25 below zero

it's tuesday morning around 720am. justine gave me a ride to the auto shop this morning, and then off to school. so here i am, rather sleepy, sitting and listening to NPR and thinking about starting to do some work (goal today = get *something* done. anything, really, would be good). hoping hoping hoping that the car doesn't have something terrible wrong with it! and thinking about updating this here blog-thing more often. this is sparked mostly from reading Tash's blog (see links!) and Nola's blog on myspace. so good to read words from these wonderful wonderful women.

so indeed it is around -25F out today. something about the pollution in the air (gotta love fairbanks, but lordy the air quality is bad in the winter) made the light from the street lamps shoot straight up in these light spikes. sunrise at 940 am. sunset, probably around 430...alright. gonna put out some pictures from our trip to kanuti in october!


i'm unable to find MSPaint on my computer. hm. So i can't highlight on this wee map where we were. but i can describe. Fairbanks, here, is right above the 'K' in ALASKA. We drove ~170 miles up the Haul Rd. (Dalton "highway"), to appx. 30 miles south of Coldfoot, AK and about 10 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Then it was a ~9mile hike almost due west from the road to the hotsprings, following south of the Kanuti River.


Ken and Freya along the Haul Rd, gearing up to go
Ken and Laura, up on the ridge. Lordy it was windy. Yet another buffeting in life.

Drinking one of the PBRs that Danny threw in his backpack on the way out. Mmmm...essentially water


Chrissy, Jon and Freya working their way up the hill. Fraya enjoyed herself, trying to catch ptarmigan the whole way along the ridge

socked in on the backside of caribou mtn, wicked happy to have a compass in my pocket! also glad that i took a bearing on the way out near the car. it hadn't fully occured to me that when you are so close to the pole the magnetic pull is crazy. my bearing was probably 30 degrees off! so to get back to the car, which was nearly due east, i would have needed to work back nearly due NE

me, walking through the tussocks, after the clouds lifted

ken and laura, at the final push down to the hotsprings. the kanuti river is in the top right, and you can somewhat see a small meadow just to the left of the river. that's where we were headed..getting through that burned slope just below these guys in the picture, and then through the veritable swamp at the bottom, was a pain.in.the.ass.!! but so very well worth it.

freya sleeping in front of the hotsprings pool...