Floating down the Fortymile River, we saw a cut in the green hills that hinted of a creek. My canoeing partner and neighbor, Ian Carlson, 13, wanted to see a ghost town. The map told us one should be dead ahead. There, up a path of floury soil, was Franklin, Alaska. Like many Alaska ghost […]
Thanks to her six-year-old grandson, Janet Klein of Homer recently hosted a few interesting house guests. Five experts on ancient creatures slept in Klein’s Homer house last month as they searched local cliffs for another chunk of a mammal that lived in Alaska millions of years ago. Her guests were Patrick Druckenmiller of the UA […]
The evidence is in: Snowshoe hares near Wiseman eat lots of dirt. “I have thousands and thousands of photos of hares eating soil in this one little spot,” said Donna DiFolco, a biologist and cartographer with the National Park Service. DiFolco has studied hares in the eastern portion of Gates of the Arctic National Park […]
YUKON RIVER — “She’s starting to wail,” Chris Florian says, referring to the worrisome shriek of a peregrine falcon across the river. Florian, her biologist husband Skip Ambrose and I are sitting on warm gravel a few steps from the river on a sunny summer evening. We just ate dinner, and Ambrose is repeating an […]