Category Archives: Alaska

Contemplating the Thermal Properties of a Subarctic Home

(Or “Another blog post for insomniacs.”)

While we spend a lot of time and money working to keep the house heated each day from about mid-September through early May, if you only focus on that you miss some other interesting things that work more subtly on longer cycles.

One Sunday morning in early spring, Rose and I were sitting in the living room reading the newspaper. It was very quiet. The snow had melted, it had yet to green up, and few birds were back. We’d been too lazy to put on music, so it was quiet inside, too. We heard something fall with a clatter to the deck. Surprised, we got up and looked out the window to see a strange piece of metal lying there.
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Life in a Snow Globe

We woke up this morning inside a Christmas card.

Light, powdery snow piles up on branches in the calm air of Fairbanks, Alaska

This leisurely dawn photography sure is rough. Sunrise was at 1059 today. These are some shots out the windows of our snow-globe home.
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The Minus-30 Quasimodo Smackdown

We’re not wood snobs. If it will burn well, into the firewood pile it goes. So while cutting, moving, and stacking wood, some real ugly cusses get brought along in the process. They can screw up a good woodpile because they can be grotesquely misshapen, so I often put them on top. But where they really gum up the works is in the splitting.
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The Rock Hard Bottom of November

Here we are staring at the ass end of November, cold and dark. But we were completely surprised yesterday morning to wake up to a very crisp -36 F. While we’d been having some below-zero weather, we hadn’t been expecting such a drop off a thermal cliff.
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Our Subarctic Denizens around Thanksgiving

During the past week or so we haven’t gotten any new snow, so the tracks have been building up. Sunrise-to-sunset time is about 5 hours, so there is little daylight during which to see (in real time) who’s been passing. Our resident snowshoe hare has been dashing everywhere. We first saw it in the latter half of October—it stuck out so boldly, white against the snow-less landscape, that we could even see it after dark. This species has only recently colonized our neighborhood, probably drawn by the increasingly open woods as aging aspens have fallen. Until now, we have not had one actually spending time in our yard. It seems to love to run on the deck. Of course we call it Thumper.

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