Friends,

I keep thinking that I try to start planting garden before this - radishes, lettuce, carrots, onions, potatoes, and other early crops.  But not here.  The avid gardener here has a greenhouse.  And the greenhouse usually has some kind of heat when needed.  Yesterday and today it is needed.  We had snow Sunday and Monday.  This morning officially the temperature was 2 and this afternoon it was in the upper teens.  This first picture shows the river still frozen and covered with snow.  (This is a fairly long view, the dark line is the shadow of a bridge.)  Fewer people walk across it now, but some still do.  We don't.  The second picture shows snow, our van, and our apartment through some birch trees.

It had been warmer for a week or so.  There was a lot of melting.  It is quite flat here so as ice melts into water it stays put.  This is water in front of the apartment, about 10 feet from the apartment.

And this is how to get rid of the water, an outdoor sup pump about one foot high!  It sucked a lot of water away from under the ice also.  It actually worked fairly good, except that it turned cold again, froze the water, and snowed again.

Some of you have asked about the length of day here now.  Today the sun rose (except that it was cloudy) at 6:41 and will set this evening at 9:06 giving us 14 hours, 25 minutes, and 19 seconds of sunlight.  For comparison, Chicago's (not all cities or towns were listed in the web site I used) corresponding numbers were 6:22, 7:24, and 13 hours, 2 minutes, and 33 seconds.  For the longest day of the year, June 21, Chicago's sunlight will be about 15 hours and 33 minutes.  Here it will be 21 hours and 50 minutes.  Here it will not get dark.

Today Elva and I went to the Alaska Mining Hall of Fame Museum.  This is Elva in front of a scale used to weigh gold 100 years ago.

Very few people pan for gold any more.  This picture is from about 100 years ago.  They run water through the sluice box to wash away the rocks and leave the gold behind in little traps.  Very few nuggets are found.  Most is "placer" gold, very fine specks (about like dust, except wet at first) of gold that are gathered up.

Some times they use water pressure to wash away the dirt to get to where the gold is concentrated.  The cliff here would be about 20 feet high and the spray of water is about 30 feet.

 Or they dig it away with a dredge.  The dirt would still have to be run through a sluice box (bigger and better than the one above) to separate out the gold.

In 1909 466,860 ounces of gold, all mined or panned by hand, were produced in the Fairbanks area.  That was about half of all gold produced in Alaska that year.  This area became known as "America's Klondike." From 1928 to 1964 large dredges were used and after that hard rock mining has been used to get the gold.  This area is still easily the largest producer of gold in Alaska.  As of 2013 a total of 13.5 million ounces of gold have been produced around Fairbanks.  At today's prices that would be over $16 billion.  This is 1/3 of all gold produced in Alaska.  I have heard people say they know where they could go in the mountains to certain streams and just pick up nuggets of gold.  I don't know.

All the winter activities seem to be done.  Summer fun is not yet started.  There are a few spring events.  Just a few sandhill cranes and Canadian geese have returned.  

May God bless each of you.

Larry and Elva