Skiing across the raw, open landscape of the Seward Peninsula a few weeks ago, my friends and I dreamed of getting out of a big wind and into the tub at Serpentine Hot Springs. Though none of us had been there, we all recognized the Serpentine valley by black tors guarding the surrounding hillsides. With […]
It has been a long winter. Like many Alaskans, I have a love/hate relationship with this oversized peninsula, especially as the months of dark and cold pile up like woodstove ash. When the sun returns, I feel a need to recharge my affection. One way to do this is to visit new parts of this […]
Under its own power, an earthworm gains about 30 feet of new territory each year. But that does not help explain how worms got to Alaska. “It’s almost geologically slow,” Matt Bowser, said of the earthworm’s locomotion. Bowser, Alaska’s closest thing to an expert on earthworms, is an entomologist with the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. […]
A scientist named Victor Hessler once made an aurora detector by driving two metal rods in the ground a few hundred feet apart and stringing a wire between them. When voltage changed along the wire, a bell rang. Hessler then pulled on his boots and went outside to take black-and-white aurora photos. During the recent […]