Hello Friends   ---

The weather has been the news up here the past week.  I suppose the weather has been the news in the lower 48 also, but for opposite reasons.  January has been above normal temps and below normal snow.  Last Friday when we woke up it was over 40 degrees.  It could have easily been 40 below instead of 40 above.  All the pretty snow in the trees melted or fell off.  There is still plenty of snow around, but not on the trees.

It also rained Thursday morning.  The road surfaces are way below freezing so the roads were very slick.  Walking was very slick.  School was cancelled for the day.  There were numerous accidents on the roads.  It was so warm that a butterfly was out.  It got its picture in the paper

It is the same high pressure system giving us the warm weather that is giving you the cold weather.  So when you blame us you are at least partly right.

Before the Iditarod there are qualifying races.  Some of them have been cancelled because of the warm weather.  There have been some questions about the Yukon Quest dog sled race that starts in Fairbanks this Saturday.  The officials say the race will go on.  The route may need to be changed in a few places, but the race will happen right on time.  We want it to start in the regular spot because our apartment is about 3-4 blocks from the start and just across the road from the usual path.

So some of the snow melted.  There was a buildup of frost on things also.  That melted away.  But new frost is forming.

The one below show the size better.

Barrow, Alaska had its first sunrise in 68 days last Wednesday.  They had no sun since November 18.  They would have had some twilight each day.  On the first day of sun for the season the sun shone for 23 minutes.

Do you buy salmon?  The price may go down.  Alaska has had its largest salmon harvest ever.  A good harvest pink salmon have been the reason.  Alaska fishermen have harvested 272,000,000 fish of all sorts.  Of those, 219,000,000 were pink salmon.

Have a good week.  It is still supposed to be warm here so there is a good chance you will be cold.  Pretend you like cold weather!

God's blessings to all.

Larry and Elva

Friends,

Several times it has been warm here in Fairbanks when it is cold down there.  It is that way again.  Temperature is -4 in NW Ohio, 5 in Iowa City, 0 in Sturgeon Bay, and 24 here.  All you people who are getting tired of the cold weather better come up here!  Walking is much nicer than when it is 20 below.

One of the big events here is the Yukon Quest.  It is a dog sled race between Fairbanks and Whitehorse in Yukon Territory.  It is nearly 1000 miles long.  The starting point alternated between the two cities.  This year it starts in Fairbanks.  The number of teams is the smallest this year it has ever been.  There will only be 18 teams and the most teams was 48 in 1988.  It could be a dying event.  It might be replaced with snow machine (snowmobile) races.  People don't have dog sleds for practical uses any more, but there are a lot of snow machines.  It would be like "tractor pulls" replacing "horse pulls."  We have volunteered to help set up a meal for the mushers but have not heard much yet.  The race will start on the Chena River just a couple blocks from our apartment and go past our apartment.  It starts February 1.

One activity here is skijoring.  It was totally new to us.  We had to ask what it is.  It is  being on skis and being pulled by something - horse, car, snow machine, or (usually here) a dog or team of dogs.  We asked the guy in the picture above if we could take his picture.  He said he didn't care, but this was the first time he had ever tried it and did not think it would go very well.  He suggested finding some one else for a picture.  We only saw one other person skijoring but he was too far away for a good picture.  This guy indeed did not do so well.  There should be a harness for the person and for the dog or dogs.  And the dogs should be trained.  This dog did not know what to do.  The man just had a rope tied to his dog.  We took this picture to give some idea about skijoring but the results for this team was disappointing.  The person too far away for a good picture was probably going 8 mph and had a smooth operation.

Elva and I call these snow lumps.  They started as small bushes and by this time of the winter they have been completely covered with snow.  We have had over three feet of snow this season.  Some of the early snow melted.  Some sublimates.  It settles.  There is still probably over two feet of snow where nothing has bothered it.

It is cloudy here far more than I expected.  So colorful sunsets are rare.  Here are a couple from a few days ago.  The first one has electric lines across it.  The bottom electric line is mostly covered with snow.  Pigeons and ravens probably landed on the top wire often enough to get the snow off of it.

 The days are getting longer.  The average daily low temperature and high temperature have just started going up again.  People are getting optimistic.  I still want -50 degrees or so, I have experienced -40 while in college so that was not so impressive.  Elva thinks I am crazy.

God's blessings to all.  Enjoy winter!

Larry and Elva

Friends   ---

Reading the various brochures about Fairbanks we suspected January would be a slack month.  And it is.  The Christmas season is over.  It is still dark much of the day.  Several people have said that it is a good month to find a favorite recliner, curl up with a good book and a warm blanket  -- and take a nap!  I've been doing that more this month, I just don't bother with the recliner, book and blanket.  The result is equally as satisfying.

Though the sun rises late and sets early, we can see the more daylight already.  By March 20 the daylight and dark will be the same world over, except near the poles where the sun rises once and sets once per year.

We still take our daily walks.  Some days are very cold, but if we bundle up it is not too bad.  Today there was a little wind, perhaps 10 mph, which made it feel colder.  This has been a mild winter so far, with only one day colder than 40 below.  There is usually about a dozen days colder than 40 below.  A week or so ago it was colder in the lower 48 than here in Alaska.  It was about 20 degrees colder in Iowa than here.  That happens sometimes.  But when it is the other way around, it is much more dramatic.  Sunday morning it was 72 degrees warmer in Wayland than here.

The complete weather forecasts here take about a half hour, that is the state forecast.  That includes marine weather because there is a longer coast line here than all other states combined.  It also includes flying weather because there are many villages that have no road connection.  And, in the winter, many back country roads are impassable.  And, Alaska is huge.

As you can see it stretches from northern Florida to central California.  If there was a a forecast for all these states it would take a long time too, just like here.

We have heard that when it is 40 below, and a cup of boiling water is thrown into the air, it will evaporate before hitting the ground.  Well, we tried it when it was 20 below and nearly all of it evaporated.  In the picture a few steaming drops of water are falling toward the ground.  We could see in the snow below the picture that a few drops did not evaporate.

A girl from here goes to college in Alaska.  She is so amazed at some of the questions people ask that she sent some to the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.  Here are the top ten according to the paper:
10.    What time do you turn on the northern lights?
9.      How do you keep the animals inside Denali National Park?
8.      Are all your vegetables frozen?
7.      You can drive to Alaska?  I thought it was an island!
6.      If Alaska and Hawaii are so close, why do they have such different climates?
5.      What kind of currency do you use and what is the exchange rate?
4.      You are from Alaska?  Can I see your green card?
3.      How do you know what time it is when it is always dark?
2.      Do you have to use snowshoes or a dog team to go everywhere?
1.      Does everyone still live in igloos?

Whether you have gone to college or not, I am sure you are smarter about Alaska than the students who asked these questions!  Remember the TV program "Are You Smarter Than a Second Grader?"  Well, you are probably smarter than college students, at least some of them.

Thanks for staying connected.

Larry and Elva
God is love

Marcia, Todd, Sadie and Claire Widmer came to Fairbanks for a visit from Christmas day to New Year's Eve day.  She agreed to write a blog.  Thank you very much Marcia.  (Even her high school English teacher says she did a good job writing!)

Winter Wonderland

If asked to sum up what I thought of Fairbanks, Alaska, I would use the phrase, "Winter Wonderland".  The pastor of the church used that term during the Sunday service when our family of four visited my parents the week of Dec. 25-31.  Alaska was both what I expected, and not what I expected.  And my week was filled with wonder. 

View from plane

I did not expect to find a land so white, and I was filled with wonder about how it could be.  In elementary school a teacher taught me that white is the absence of color in an object, because all wavelengths of color are reflected off the surface of the object, none absorbed, so therefore the object does  not have color.  Although I know that understanding is very simplistic, and some reading this might wish to debate that with me (I'll pass), I have long remembered that.  (And if you need a refresher on how we see light (the reflected part is what we see) you can delve into that on the search engine of your choice.)  According to that understanding, Fairbanks was nearly colorless, so therefore, how can something "colorless" be so beautiful?  But it was.  The snow was white, not dirtied with mud, melted snow, vehicle exhaust or black from tires.  (Okay, animals left their marks.)  The trees were white, thanks to hoar frost.  Not only the trees, but the roadside weeds, fences, signposts, and most other inanimate objects were white with frost.  My parents said wind blows the hoar frost off; I was glad it was not windy during our visit, as the hoar frost is beautiful.  It blended with the white, clean snow.  Much of the land was white from the ground to the sky.  I was left in wonder of how so many things not absorbing color could be so beautiful.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, there was black.  The sky most of the night was black, and the night was longer than we have in Iowa City.  We went out at night a few times.  It was easy to get beyond city limits and be in wonder of the vast blackness, this time from the ground and continuing through the sky. The sky seemed to be more immense than I have seen in a while; can you tell I now live in a city?  And it was filled with many, many stars, offering their various levels of light.  I am not good at recognizing constellations, but I did see the Big Dipper.  And I believe I saw the Milky Way, thanks to Dad's help.  My first night out I lay down on the ground to just look up.  I'm sure my mouth hung open in amazement.  Then darkness was not just at night.  I would get up in the morning, ready to go for the day, full of energy, and head to breakfast at the hotel.  At breakfast I looked out the windows and saw black.  Yes, it was dark at 8-9 AM.  My body instantly wanted to go back to bed.  I didn't, but I was amazed and amused by the black darkness.  The dark wasn't suffocating; instead it made me feel very loved.  I wondered how the blackness could be so vast, amazing, amusing, and loving all at the same time.

Green has never been on my list of favorite colors, but in the Fairbanks I was left in wonder over green.  When we went out at night it was in hopes of seeing the aurora borealis.  The aurora borealis is commonly known as the northern lights; the equivalent in the southern hemisphere is the aurora australis.  We checked websites and signed up for nightly phone call alerts should the forecast for the aurora, as it is commonly referred to there, predict it to be visible.  Todd was the diligent, even obsessed at times, checker of predictions.  And it paid off.  Off the three nights at least some of us went out we saw the aurora each time.  Green is what we saw.  Apparently there are other colors in it, colors a better camera and photographer could record, and colors that are more apt to be visible other times of the year.  But for us newbies to aurora viewing, it was amazing.  As I watched the green in the northern sky move, I pictured God's hand with a large paintbrush coloring the otherwise black, starry sky.  We watched a movie at a museum that explained the northern lights, and I was left in wonder about how scientists could understand them, and curious if in the centuries to come generations will still understand the phenomena in the same way. 

The cold was something we were prepared for when we traveled to Fairbanks.  We researched the best ways to stay warm (layers, and certain types of fabric), we purchased better long underwear (now called base layers, if you might be in search of such yourself), and Mom lined up warm boots for us to borrow so we could travel with less bulk.  We get cold weather in Iowa; in fact, as I type we have dropping temperatures and are expected to have wind chills equaling or lower than the temperatures we experienced in Fairbanks.  The significant difference is that in Iowa our extreme cold is in the form of wind chill, while in Fairbanks it was just the temperature, no wind.  (Thank God for that, as I do not want to experience the wind chills that would happen with temperatures already so low.)  We took a family photo in front of a sign that recorded -41, and we can say we were in the area for the first day the interior of Alaska experienced temperatures less than -40.  The cold literally took our breath away and made us cough.  That made us laugh, which caused us to breath deep, leading to a cough . . . a cycle that was broken by ducking our mouths below our coats or scarves and breathing warmer air.  We were able to stay warm for a while outside, except sometimes our toes.  I often wondered how people long ago, without our modern, engineered fabrics and layers, stayed warm.  I wondered what drove them to inhabit such a cold area, and wondered why they stayed. 

 Notice that it is dark at 9:38.

I wondered if it was the colors that caused people to stay.  I talked about the black, the white, and the green.  All other colors of the rainbow were there, too, in varying amounts.  I would say reds and yellows, their various shades and mixings, were the most prominent while we were there.  The sun was the cause of these colors.  Before we visited Dad mentioned that twilight is much longer in Fairbanks than Iowa.  I didn't understand that.  I expected about 1/2 hour of sunrise and sunset, which is what we have here.  Instead, each event took at least 1.5 to 2 hours.  Some days it seemed longer.  And when the sun didn't get more than 10 degrees above the horizon, if the clouds were positioned right in the sky it looked like there was only sunrise and sunset, with the accompanying colors visible all day long.  I expected literal dark for 20 hours, and light only for 4 hours; I experienced light in the sky for 6-8 hours, which was much more tolerable.  Yes, we saw blue sky some days as well.  The blues mixed in with purples, and changed to white.  The color that was in the sky, other than "sky blue", reflected off the snow making the snow appear to be those colors as well.  It was beautiful beyond what my camera could capture. 

I wondered at the ingenuity of humans.  The Alaska pipeline was above ground in that area.  My daughters weren't so thrilled with seeing it, but having learned about it when it first was made I found the pipeline amazing.  To think humans are given the ability to engineer a pipe that could carry oil across the tundra, across the permafrost ground, through the bitterly cold winter temperatures, across a land that is filled with tectonic plates and seismic activity, and not break due to any of those potentially devastating forces.  To think humans have developed instruments to understand the forces behind the aurora.  The ingenuity amazes me.

People often say Alaska is beautiful.  I can only speak for one area, Fairbanks.  Yes, it was beautiful.  I often think places I am not familiar with are more beautiful than where I am from.  I look at those places with "fresh" eyes, and I certainly viewed the Fairbanks area with fresh eyes.  Fresh eyes caused me to see it with wonder and amazement.  And I was left in wonder of God, who created the colors, the snow, the starry dark, the brains of the humans who help me understand it, the cold, the warmth built up in layers.  If I visited in spring when the snow turns brown with muddy melt water, I am sure I would be amazed in a different way.  This time I can only be left to praise God for the beautiful winter wonderland He created.