Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Winter Sights, Scents, and Sounds in Rural Alaska

(I welcome your comments and questions through the "comments" option below any entry. --Laura)

My strongest visual impression of a rural Alaskan winter is the narrow color palate.  It is a black and white world. Deciduous birch and willow, and black and white spruce trees stand still and strong in a landscape of white snow and mountains against a thin blue sky.  Even in snowy cities and suburbs, the color range is expanded exponentially by brick and painted houses, cars in parking lots, colorful billboards and shop signage, and the colored lights of stoplights, seasonal decorations, and flashing “open” beacons.   Out in the bush, we have none of those things.  The only color, really, is our laundry.


The impact of this view is a greater awareness of shapes - the triangle of a bleached out sky outlined by bent branches, shadows cast by an icicle or a corner of the cabin, or shallow or deep animal tracks puncturing the snow.  The landscape is so still, that movement startles, as when the wind blows snow.   We can track animals more easily than in the refulgent summer: snow shoe hares tracks dive under the snow, martins tracks skitter among and up trees, river otters slide along the banks of water courses not yet frozen.  One day we came across a mass of dark blood at the base of a tree.  As detectives, we looked for predatory footprints and found none, concluding that an owl or other raptor had swooped down and impaled a hare with its sharp claws and beak before the furry fellow could dive into its warren below the tree.  The long, straight lines of diagonal trapping poles and horizontal supports of hunting stations catch our eyes as foreign objects we do not see the rest of the year, when they remain hidden in the woods.
    

Monday, February 13, 2012

Weather, Light, and Temperature at Latitude 61

Storm coming in fast
(I welcome your comments and questions through the "comments" option below any entry. --Laura)


One joke I've heard about Alaska weather is the defensive line, "We do, too, have four seasons:  June, July, August, and winter!"  Read below to see if you think that is true or close to it.

Here in South Central Alaska, it is not as warm and rainy as South East Alaska (Juneau) and it lacks the extreme temperature fluctuations of the Interior (Fairbanks). Naturally, any place with as many mountains and bodies of water as Alaska has a huge variety of micro-climates. Anchorage, for example, is warmed by the Cook Inlet and gets only about 5 or 6 feet of snow per winter, and is protected from deep temperature drops.  Where we are, inland, summer temperatures range from 50 - 70 degrees and winter temperatures can sink to -40 (but the coldest I've ever felt was -30). It starts to snow in October and my impression, although we haven't yet spent a whole winter there, is that normal winter temperatures tend to range between -20 and +20. March is my favorite winter month, when it is sunny and the snow sparkles as it crystalizes when the afternoon temperatures rise above 32. Over the four winters we have partially spent there, snow depth has varied from 5 (winter of 2010-11) to 14 feet (winter of 2011-12), depending less on accumulation than on whether the snow warmed up enough times (or if it rained) to compact significantly.