More than 100 volcanoes pimple the adolescent skin of Alaska, spreading from ear to ear. Some are loud, flamboyant and obnoxious. Others are sneaky and quiet, escaping notice until a pilot sees a gray plume that wasn’t there yesterday. Because people live on the slopes of these volcanoes and thousands more fly through their blast […]
The mushers were gone, and so were the 640 dogs that pulled them out of town. A few days earlier, the volunteers who gave life to Iditarod had climbed into their single-engine planes and lifted off the ice, carrying their noise along with them. Iditarod City was now quiet, except for the whoosh of […]
Floating down the Fortymile River, we heard the roar of a rapid just ahead. At the same time, we noticed the caribou, about 50 of them, clustered on a cliffside near the water. It was too late to pull over. I aimed the canoe for the bumps of frothing brown water. As we plunged in, […]
All of a sudden, we are again the land of no night. Summer happens every year, but it is always a surprise. Maybe because winter is the normal state of middle Alaska, with a white ground surface possible from late September until late April. Over the years, I have marked this frenetic, green time by […]
In his job as a university machinist, Dale Pomraning has built and fixed earthquake detectors and aurora rockets. But recently he worked on his first object that was once part of a living creature. He and others sliced a six-foot, 100-pound wooly mammoth tusk lengthwise, sort of like a salmon filet. Seven people spent six […]
An ancient jawbone has led scientists to believe that polar bears survived a period thousands of years ago that was warmer than today. Sandra Talbot of the USGS Alaska Science Center in Anchorage was one of 14 scientists who teamed to write a paper based on a polar bear jawbone found amid rocks on a […]
A few days ago, Cora the dog and I walked across a footbridge spanning a natural moat flowing through northern tundra plants. There, we reached mile 0 of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and the finish of a south-to-north walk across Alaska, most of it on the service road that parallels the pipeline. Though the orange-and-black mile […]
FRANKLIN BLUFFS — I said goodbye to my final hiking partner outside a van on the side of a gravel highway. For the remaining 40 miles in my summer hike along the path of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, it will be just Cora and me. When I walked away from Eric Troyer and the muddy Northern […]
SAGANAVIRKTOK RIVER — August, here so soon. And we just passed Trans-Alaska Pipeline mile 100, which means that distance remains on our summer hike from Valdez to Prudhoe Bay. My dog Cora and I started walking on April 30, which means we’re in our fifth month of sleeping outside. For this week, I’m hiking with […]