Friends,

We Evers have our Christmas in the summer.  The travel is easier.  There is no school to interfere.  Well, usually the travel is easier.  The travel may not have been easier this year but it was more memorable.  All three of our children, their spouses, and their children came to Alaska for Christmas a couple weeks ago.

Perhaps a "Christmas tree" will help you believe it is possible to have Christmas during the summer.  Most of the presents were food that could be easily consumed because all the families were flying back to the lower 48 and did not need extra luggage.  And there were some books.

You  can see that we were all there.  There is a total of 16 of us.

We panned for gold (before Marcia's arrived.)  I think I saw one very small flake of gold.  But we had a good time trying to find more gold.

The kids played at the park across the road from our apartment.

Some of us squeezed into our small kitchen.

We took in some Native dancing.

The Native Alaskans did not have stringed instruments until the 1840 when the Hudson Bay Trading Company traded some for some furs.  Native fiddling is very popular now.  These two men played the music for some of the dances by the group above.

James's family

Marcia's family.

 Paula's family

So   ---   Merry Christmas!  We should always rejoice that Jesus came into the world no matter what time of the year it may be.

Thanks to all of you for your interest.

Larry and Elva

Friends   ---

This blog is mostly about the early summer flowers in and around Fairbanks.

bluebells

highbush cranberries

Ok, perhaps these are not flowers, in fact these fill the air with much wind.  Both cottonwood trees and aspens put out millions of seed puffs.

This is Fairbanks on a sunny June afternoon.

Far in the distance is the Alaska range, 150 to 200 miles south.

Very small flowers in Barrow Alaska.  The cluster is probably about the size of a dime.

Wild flowers

Cabin of a friend where some of the flowers were.

 Moose

Mosquito, wings about 8 feet high.  Most live ones are not this large.

Lilac, some lilac are still blooming.

These next three pictures are of a native cemetery.

This is a tree coming up through asphalt walking path.  God has make things survive and even thrive in this cold area.

Wild iris, these are common.

Wild roses, these are also common

Wild strawberries, also common.  I ate some of these the other day, small, not a lot of flavor, but good.

.

The white flowers are strawberries.

The first half of June was dry.  Then there was a lot of rain.  There was more rain this June than any previous recorded.  Records have been kept since 1912.  A heavy wild fire season had been predicted, but now that is almost impossible, at least for the next month.  New record rainfall for the month of June   ---   3.56 inches.  I remember getting over 8 inches in one night in Fort Dodge!

Officially there has been only one day over 80 degrees so far this summer.  Are you suffering from the heat?  Try Alaska!  Yesterday the high was in the upper 50's with constant rain.  The length of sun time is over 21 hours.

Elva and I now have a little less than a month remaining for our stay in Alaska.

Thanks for your interest.

Larry and Elva

Friends,

Just a little more about our trip last week to Anchorage and Valdez.  One of the defining points in the history of southern Alaska was the 1964 earthquake.  It was the second strongest earthquake ever recorded in the world and the most powerful in North America.  It struck in the evening of Good Friday.  Massive damage resulted in Anchorage and surrounding areas.  The town of Valdez was not built on solid ground, but on silt from the glaciers.  (Those of you from Colorado may remember that when irrigating there would sometimes a buildup of mud which if you would pat it with a shovel it would become jelly like.)  So some of the silt that Valdez port was built on "liquified" and slid into Prince William Sound.  This caused a massive tsunami that killed 30 people who were in the port area of Valdez.  We have been told that one lady we know at church lost her first husband and two sons who were swallowed up by the tsunami.  The army corps of engineers determined that it was unsafe for the town of Valdez to be in that area because another earthquake would cause more of the town to slide into the water.  So the town was given two years to move four miles to a site that was on solid footing.

The second defining point for Valdez was the "Exxon Valdez" oil spill.  That was March 24, 1989.  Over 10 million gallons of crude oil spilled into Prince William Sound from the oil tanker Exxon Valdez.  This is considered to be the worst human-caused disaster of all history.  More oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 but that was not as near land and much of that oil dissipated into the seawater of the Gulf.  In the Valdez area there were a great number of sea and shore animals that were killed.  I remember seeing pictures of that event 25 years ago showing birds and seals soaked in oil.

It is interesting that this year is the 50th anniversary of the earthquake and the 25th anniversary of the oil spill.  So we were hearing a lot about those two disasters in the news a couple months ago.  This is a ship that was tossed onto the shore above the port and left as a reminder of that disaster.

The oil that spilled would have come to Valdez by the Alaska oil pipeline and gathered into tanks like these seen from across Prince William Sound.  My guess is that we were six to eight miles from these tanks when we took these pictures.

 There are pumping stations to get the oil from the tanks and onto the sea-going tankers.

And the tankers ships are still busy.

And the pipeline is still busy bringing crude oil.

The oil spill cleanup was a massive undertaking.  The motel we stayed in in Valdez was originally offices for people who were there to manage the cleanup.

It is in two parts connected in the middle.  The original understanding was that when the cleanup was completed the buildings would be transformed into motels by adding (seen in the pictures extending out from the building) restrooms to each office.  Seen above for the nearest building are restrooms for eight rooms.

Interestingly, several miles outside of Valdez is a "man camp."  Men who work on the pipeline alternate "on the job" for a couple weeks and "off the job" for a couple weeks.  The families of these men live elsewhere.  The workers are flown back and forth by the company.  While on the job they live in these dorm buildings called the "man camp."

This picture shows about half of the dorms at the "man camp."  The motel we stayed in was like two of these before the restrooms were added.

We were glad for this trip.  Without it our trip this year would have been to Fairbanks and not to Alaska.  We still plan to see the Arctic coast at Barrow in a couple weeks.  It is the furthermost point of the North America mainland.  Parts of Greenland and Canadian islands are further north.

We went to an auto museum here in Fairbanks.  It is by far the best auto museum I have ever seen, though I have not seen many.  There were around 70 cars there from the very oldest up to the early 30's.  Many of the cars were models of which there are only two, three, or four still in existence.  They also had women's fashions that matched the eras of the cars.  Many vehicles were unique to Alaska.  There was an early International Harvester car.  I did not know that IH ever made cars.  I could not get these pictures into the blog so they are attached to the e-mail announcing this blog.

This will be it for another week.  May this be a good week for you with God's blessing noticeably upon you.

Larry and Elva

Friends   ---

This is perhaps the most astounding thing about our trip to Anchorage, Seward, and Valdez.  By no means do I wish to diminish from the grandeur and majesty of the mountains, the vastness of the glaciers, or the beauty of the water falls.  We have seen other mountains, we grew up in Colorado with the Rockies and numerous water falls.  There were, however, no glaciers in Colorado.  We visited Glacier National Park in Montana a few years ago, but those glaciers were mostly gone.

Last year nearly a half million passengers rode the Alaska Railroad.  Probably about that many will again this year.  The passenger trains run daily from mid May to mid September and on weekends the rest of the year.  In one car I counted 80 seats and our train had five passenger cars.

We were assigned our seats.  So what are the chances that in the seats right in front of Elva and me would be someone we knew?!  Imagine our surprise when someone exclaimed, "Mr. Evers!"  Elicia Olsen was assigned the seat right in front of us!  She is no longer Olsen, she was with her husband Dustin Lindahl.  They live in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, where they own a business of doing Christmas decorating for their clients.  And, her brother Barnabas was there also.  He is married and has a year old daughter.  He is in the Air Force.  We talked about high school, recent things we have done, and Christianity in Alaska.  

Elicia and Dustin

Barnabas, Lauryn, and Emma (she was sleeping)

Proud teacher with former students.

Alaskans say they often run into people they know from various places, I certainly agree.

To me, this was the most amazing part of the trip!

Larry and Elva

God is love