Arctic Light

(People on FB have already seen some of these pictures, but there are more here.)

A pine marten (American marten) climbed all over the house yesterday in pursuit of our insulation squirrels. I haven't posted about the Squirrel Problem but it's been going on since last summer, when squirrels started stealing insulation one squirrel-sized chunk at a time, and have literally emptied some parts of our walls, the little jerks.

Anyway, yesterday Orion said, "There's something jumping around in the yard!"

I ran over and looked. Martens are basically large ferrets, and for a while we just watched it bounding around in the snow. I ran to get my camera eventually, but only got one picture because it was just so fast-moving and usually appeared in a bounce in between vanishing into the snow.



We also watched it climb a tree - straight up the bark - and then it was just hanging around on the tree, occasionally swishing its tail around excitedly like cats do.

But THEN it climbed up on the house and got right in the window and I got some great pictures.





I can't get over the giant feet; they're like big mittens, so oversized compared to the rest of it!









It zipped around on the deck a lot but moved way too fast for me to get any pictures of it (I'd usually have the camera pointed at where it was half a second ago) except when it got interested in the second level of the deck, probably because of squirrels, and stood up on its back legs. Orion calls this picture "nanobear."



It zipped up the ladder at supersonic speed and I lost sight of it.



I heard some rustling up there for a while afterwards, but never was quite sure where it went after that, or when it left.

I wish it good hunting.

I noticed the moon shining through the branches of a tree in the backyard at about midnight-thirty. This is a fairly accurate rendition of how bright our nights are now.

I drove to North Pole today, a sentence which I am reliably informed sounds completely off the wall to anyone who's not from around here.

I was out there to take pictures for my Julie Ecker newsletter (the town in the next book is kind of loosely based on it) but I figured I'd also share a few here because North Pole is ... definitely a place. It's kind of industrial, adjacent to a military base, well known as the local primo source for artisanally handcrafted meth, and located in a swamp, but they have a Theme and they are committed.



This sign is located on a roundabout that I had to cross on foot in 3F weather to take a picture, which is a GREAT place for a sign that people are probably going to want to take pictures of, but it's very North Pole to put it there. To give them full credit, in spite of our recent snowfall they had very well-cleared sidewalks.

North Pole also features red and white striped light poles that look like candy canes.



In fact, if there is anything in town that can be red and white striped, it probably is.



But of course I was really there to take pictures of ...



... giant Santa.

( More under the cut )

We are having an unusually gorgeous winter. Normally, our snowfalls are light, dry, and infrequent, interspersed with wind. It's much too cold for the snow to melt, so it piles up on the ground all winter, but the trees quickly lose their snow coating and turn into bare sticks. Winter in Fairbanks is white, but it is not a picture-postcard experience, usually - I mean, there are appealing aspects about it (the subtle pastel colors are nice, and during long cold snaps the trees get coated with hoarfrost, which is neat). Generally, though, winter is kind of bland, visually speaking.

But not this winter! We got a rare sticky snow early in the year, which seemed to turn the trees into snow magnets that even the lightest snow sticks to. Most of the winter has been that gorgeous lacy snow-covered look that you get right after a snowfall. We lost a bunch of it in a windstorm recently, but a couple of days ago, our forecast 2-3 inches ended up being 9 (as measured on the hood of the car), so everything has been freshly snow-sheathed.

I did some shoveling yesterday for the first time since surgery (9 1/2 weeks ago). I was very cautious, stopping frequently and trying not to twist from the waist, but it doesn't seem to have even made me sore. I wasn't actually shoveling the driveway (it's about half a mile from the house to the highway, that would be impossible), but rather, cleaning up berms and loose snow from Orion's quick-and-dirty plowing before he went to work.


Snow-bent trees along the driveway.


The tree-framed driveway leading out to the gravel pit.


Dramatic winter skies and snowy trees along the side of the gravel pit.

Then I looked over and saw a moose, framed between some of the trees. My phone camera's zoom is absolutely terrible, but I did my best to get a shot of it.



Honestly, it wasn't very close and it didn't seem aggressive, but being home alone and out by myself, I wasn't about to take a chance. Moose says shovel work is over for the day!

We had planned an anniversary picnic, but not being sure if we'd get rained out by the periodic and unpredictable cloudbursts (with beautiful sun in between) we instead explored old mining roads.



This one, as you can see, leads to a mining clam.

(rachelmanija, please appreciate the gratuitous antler on this sign.)

We did not bother the clams. At any point when we got the feeling we were heading onto private property, we turned around.

And sometimes we had to turn around for other reasons.

There's an actively growing 500-acre wildfire about ten miles north of us right now. I'm not particularly concerned; there are crews on it, it's on the other side of a river and it's also north of the municipal firebreak (a stripe of cleared land that surrounds the town as a fire control measure). However, it's producing a vaguely thunderhead-looking plume of smoke over the top of the hill to the north, which right now - this is at about 11:30 p.m. - is also coinciding with a spectacular sundog surrounding the sun, which is below the horizon but (in the way of the Arctic in mid-June) not very far below and not for very long.





The color correction on my phone camera makes it look darker out there than it really is. It's actually broad daylight, and the sundog stands out a bit more on the camera than it does in real life. Still a really cool effect, though.

Posted some snow pictures on Tumblr (also on Facebook). We have absolutely ridiculous amounts of snow right now. We got about a foot and a half in the last two days, on top of all the snow we already had.

Preview:

There's a pretty big wildfire north of town right now. It's not dangerous to us, and not likely to be - it's about 20 miles away and would have to go through a whole lot of subdivisions and the Trans-Alaska pipeline to get to us. However, the air quality is absolutely horrendous (I wore one of Orion's air-filter shop masks while I was doing garden work just now, because breathing hurts and makes your mouth taste like smoke), and it was raining ash and burnt spruce needles last night, although that seems to have mostly stopped for now.

I took a couple of pictures of the ashfall on the car last night around 11 p.m. or so.

Northern/eastern sky from the upstairs window at 1 a.m.

Pink-edged clouds in the sky to the north at midnight-thirty.

We had a really gorgeous 360-degree sunset tonight - it's a thing that can happen in the summer, when the sun sets in the north but due to its low angle, you get pink light on the clouds all the way around the sky. (Well, okay, not so much to the south, but all around the rest of the sky.) Here was the view to the east, not a place you normally expect to see a sunset:



The sun will rise again in about 3.5 hours.