Earth Outdoor Living Diaries

For the past few winters, we have worked at clearing paths through the willows and alders on the hills surrounding the cabin. Some of the trails are for snowboarding but most are a series of cross-country ski trails that link together a series of ponds along the pipeline. This fall we put in the last few trails to end the circuit. We haven't gotten enough snow to fully test them out but we are already looking forward to exploring new areas. At Summit Lake, there is plenty to explore but only so much time. And only so much daylight and good weather. It has been a good start to the winter season but we are anxious to explore beyond Alaska this winter and have plans to visit Florida and then return to our ski trails (and hopefully more snow) in the spring. I hope your winter is going well and that you enjoyed my blog this month. Goodbye and see you on the trails.

To get to our Thanksgiving dinner destination, we drove through a mountain pass, over several creeks and through a bison farm to see Gabe's dad. He had a turkey, potatoes, cranberry sauce, and we brought fruit salad, squash and sweet potatoes. There was more food than we could eat and the feast lasted two days.

Gabe's dad lives next to one of a few bison farms in Delta Junction. There are also elk farms in the area. With so many big game animals in the area, it seemed odd to be eating turkey. A nice Thanksgiving day ptarmigan might have been the way to go if we were keeping with an Alaskan theme. But Gabe's dad's turkey was delicious and a nice change of taste from all the wild game we have been eating this fall.

Last night we received our first real winter night. It was hard to get the cabin up to a warm temperature after being gone for two days and it had been taking only a couple of hours around the beginning of the month to warm the logs and get all four corners of the cabin roasting. It was clear and cold and a stripe of green northern lights spread across the mountains. It was a beautiful night but a night I would not want to spend outdoors which made me think about, Frank Glaser, the wolf man, walked up and down this strip of the Richardson Highway before there was a highway.

Glaser was a naturalist who came up to Alaska in 1915 and quickly learned how to navigate the Alaska Range, its creeks and rivers, and its animals. In later years he would become a wolf hunter and help manage game populations. Wolf management is a controversial subject, but I think his nickname the Wolf Man means more than just wolf hunter.

Sunlight in Alaska is a scarce resource this time of year. We get about four hours of daylight right now. We often rise before the sun does and go to bed much longer after it sets than most people do in the lower 48. However, the lack of light is what creates magical mornings and beautiful sunsets that we don't get in the summer.

If there was a word to describe the color of alpenglow it would have to encompass the three colors pink, orange and red. Alpenglow is a strange, vibrant color that hits the summits of the Alaska Range every morning before the sun rises. Light refracts (or bends) through ice crystals in the cold air before the sun comes up, illuminating Alaska Range summits on the opposite horizon.

Everyone in Alaska should hire their own personal videographer to catch those miraculous moments when you're too busy fixing something, thawing something, or digging something to be able to capture the moment.

Gabe and I had ourselves such a moment today when we pulled out of our driveway only to discover that the two key turns in the road had been drifted in with two to three feet of snow. We thought the hardest part would be pulling out of the driveway. As soon as we get to the road, we thought, we'll be fine. It's all downhill from there. Except there is one stretch in the switchback that leads to our house where all the snow gets deposited after a windstorm.

Slick winter roads, icy steps, cold fingers and toes, and freezing winds that blow through your clothes are all good reasons to complain about Alaskan winters. But there is also something magical about living so far north during the harshest season of the year: the light.

It's a paradox, but even though we receive less sunlight in the winter, the alpenglow creates a different kind of illumination that can only be seen during the long dusky mornings of winter.

Before Birdie and Dennis Kennedy left Summit Lake Heights for Hawaii, they cleaned out their generator-powered refrigerator and left us with moose and salmon meat. It's been sad to see their cabin at the top of the hill dark at night, but cooking up some of the salmon they left reminded us of the good times we had with our neighbors.

When I moved to Alaska almost four years ago, my dad gave me his Jeep that had belonged to my stepmom, Molly. Gabe came down from Alaska to visit his mom in Arizona and to drive up to Alaska with me in the Jeep. After a lot of sad goodbyes between me and my family, Gabe and I headed north to the Canadian border. I think the Jeep's odometer was somewhere around 100,000 miles when we left Nevada.

I looked at the odometer today when we made it back to the cabin after getting some wood, and the Jeep now has almost 260,000 miles on it. The Jeep brought me from Nevada to Alaska and traveled the whole length of the Alcan. It's been half way up the haul road and took Gabe and I from Paxson to Cantwell on the Denali highway. It's been to Anchorage, Valdez, Chitina on the Edgerton Highway. And this past summer it took me back and forth from Tok to Chicken and once to Eagle on the Taylor Highway. Most of these highways are mostly dirt, filled with potholes, soft shoulders or only one lane wide. But the Jeep has driven over most of them with little complaint considering what we've put her through. Yes I said "she". And sometimes we call her Jeepy.

This morning we put in the first tracks of what will become our winter trail. Soon a snow and wind storm should arrive that will blow all of the snow off of Summit Lake and onto our dirt road that leads to our cabin. Snow drifts will create road blocks that not even four-wheel drive can bust through, and we will start parking our Jeep at the bottom of the hill and either hiking up to our cabin or driving the snow machine.

Firewood and water are the two most crucial supplies at Summit. A natural spring runs out of the mountains about ten to twelve miles up the road from us. The water is purified by the minerals in the mountainside and is safe to drink. It is also the cleanest, most refreshing water I've ever tasted. When we go to Fairbanks and have a glass of city water, we know how lucky we are to have our spring.

We finally made it down to the lake to go ice fishing. Last night, a couple friends from Delta drove down to cut some holes in the foot and a half of ice that has grown over the lake. Gabe and the guys left baited hooks in over night and this morning we walked through a blanket of fog to check their hooks. No fish.

We jigged for awhile and still nothing. But the good news is that now we have three holes to fish from: two cut with chain saws and one hole drilled in with Gabe's manual auger. For the next few days, our morning ritual will be to have a quick cup of tea and then head down to the lake right as the sun rises around 9 or 9:30 a.m.

Before we turned into snow birds last year, we would hit up all the salmon runs we could to store up enough fish for the winter. The summer before last we drove to the small town of Chitina near the Copper River for the red salmon run. It was the first time that I had gone dipnetting. Dipnetting for salmon is pretty self-explanatory. You take a huge net, dip it in the river, wait for a tug and pull up a red salmon. When the salmon are running hot sometimes you can pull up two or three fish in a single net.

We netted 60 fish between Gabe and I and our two friends. Processing 30 fish took about a week. We cleaned them, brined them, smoked them and canned them. After cleaning that many fish, I don't think we ate much of it for the rest of the summer. But when winter hit, we were glad to have the 12 or more cases of red smoked salmon stacked in the kitchen ready to be mixed with a brick of cream cheese and devoured with Ritz crackers.

The day before yesterday I thought we might try our luck at ice fishing down at the lake. About a week ago we checked the ice and it was thick enough to walk on safely but not so thick that we couldn't bust a hole through the sheet quickly with an auger.

The weather, although warmer, is keeping us close to the cabin and working on projects instead of exploring the lake and the hills. Although if we want to catch one of the trout that lurks beneath the ice off the tip of the lake's beaver dam, then we better not wait too long.

When it's just you and your boyfriend up on a hill with no neighbors and few visitors, sometimes the entertainment and the company of the critters that live around you can give you the distraction that you need from cabin fever.

Today was a gray day. The hill was enclosed in a cloud and it's been snowing small flakes steadily since this morning. A few laps around the pond on our cross-country skis got us outdoors this morning, but the gray flat light is not inviting for long outings. We've been trying to keep busy with chores: I've been tidying up the kitchen and putting laundry away and Gabe has been working on both our snowmachine and our generator.

Today's post will be short. The battery on my computer is about to die and our battery bank does not have the strength to charge it now that the sun has gone down. The days are getting shorter and our solar panel only has a few strong hours of charging time in the middle of the day. Not being able to plug into a grid can really test your patience sometimes. There's a dance that has to be done with the electricity. You learn to charge things in the middle of the day when the sun is powering your electronics and you're not draining the batteries. At night you only use the battery bank for lights and maybe some music, but the long night is not for charging. We try to use our solar as best as we can to save on fuel costs for the generator. Our neighbors around us have wind generators that work very well up here. Especially when we get northern wind storms that can gust over 50 miles per hour. A lot of the people up here at Summit Lake only use their generators for weekend snowmobiling trips and produce more electricity then they need. A wind generator is on our list of cabin improvements. For now, we're working with what we have and trying to be patient when a deadline is approaching and the laptop battery is dying. Tomorrow I'll try my patience at ice fishing while the noon sun charges up my laptop. Talk to you tomorrow!

While we were in Delta overnight, Summit Lake received a dusting of snow and a windstorm. Bad for the ice rink, but good for the cross-country ski trail.

In the morning, before the sun rises which is around 9:30 a.m., Gabe usually heads down from the loft and gets a fire going. While we're still groggy and shuffling around in our socks on the cool wood floor, the quiet of the surrounding mountains and willow-covered hills is inescapable. Inside the cabin is as quiet as outside the cabin, but once the fire gets crackling the sound of the wood burning is almost like having a third person in the cabin. A talkative lively character that keeps us warm, cooks our food, and fills up the silence.

Our barrel has a flat-top on it that heats up like cook stove. Once the fire really gets going, we can heat up a pot of water for tea, throw the cast-iron griddle on for pancakes, or heat up a pot of soup. It helps us cut down on the propane and gives us something to gather around since instead of a television.

The wonderful thing about Summit Lake is that you can go to the cabin and truly get away from it all. But then you are away from it all. We drove to Delta yesterday to watch Sunday night football and check into a better Internet system. Our friends are very hospitable. They feed us, watch football with us, and every winter when my Jeep freezes up in their front yard, they let us fix it in their heated garage. Even though we live off the grid and 70 miles from the nearest grocery store, we can only be so independent with the energy and water system we have. The sun provides us with enough electricity to turn on our lights and charge our cell phones. Our water system consists of five-gallon jugs theater we fill up at a nearby spring. Until we can amass a battery bank that is large enough to accommodate a shower pump, washing machine, and a satellite system to watch football on, we are dependent on friends and trips to town. The next most wonderful thing about Summit Lake is the weather. Because it is up in the Alaska Range and not in the inversion of the Tanana Valley, the temperatures are usually higher than in Delta and especially than in Fairbanks. We like this aspect of Summit and so does our Jeep. The colder temperatures of town froze up the Jeep and kep us in Delta longer than we expected, but sometimes the peace and quiet of Summit Lake is too peaceful and too quiet. It's a balance that we try to keep between the busy banks and crowded grocery stores of town and the media-free environment of Summit. We are looking into adding a wind generator to our energy system and increasing our possibilities for more ammenities. But we also realize that having less provides us with more time and energy for skiing and skating. And not having all the comforts of town at the lake gives us a good excuse to come visit friends.

When my boyfriend and I returned to our cabin at Summit Lake recently for the winter season, we were surprised to find that the weather had conspired to create a natural ice rink. Usually the pond behind our cabin drains at the end of summer and leaves a dry bed of pointy black lava rocks. We have to wait for a snowstorm or two to cover the rocks enough for us to cross the pond on our cross-country skis and head into the hills, but this year the summer rain kept coming even after the ground froze. The water held and froze and when we pulled up to our cabin we found that the pond was smooth and white like a bedsheet instead of lumpy and white like mashed potatoes.

Welcome to my diary! I live in Fairbanks, Alaksa and travel throughout the state working in the schools as a speech-language pathologist. Winter has definitely arrived in Alaska! Fairbanks is 5 inches behind in annual snowfall thus far, but the temperatures keep dropping. This morning I woke to -13 temperatures. This may seem cold to you (and it is) but once we've had a cold snap of -40 for a few days, -13 will feel balmy! even after two winters here, these temperatures are still an adjustment for me. Before coming to Alaska I lived in California all my life so you can imagine the adjustment it's been for me!

As I drove on over the flat lands, the local caribou herd was eating their way across the meadow. The bulls stood watch as the rest of them snacked and enjoyed the warm sun. Its kind of amazing to watch the way they protect one another.

Usually one bull will be out front and another is always behind and last in line. The guards will stand and let a few pass. Then the group will stop and let the bull take the lead. This cycle repeats until they are safely across the fields--- or the road. It's as if he goes on ahead, takes a look around, decides if it's safe and THEN lets them pass him. Sometimes the bull is always the leader.