Mary Shield's Cabin, Part II

Two weekends ago I found myself skiing out to Mary Shields’ cabin with Martin and Dana and their 2 year old daughter Sonja, and Keith (another glaciology professor). This was the second time that I’ve made the trip (see February 2006). It was a lot of fun and mostly uneventful, except for one near disaster… On the way into the cabin on Saturday we encountered a long stretch of overflow that had not yet frozen. (Overflow occurs when a creek freezes to the bed, but there is still water being fed into the creek. The water pressure gets too high, and it squirts to the surface through cracks in the ice, the result being that there is water everywhere.) We managed to get through the overflow with little difficulty – just wet feet, but that wasn’t a major problem because it was quite warm.

We met Mary at her cabin that afternoon; she had spent Friday night there and was just about to head back to Fairbanks. She was surprised to learn that there was so much overflow since she hadn’t seen any the previous day. It turns out the by the time she got to the section of overflow (with her dog team) the water level had risen to above her knees. Her only choice was to take her team through the overflow, which took her two hours and she must have become nearly hypothermic in the process. She was naturally quite concerned about our ability to get past the overflow on Sunday, so she came out to the trail to meet us. By the time we got there the overflow had already frozen, so we didn’t have any problems. She claimed that crossing through that overflow was probably the second most dangerous thing she’s ever done with a dog team, which is a lot coming from her: she’s mushed thousands of kilometers throughout Alaska. She wouldn’t tell me what was the most dangerous thing that she’d ever done.

Yukon Quest

This year's winner of the Yukon Quest dog sled race crossed the finish line in Fairbanks yesterday afternoon. At noon I heard that the lead team (Lance Mackey's team) was expected to be in town shortly, so I drove into town to watch the finish. It turned out that Mackey wouldn't arrive until 2:00 pm, so that gave me a lot of time to stand around in the cold and ask myself "Why am I here?". I was there to people watch, I guess, and to check out the latest Fairbanks fashion.

Mackey eventually arrived and we were all happy that we could go back to our cars to warm up. The dogs looked happy and eager to continue on, even though they had just run 1000 miles in 10 days, and in doing so broke the old course record by over 12 hours. Mackey is also planning to run in the Iditarod, another 1000 mile long race; it starts in two weeks

Rainbow Peak

I’ve been quite bad updating the blog lately but I have a pretty good excuse: I’ve been too busy having fun. We’ve had exceptional weather over the past month and there has been no shortage of opportunities to enjoy it. The past weekend was quite cold, so I finally had the chance to cross off some things from my to-do list.

Two weeks ago Inari and I and a few friends headed down to the mountains to climb Rainbow Peak, one of the easiest and most accessible climbs in interior Alaska, making it an ideal day trip. To take full advantage of the little sunshine that there is in January, we awoke at 4:30 am (!), left Fairbanks at 5:30 am, and started climbing at 9:00 am, just as the sun was rising. The snow at the bottom of the mountain was so sugary that we had to literally crawl on our hands and knees for the first 20 minutes. We encountered solid snowpack (actually very crusty snow) once we got past the vegetation that separates the mountain from the road, so we strapped on our crampons and headed up. We reached the peak at 1:30 pm and were treated to spectacular views. From there we could see Denali three hundred kilometers to the west as well as Mt. Wrangell (a massive volcano), Mt. Drum, and Mt. Sanford (a 5,000 m peak), all approximately 150-200 km to the south. We were back down to the car at 4:30, just as the sun was beginning to set. I found myself in bed at 10:00 pm and didn’t find myself getting out of bed until noon the next day.