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.

Last full day of my fall road trip, which is good because I'm starting to receive plaintive "when are you coming hooooome" emails from the Beloved Spouse.

My previous places were pretty swank, but this cabin is appealingly rustic. Well, mostly appealing - it does have running water and the info on the place says that the water is "potable," by which you might guess "won't kill you but tastes terrible" and you would be correct. It was so bad that I went out at 8pm last night hoping to find a place that was open (which I did, a little convenience store at a campground up the road) and bought a few bottles of extremely overpriced bottled water for drinking and tea. I think it's all right for cooking and brushing teeth with.

The propane stove is so old that it doesn't have an igniter or a pilot light - there's a long-handled barbecue lighter to ignite the burners. I think it's distinctly possible that we had this exact stove when I was a little kid in the '70s. It looks just like it. (And I can't get over how much smaller it is than a modern stove, it's like half the size of ours at home. You can see the scale of the stove by the size of the teakettle, which is not huge, it's just a normal-sized teakettle.)



All of that aside, the place where I'm staying is behind an airstrip used by a flightseeing service (not too busy, I see a few planes a day) and the view from the kitchen table looks like this:



That's the view out the window, not paintings!

It was cold and rainy today, so I stayed in most of the day, worked on my Closer exchange assignment and did some business stuff related to my book launch on Tuesday. But later in the afternoon I decided to go for a scenic drive out to the Savage River hiking trail (as far as you can drive in a private vehicle on the Denali park road; the drive goes from the park entrance, which is a bit north of here, to Mile 14) and I had no regrets because it was STUNNING, peak colors and sweeping red and gold vistas. It was "I can't believe this is a real place and not a fantasy world" levels of gorgeous.







This sign implies adventures ahead.



After that I was going to be EXTREMELY salty if I saw no moose at all - but I did! It was a cow and a calf, their presence advertised by a large cluster of RVs and tour buses on the side of the road.



One more scenic visa:



And tomorrow I drive home.

My current location:



It's a riverside cabin on the Resurrection River near Seward. This river flows out of the Exit Glacier, and if you drive up the road a few miles, you will in fact see the glacier!



I was getting a bit jaded about glaciers by this point because I had just driven through a mountain pass with lots of them, but they were all far away and high up, so by this point I was thinking "meh, another glacier" and then I came around a corner and there was that view and I guess you don't get jaded about glaciers after all.

( More pictures and the rest of the day under the cut )

Yesterday afternoon, I was sitting in the tinyhouse-like structure next to the creek that we call the Nest with my laptop for writing, when I started noticing an odd, repetitive grunting noise, about 5-7 notes in a repeating pattern sort of like "oog, oog, oog" that would stop and start. I wondered if it might be a bird, but I had never heard anything like it before. When I started noticing rustling and snapping sounds in the woods, I went out on the front deck of the Nest to see if I could see what was making it. It didn't sound like any bird I'd ever heard, and with bears and wolverines around here, I'd like to know what I'm dealing with.

After a little while, hearing it repeating now and then, and ongoing ominous rustling, I saw a porcupine waddle out of the brush along the opposite bank of the creek. I scampered off to tell Orion, and when I came back, I realized there were two of them - one would make the grunt, grunt, grunt, and then the other, which I soon saw coming along the bank from the other direction, would reply with a higher-pitched "eek, eek, eek."

I thought they were a courting pair, but I looked it up online and porcupines do not mate in the spring, they mate in the fall. Babies are born in the spring and unlike most rodents, they are active and mobile almost immediately. Otherwise porcupines are completely solitary. So even though it looked big enough to be an adult, that squeakier one must have been a baby and the other one was Mom asking "Where did you go?" <3

(The only other time I've seen a pair of porcupines together was also about this time of year, along the side of the road, and I now realize that must have been a mom and a baby, too.)

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 was looking for an old photo of something else entirely, but came across this photo I took in 2004 of a perfectly normal parking lot containing perfectly normal parked commuter vehicles outside the general store in the town where my brother was living at the time (Point MacKenzie, Alaska).

THEY RETURN. I heard the owls hooting outside tonight, slipped quietly onto the back porch but it was really too cold to stand outside and listen. (April. WHY.) So I went back in for a while, but they were definitely still hooting out there, louder than ever, so I put on a coat and went out the front door, and -

.... One of them was in the top of the tree right off the back porch! If I'd done what I've been doing to listen to them (slipped quietly out onto the back deck in sock feet) it would've been not 20 feet away from me. As it was, I watched it for a minute or two from quite a bit further away, at the front of the house (I mean, to the extent that I could see it, mostly a silhouette against the still somewhat light sky) and then tried to sneak back in to go out the back door, but my feet immediately crunched on the snow and the owl flew off for the trees on top of the hill.

The fact that they're clearly hanging out around here makes me hope they'll nest nearby. That would be really neat.

In other news, I discovered by total accident today that a new Vlad Taltos book is out - Lyorn! It came out TODAY! I had no idea! - so I guess I know what I'll be doing for the next couple of days. Actually, a brief comment about that - so a lot of the Vlad books are written in the style of different genres other than their main fantasy genre (one's a war movie, possibly more than one are heists or gangster films, one's a trip to the underworld and also a buddy road trip, etc) and when I found out what this one was, on the basis of reading the first chapter, I CACKLED. ( Basically that's the only spoiler )

It was -30F according to the outside weather station and -35F on the official (airport) weather when I got up this morning (-35/-37C respectively). It's been so pleasant to be warmer this past week, about 15F/-9C and lightly snowing, which I realize isn't warm by most people's standards but I just find that weather so refreshing and pleasant. It's just so much easier. You don't have to plan everything in advance, you can just get in the car and go places, you don't have to worry about tucking in your groceries so lettuce doesn't freeze on the trip to the car, you don't even have to zip up your coat or cover your ears just for walking from a car to a building. Then it gets cold like this again and everything is couched around with careful planning, no unnecessary travel, having to plug in the car's block heater for hours ahead of time before it'll start ...

But there's also something fascinating and neat to me about the physical changes in the world when it's this cold. Everything sounds different, because the air is so much denser; sounds are sharper, and carry farther, so car noises from a mile away sound like they're right in the yard. (If you think about it, -35F is almost 70 degrees colder than freezing, and 100+ degrees colder than room temperature.)

This is the kind of cold in which boiling water, thrown in the air, turns instantly to a cloud of frozen mist. I filmed this for Youtube a number of years ago; the "pop!" is the water converting to steam, and the video also captures the odd squeaky-crunchy sound of walking around outside when the snow is this cold. (See also the cutting room floor outtake version in which the handle came off the mug.) I demonstrated this phenomenon once many years ago for a coworker who was new to Alaska, and it made an incredibly satisfying, tremendously loud CRACK! that startled me so much - it's not usually that loud - that I thought at first the cup I was using to throw the water had exploded.

Cars have block and battery heaters, operated by a little plug dangling from under the hood. (When I first moved to Fairbanks in the 90s, I used to wonder what the plugs were for, until my first winter ...) Down to about 0 to -10F is about how cold it can be, usually, before the battery will cease to crank without an hour or two of plugging in first, which really makes you think twice about unnecessary trips. Back when I was working an office job, in the really serious cold, -50 and colder, we would go out on our lunch break and start our cars for a while on our lunch break even though they were plugged in, just to make sure they would start at quitting time after 8+ hours of not being driven.

As much as I know that the Arctic warming has all kinds of negative knock-on effects, it's hard to truly muster up a lot of mourning for the weeks-long -50 cold spells we used to have in December and January. Like, okay, yes, local ecosystem, FINE, I do get it. The severe cold is a barrier to many species moving north, like spruce bark beetles and ticks and snakes and other things I'm glad not to have here.

But it's just so incredibly hard to live through. Everything starts to break at -50. Fan belts snap like twigs. Tires freeze flat and go CLUNKCLUNKCLUNK until they warm up enough to be round again. One winter back in the 90s I accidentally rolled my car into a wooden parking barricade during a cold snap and the plastic bumper - which, to be fair, had been through an earlier fender-bender already - fell apart like an eggshell. Propane liquifies below -40, so gas stoves don't work right. (Our propane tank is outside but insulated, so I've rarely had it do anything weirder than having the flame get kind of guttery and yellow; still, it's annoying not to be able to trust that the stove will turn on because Physics Says No.) Diesel engines stop working because diesel turns to sludge. And so forth. Severe cold is hard for humans to live in.

But it's not that cold for us right now, and not supposed to be. It might dip to -40 briefly in the next few days, but it'll warm up after that. And we're already past the darkest point of the winter, the sun will be shining on our house soon (currently blocked by a hill), and things will be getting warmer again.

"The Lady is dancing!" This is how local people on Facebook often refer to the aurora on an active aurora night. "The Lady Aurora is dancing - come outside!" I love that no matter how long anyone lives here, the aurora is something you simply never get used to. People on Facebook who have lived here for 40 years call to each other to come see it if they're awake. I don't know any other weather phenomenon quite like it.

Anyway, we are having an especially vivid aurora night ... or so I hear. The Kp index (measure of solar activity) is a stunning 7 - on a scale of 9; a typical active aurora night is around 3-5. It's not that bright here. But when I walked outside, and walked around the house and looked up and saw it, I found myself saying, "Oh hi! Oh there you are!" (It's farther south than it typically is - it generally manifests north of us, but on a very active night like tonight, it spreads farther from the pole and its epicenter is well to the south.)

What it *wasn't* doing was racing all over the sky. It was scattered light shafts, deep and tall, especially pretty when they're right over you, like arrows pointing up to the depths of space.

I took some not so impressive cell images.

( Under the cut )

It's tire changeover season (summer -> winter tires), and I was going to take the Subaru to my preferred tire place on Wednesday, but my body decided that getting up at 5:30 this morning after going to sleep around 1 was a GREAT idea (tonight is shaping up along similar lines, I would like to question autumn and all it stands for) so I went in at opening time because they do first come, first served, and usually it's not too long of a wait if you get there early. (The tire place is located in the middle of absolute nowhere in the industrial part of town, so there's really nowhere to walk to, unless window shopping for caterpillar tractors is your sort of thing.)

( Tire stuff )