FIREWEED ROCK GLACIER — “I’ve been thinking of this stuff for the last 20 years,” says Adam Bucki. My friend, soon to be 50, was in his 20s the last time he stood on this massive pile of pointy rocks that oozes slowly downhill. Adam has returned to Alaska from his home in suburban Texas […]
The grizzly hadn’t seen my dog or me, so I yelled and waved my arms. The bear stood, looked in our direction for three unforgettable seconds, then trotted up the valley. Late for a meeting with scientists, I kept hiking in the direction of the bear. A few minutes later, as I clung to a […]
A few days ago, Mat Wooller had news about a woolly mammoth my friend LJ and I “adopted” last October. “You’ve got one of the youngest ones,” said Wooller, an ecologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and inventor of the Adopt-A-Mammoth program. Wooller’s goal is to carbon-date the 1,500 mammoth fossils that rest in drawers […]
While driving Alaska’s graveled highways, people sometimes wonder how an unpaved road can turn into a bed of corduroy. Keith Mather had the same question about roads in his home country of Australia and then later in his adopted home of Alaska. He wrote a paper about washboard roads in 1963, the same year he […]