), then wished us a good night once the mosquitoes began to get the best of us (they’re giant!!).
In brief, it’s been outstanding!