Frozen Alaska

I may not be with my wife or daughter, and I may not be earning enough to support us right now, but hey! I can still blog, so let's get to it.

I didn't bring my camera this time around, because I thought it would be too snowy and dark to be useful, and besides, I took like 1500 photos this summer. How many photos of the Chugach and Talkeetna can a guy take?

Well, I forgot about the snow, and the increasing presence of the moon as night itself lengthens, and about the long orange dawns and purple evenings in this slightly moist air. Suffice it to say, I've seen enough full-moon-rising-over-the-snowy-mountains-made-pink-by-sunset scenes to recognize my failure. Alas...of course, the moon and the mountains aren't going anywhere soon, so it's just a matter of whether I'm on had at some later point with a camera to show an image or to the rest of you. But suffice it to say, even in the mid-to-low 30s, or cooler, Alaska's beauty is undiminished.

The survey season in Alaska is, for all intents and purposes, over. As I write this, I'm in an 85-foot boat, the Dream Catcher, steaming back southwest through the Inlet coming from an ADCP (acoustic doppler current profiler) survey near Nikiski, for another tidal energy project--this one potentially to power one of the oil platforms. We dashed out between spates of bad weather, surveyed as long as we could, and are now heading back to dock, as the winds rise and hopefully before they reach gale force. But little jobs like this are very much the exception, and will soon cease altogether in the inlet, as ice will become a much bigger problem than it is now (and the Nikiski area can be entirely iced over during an especially cold winter).

So far, the weather in Palmer and elsewhere has surprised me for its mildness. I'm hearing that, like the summer, this winter onset season has been very warm. Many days it was over 40 when we in the TerraSond house would go to work at 8 AM. Only on three or perhaps four days was there any frost. My insulated bomber jacket and sometimes a wool cap are all I've needed to stay comfortable.

And the shortness of the days is pretty amazing to me. I haven't found myself thirsting for sunlight--though, of course, daylight will keep shrinking until late December, down to about 3 hours--so much as enjoying the dark mornings, and the closeness and solitude they bring to starting the day. (It's also a nice feeling, getting up even at 7:30 and still having the impression that I'm up extremely early and being highly productive.) Darkness is like a soft snowfall or a steady rain outside, a kind of comforter wrapped around the building and covering the windows, cutting off me and the others inside from everything beyond our view. And I love that feeling.

A few weekend mornings, when I go to the gym at 8 instead of to work, when I head to the coffee shop at 9:30 or so, the sun's just starting to rise over the Chugach to the southeast, and the stillness is like pre-dawn of a Sunday morning in the country. I'm awed by the stillness. It brings stillness to me, and at times like now, that's a great thing.

But a few things have really surprised me. First, the dust. I'd heard that Palmer especially, in a flat river valley between the Chugach mountains to the southeast and the the Talkeetna to the north, is subject to very high winds through the pass, coming from the Alaskan interior to the northeast. One day last week, before motoring down to Homer, I was treated to my first glimpse of Palmer in winter's grip. It was below freezing, and the wind was strong enough to push me as I walked. I went to the post office and the sky looked slightly brown, and smelled dry, almost as if something were burning. I turned around to the south and saw this slight orange-brown haze, everywhere. Smoke, I wondered, or dust?

It's dust. I've studied glaciers, and I know that they generate, among other things, a fine powder called rock flour, by abrading bedrock as they travel. Alaska has many glaciers, and has had many more in colder times past, and when the wind grows intense, it picks the dust up and blows it around. When the dust hits the the ground again we call it loess, and in some parts of the state it's 60m thick (it's almost that thick in parts of New England too, though we don't have glaciers any more--the loess is several thousand years old). I'd never seen this aspect of a glacial, or periglacial (to be picky) environment before.

It's like I was in Egypt! The brown dust rises above the height of the mountains, fills the entire valley, and hangs in the air for days. It colors the sun ever so slightly, and you can practically feel it on your eyeballs and face. I've always wanted to go to Egypt, and I hope to work there someday, but for now, this is a decent pre-taste of what it's like with billions of tiny pieces of sediment in the air.

We're heading back to Homer now, a small fishing city on the southwestern tip of the Kenai Peninsula, which is southwest of Anchorage and one of Alaska's most popular hunting and fishing areas. As we drove down Route 1 toward the city, the area's similarity to rural populated Maine was overpowering. A narrow paved road curved through the hills and valleys. Spruce, often showing the effects of high wind, surrounded us, and we passed the occasional town center but more often, isolated homes, usually looking somewhat ramshackle. One or two newer vehicles might be in the driveway, three or four more dead ones might be scattered around the yard, and nearly every house sported a satellite dish.

Homer itself lies at the base of a gigantic bluff, built by hundreds of thousands of years of glacial activity, at the mouth of Kachemak Bay. Most of the city is on the bluff or at its base, but the marina and restaurants are at the end of a 4-mile-long spit of gravel, sand and mud, which sticks straight out from the coastline into the middle of the Bay. I haven't been able to find any specific writing about it, but that spit just has to be a glacial deposit, whether a lateral or and end moraine, or possibly something else.

But the bay location of Homer itself is stupendous. Pacific ocean to the west, into which the sun sinks at night. Kenai Mountains, now mostly covered with snow, to the south, glowing either white, or pale blue, or pink in the dawn and sunset. Massive bluff, mostly sand and gravel, to the north, dotted with houses and buildings all the way up to its top, many hundreds of feet above the water. The flat water and bordering lowlands, hemmed in by such steep verticals to north and south, is not the kind of place we'd find in New England, or many other places at all. The mountain ridge and bluff give the flat water and adjacent lowland a feeling of security and shelter that it wouldn't have if more exposed on a totally flat coast.

And the eagles! They're all over the place here. Bald eagle here, bald eagle there, bald eagles all over the freaking place. I joked on the drive down that eagles are Alaska's version of seagulls, but that's no joke. They kind of are. They're still beautiful and all, but when there are so many, and you see them picking along the shoreline for things to eat, well, it kind of diminishes their grandeur a bit. They're not as common as seagulls elsewhere, of course, as they're not gregarious birds, but they're also not at all the oh-honey-stop-the-car-there's-an-eagle kind of event, either. They're just around. I've heard the story about how Ben Franklin wanted the US official bird to be the turkey, because it's smart, tough and a survivor (why not the crow? They're all that, and even smarter), and disdained the bald eagle because it's a scavenger. Well, we wound up with the bald eagle, and on the temperate coast of Alaska, they might be considered borderline pests.

Alaska is a great place to be an earth scientist. Geology, biology, ocean and weather are inescapable. Their presence is powerful and immediate (anyone who's greeted a moose while walking outside at night--as I have--can attest to the biology part). I might still be heartsick, but Alaska itself can at least partly assuage the regret.