Today I’m posting some pictures from my first trip up the Dalton Highway to see the North Slope of Alaska and fish for arctic grayling along the way.  This was at the beginning of September in 2007.  Most of the pictures are on Troutnut.com, but I had several that weren’t related to rivers or fishing, so I put some of them here.

Granite tor at Finger Mountain
This is a popular restroom stop and photo site in between the Yukon River and the Brooks Range.

View north from Finger Mountain

As far north as the red trees go
Beyond here, only the trees with yellow fall colors grew, and the remaining red was on the ground in the form of little shrubs.

Spruce grouse

Not your usual road signs

Mountain in the Brooks Range

The Dalton Highway, also known as the “haul road,” winds through some amazing mountains north of Coldfoot.

The Philip Smith Mountains
The mountains in the background are in ANWR (the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge).

A musk-ox standoff?
Nah, these two were just facing each other while chewing.

Sandhill cranes and the pipeline

The Arctic coastal plain
This is one of the prettiest flat-as-a-pancake places in the world.

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I’m testing out some new software for posting photos to the blog quickly and easily, and I found a good test subject.  As you can tell, I also got the software working.

Welcome to Alaska, 3:30am
This was the view from my apartment window at 3:30am the night after I flew into Alaska, my first experience with the midnight sun.

The same view from my window, later that day. It’s a typically gorgeous sky for Fairbanks in June. (I only lived there about a month.)

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On February 9th, I went downtown to see the start of the annual Yukon Quest dogsled race. It’s a trek through a thousand miles of wilderness in the dead of the Arctic winter, from Fairbanks, Alaska to Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory, Canada.

It was a very cold morning in downtown Fairbanks, in the -30s.

Still, a large crowd gathered to watch the race, which starts out below a bridge on the frozen Chena River.

Enter the mushers:

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Back in January, during one of this winter’s two biggest cold snaps, I drove around and took some pictures.

This polar bear ice sculpture is UAF’s greeter:

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On November 10, 2007, after two months of mostly focusing on classes, I was itching to get out and remind myself that I really am in Alaska.  Not to offend polynomial regression, but there’s a level of satisfaction that comes from standing knee-deep in light, fluffy mountain snow that I just wasn’t getting sitting in stats class staring out the window.  So I freed up a day to head out the Steese Highway about 90 miles and try my luck at ptarmigan hunting before winter grew too cold.  (It was a balmy -5°F on this date.)  I had no reason to believe the hunting would be particularly good in the Eagle Summit or Twelvemile Summit areas, but I like the scenery.

As evidence that classes fried my brain a bit, I present the wonderful pictures I took on the way out there:

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Weren’t those great?   Yes, I know you could judge them much better if you could see them.  Unfortunately, I took a couple dozen pictures before I realized there was no memory card in my camera.  So you’ll just have to take my word for it that the Steese is a pretty drive at that time of year.  Here’s where I ended up, near the put-in for the Birch Creek float trip:

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