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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February 20th, 2008, brought a lunar eclipse. It was high in the sky for most of the lower 48, but here in Fairbanks the eclipse was already in full swing before the moon peeked over the eastern horizon. I drove over to campus and shot these pictures.

The main part of campus:

The Museum of the North:

This is one of many ice sculptures greeting visitors to UAF during the winter. The temperature rises above freezing so rarely that this outdoor ice art is safe and very common:

I’ve seen the aurora borealis several times since moving to Fairbanks, but nothing like this.

I routinely check the UAF Aurora Forecast at night, and right around midnight as February 29th, 2008 rolled over into March, the forecast hit a level I haven’t seen it at before: HEAVY+. I looked out my one tiny north-facing window and saw this nice green arc across the sky, despite the glow of the city lights in Fairbanks.

As the display got more intense, I went out on my driveway to watch. In the past I had seen only sluggish aurora, pretty arcs slipping across the sky faster than clouds but slower than much of anything else. I thought the rapidly shifting northern lights on TV was produced with time-lapse photography, and the real thing must be less impressive. I was wrong.

This night the lights were all across the sky, not just in the north, and were most vivid right overhead. They shifted in waves more like rippling water than sluggish clouds. They moved so fast, in fact, that my long exposures blurred out much of the detail. Next time I’ve got some new things to try with the camera.

Since that night I’ve been checking the aurora forecast a little bit obsessively.