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.