Winter Scenes

One of the greatest pleasures of the Alaska winter is skiing. I go out nearly every day. The weather has been clear, which means cold. Day breaks at -20C, but by noon it is above freezing, so out I go then. The snow has been beautiful. Long glides! Love it. I have beaten out a loop in the woods. Note the conspicous absence of straight lines. There are no straight lines in the woods. Too many things in the way. Deadfalls. Brush, early in the winter. You detour. The trail gets beaten out early in winter, after that I just follow it. So the loop never takes the same course each year. Also I have a tendency to turn left too much! Must have something with being left-handed. Furthermore there are no "landmarks" in the woods. When the sun is out you have a built-in compass, but sometimes the sun is shy. I could of course carry a compass with me; in fact my watch has one built-in. But then I'd have to take off my glove. A pain. So my trails will break a snake's back. There are no snakes in Alaska; we do have bears to make up for it.

It takes me about 45 minutes to complete the loop. First I warm up on my backyard oval. Then I do the loop. Takes about an hour. Great exercise. If my hands do not freeze. But a dear friend gave me some marvellous gloves, made in Norway by Swix, sold by L.L. Bean, a byword in Alaska. My hands have never been so warm. Thank you, Kathy.

After we have done the loop, the house is in sight and the track is clear. Oh happiness! We have worked out, we will soon be inside, and will get back to clockmaking. I bet you were glad to get a respite from clockmaking, too.

And now for a coda. Composed by Alaska Weather Enterprises. Performed by the Alaska Weather Machine. Yesterday was as clear as the photos above. This morning when I got up it was snowing. My official snowpole says +10 cm. as of 1400 local time. Of course, what the snowpole says bears no relation to what it may be elsewhere; John says there was all of 30 cm (a foot) of snow in the driveway;  He plowed the thing.  Now I realize that by some standards this ain't much. Thing about the Alaska snow is that it stays put, and this distinguishes it from, say, Syracuse NY where it can put down a meter in 24 hours. But it does not last. Ours does. All winter, in fact. Hmm. Today is the equinox, isn't it? Start of spring. Couldn't prove it by me. But if you don't like snow, you should not live in Alaska!  If you do, cross-country skiing is your friend.

There is a place called Cordova, AK. Gets four or more meters a year, and it never goes away. They have real problems. I consider my problems minor compared to theirs.

Silly Partridge, er, Spruce Grouse!

When you're out skiing, you always hope for some wildlife. Fortunately, the bears, which you do not want to encounter under any circumstances, are sound asleep up in the mountains somewhere. Do bears dream? Science is mute on the subject. Moose, of course. Foxes sometimes. When all else fails, there is often the silly partridge.
In reality, this is no partridge. It is an Alaska Spruce Grouse. But I call them Silly Partridges, because their preservationist instinct is well below the norm. Dumb, in fact. This is why in fall, when they are fair game, they wind up in many a village pot. I play a game with these silly birds. How close can I get? The art is to move very, very slowly. And space the intervals. Apparently the silly things have no size sensor, they don't notice I am getting closer... and closer.

So far my record is about one meter. I think I could get even closer. It is all patience, you see. Of course the Russian village uses a .22 or maybe a .410 shotgun. If times get really bad maybe I could hunt them, but I kind of like the dumb clucks.

The one in the picture would fly away for maybe 3 meters. I, of course, advanced the same amount. We played this game for a while, until M. or Mme. Silly P. flew up into a spruce tree. I still could have reached it with a ski pole! One wonders if Darwin got it all. If the Beagle had visited Alaska, maybe he'd change his mind.

A ski through the woods

A couple of days ago, I went out for my morning ski. It is wonderful excercise and gets you out in the open; an essential ingredient in fighting off "cabin fever," or the malaise caused by staying indoors. This time I took my camera with me. So we're off. Our objective is to extend the Westbound trail through the woods west of the house. First, however, we warm up.
This is my warmup piste, or track. It goes around my "backyard." Temperature is about -15C. There are 40-something cm of snow on the ground, under the usual for this time of year. The snow is nice at -15C, we get a good glide. I think -10 is ideal, but you takes what you gets. Four laps, and all gear secure, my boots are not coming unlaced, don't need the hand-warmer today. OK, onwards.

A short bit through the woods next to my driveway and we are at the Power Line Right-of-way, or PLRW for short. I spent most of my life in the computer business; acronyms are a way of life. We are facing north at this point, we will go right up the PLRW. I have beaten out a track there. Swish, swish and...
...we are at the northern end of the PLRW, facing west, about 150 meters from the last photo. Off to our left, the Reutov II house, beyond it, the Polushkin house. That's where we're headed, Still power line, but badly hacked by the hateful snow machines, or Satan Sleds as I call them. However, their unskiable tracks were dusted over by our last snowfall. So we head toward maison Polushkin.
About 40 meters behind Polushkin, we arrive at the West Expressway junction. The West Expressway is a semi-cleared track through the woods, going north-south, wide enough for a small car, a snow machine, or me. You can see my snowshoe tracks, going west like Horace Greeley. We will be back here, but for now we turn right, going N to pick up a trail I am hacking through the west woods. This is all track I have broken before, so it is quite fast.
We turn on to my Westbound trail, and as you can see, we are really in the deep dark Boreal woods. Deadfall all over the place. My track is zigzag to say the least; you can't go 20 meters without zigging (or zagging, as the case may be). There is usually a tree, a deadfall or brush in your way.

Eventually we reach the end of the broken trail, and it is time to break some more. I try for a few hundred meters a day. It is a big effort to break trail through snow. Your skis go down deep:
I have a pair of skis that were designed for Telemarking. I love them, not because I Telemark well (no hills for kilometers around!), but because they will float you in deep snow like this. They are really wide. Not bad for a $10 yard sale buy. Those narrow things they sell you as "cross-country skis" at high prices are good only on prepared tracks. Here at Chalupy, the only tracks available are those I make myself.

Eventually I run out of steam. Time to return. It is much easier going back because you are following broken trail. Eventually we arrive back at the Expressway Junction:
We are now facing due south. In the middle of the picture there is a small bright dot. That's the sunlight on the meadows at the end of the Expressway. We are going there, and we have about a Kilometer to go. It is easy skiing; we have a track and the snow machines have left it alone. This luck cannot last, but we enjoy it while we can.This is Moose Meadows, as I call it, at the end of the Expressway. There are often moose there, hence the name but today (because I have the camera) there is nary a moose. My tracks can be seen off to the left. Moose Meadows is a rough ski unless there is a meter or so of snow to fill in the bumps. In summer, it is a swamp.

So off we go to the left (previous photo faces south) and go some 400 meters, and we arrive at the desolate Ghost House:
The former owners of this place were killed in an automobile accident. There are a few vehicles, like the trailer at left, junked around the place; a hole in the ground. And no doubt ghosts. We ski on by. We come to the Ghost House driveway:
This leads right to my own driveway, maybe 400 meters, we're almost done. I like the Ghost house driveay, it's fast unless the moose have torn holes in my tracks.
And we're home. We have been out an hour and a half, but some of that was spent taking pictures. Taking a picture at -15C is not at simple as it sounds. If you let the camera hang around your neck, the batteries give up in the cold. So you have to stuff the camera down your warm clothes, So before you take a picture you unzip any number of zippers (and you have great big mitts and ski poles to deal with, too) and pull the camera out and check the mode and take the picture, and then reverse the process to put the camera away.

Alaska is wonderful. The dreaded winter is not so dread, if only you get out in it for a bit.