Our Labor Day canoe trip went a day long, and almost a boat short. With our daughter traveling with teammates for a high-school cross-country meet, my wife Kristen and I had a long weekend together. We chose to paddle our canoe down the Wild and Scenic River portion of the Delta River, which neither of […]
Last week, I wrote about some of the breaks the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks has enjoyed during its 75-year existence. Another key for this place where a few dozen researchers study things “from the center of the Earth to the center of the sun” is that its directors have followed the advice of […]
We just had a party up here, to celebrate the Geophysical Institute’s 75th year of existence. Seventy-five years also happens to be the average life expectancy for a human these days. A workplace for volcanologists, glaciologists, seismologists, aurora-ologists and other types of scientists, the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks has endured since […]
Years ago, I worked for a hunting guide on a river in the middle of Alaska. One of my duties was to drive a motorized canoe full of moose meat upstream to a gravel bar where he could fly it out. When I returned home from that trip, something funny happened: the noises from my […]
YAKUTAT — “There they are,” Ben Gaglioti said, after a short hike off a gravel road leading away from this small fishing town. Gaglioti walked in rubber boots on a green, squishy carpet of muskeg — a wild garden of water-loving plants growing on acidic soil that has for centuries prevented the encroachment of giant […]
What if the country’s largest earthquake in the last half century happened as you were getting ready for bed in the only cabin on a tiny island in the North Pacific? What if the epicenter was just 50 miles away? A magnitude 8.2 earthquake happened at 10:15 p.m. Alaska time on July 28, 2021. The people […]
Neal Brown has died. The former leader of Poker Flat Research Range and the smiling, suspender-wearing man remembered by many Alaska kids was 82 years old. Born in Idaho, Brown grew up on a farm in Pullman, Washington. He made his way to Alaska in 1963. Here, in 1971, he became the first director of […]
A HILLSIDE ABOVE LA PEROUSE GLACIER — Ben Gaglioti slices a foot-long blade through the trunk of a tree that died long before he was born. As he cuts the solid wood, yellow chips fly. A clean, familiar scent wafts through the air. I think of a cedar drawer in my boyhood home where my […]
LA PEROUSE GLACIER — During our first lunch at a blue-gravel campsite near this Alaska glacier named after a French explorer, scientist Ben Gaglioti and I had a visitor. As we sat on bleached slabs of wood, I held in my left hand a rectangular cracker with peanut butter smeared on top. We heard a […]