Wow, do we ever have daylight again. One day you’re driving to and from work in the dark at 30 or 40 below, and seemingly the next day the darkness is gone and the temperatures are into the teens and twenties. It adds up fast when day length is increasing by seven minutes a day. And today, although it was snowing again when we woke up, our days just became longer than everyone to the south of us. We’ll still have snow and good cross-country skiing for weeks yet, but you can once again feel the sun’s warmth, a true harbinger of melt and greenery to come. That said, we had some spectacular northern lights over the weekend.
Category Archives: Alaska
Solstice—the Short One
And lo, it arrived: the shortest day of the year. Here in Fairbanks this brings just 3 h 41 min 29 sec of possible sunlight. The sun skims along the southern sky, at its peak hitting an angle of only 2 degrees above the horizon. Its light is all sunrise and sunset colors, all day. These weak but welcome rays, heavy in oranges and reds, stream through our south-facing windows at such a shallow angle that they can penetrate right through a building if there is no wall to stop them. You relish the light because it is such a short thing every day. We get up well before sunrise (10:59 a.m.), work hard well past sunset (2:40 p.m.), and return home after it’s been dark for hours.
Fish Heads can be Remarkably Good
Randy Pyle with a yelloweye rockfish.
I took a quick trip down to Valdez to go out with a charter boat for halibut. Randy Pyle of Lady Luck Charters took a group of us out for an all-day fishing charter on the Aleashia. We had a great day on the water. We saw whales, sea otters, great birds—and we caught fish. Then I zoomed home with the fish gutted and on ice: two halibut and two yelloweye rockfish. They fileted up quickly and easily enough, and I vacuum-packed most of the filets and put them in the freezer. I held out two nice pieces for a side-by-side taste test of the fish—baked: a little olive oil in the pan and seasoned only with salt and pepper to keep it simple for a flavor comparison. (I liked the yelloweye better, but both were very good).
Moose!
Having not gotten a moose on our float trip, I carved out a couple of days to go out to Standard Creek, where I’d last gotten one several years ago. I hadn’t had any luck crossing paths with a bull during the season out there since, but the biggest part of moose hunting is just putting time in where they are likely to be. I hunted two evenings and mornings in my usual area, but judging by sign the densities were the lowest I’ve seen in many years of hunting there. The visit was great, especially because I’d avoided the weekend by working then and taking a couple days mid-week, which really reduces the hunter activity. Coyotes were howling at dawn on the second day, and the weather was excellent, but I left feeling strongly that it was not worth returning. Moose densities have been too high across this entire hunting zone, apparently, and they’ve been issuing a lot of cow tags to push those densities down. I guessed that a lot of those tags have probably been being filled out here.
A Fall Float Trip
After returning from a wonderful trip to Europe, life was back to its hectic norm for a couple of weeks, but Rose and I planned to take a float trip down the Chatanika River—just like the one Dad and I had gone on moose hunting back in September 2000. During that former trip, I remembered thinking how much Rose would enjoy such a float, and rumor had it that the 15-mile road off of Murphy Dome Road (which had been very bad before) had been improved for fire fighting earlier this year. So we planned to go. When Dad and I had gone, we’d taken a standard 18-foot aluminum canoe, but we’d worried about the extra load a moose would add and so had brought along an inflatable raft to tow if necessary. That scheme unfortunately was never put to the test, but in talking with some guys at work I heard a resounding recommendation for an inflatable Pro Pioneer made by Soar. I was able to rent one from the folks at Test the Waters, and we were set.