The University of Alaska Fairbanks will celebrate a new interpretive trail July 11 at the 2021 Yankovich Road Fire site, where 3.5 acres burned within 100 yards of a neighborhood. The Wildfire Walk educates visitors about the fire site through nine interpretive signs describing the relationship between wildfire and the boreal forest, fire science and climate change, […]
It is a pleasant day for a walk in middle Alaska, with blue sky overhead, sandhill cranes croaking above the University of Alaska Fairbanks farm, and the sharp scent of sliced blades of grass, mowed for perhaps the last time in 2019. I am hiking the length of a new planet-walk display with Peter Delamere. […]
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 […]
PORT VALDEZ(May 4th)–We have launched on the pipeline hike version 2.0, 20 years after the first time. I’m now sitting on the muscled root of a Sitka spruce by the pleasant rush of a creek. A bald eagle shrieks from the top of a tree nearby while a diesel ship engine thrums from the Valdez […]