To the North Pole and Back

High today: 28

Low today: -5

I flew to the north pole today.
The north pole you say??? Yes! In fact, over it, and around the world in less than a minute!
Got some last minute news on Wed. evening of going on the DC-8 with the ARCTAS program.

We flew over the frozen Yukon River...
Over the beautiful Brooks Range...
Over Prudhoe Bay...
Did a spiral OVER Prudhoe Bay and got within 250 feet of the ground...
Flew over thousands of miles of sea ice...
Got to hang out in the cockpit for awhile...
Watched the weather conditions and chemical traces changed as we descended and ascended through plumes.

Check out the video of the sea ice.. nothing exciting but it gives you a better idea than snapshots do.

I wonder how long this ice has been here.. a world of white and blue.
It was a long flight - about 10 hours long. Some people had to take a snoozer.
Jing took me down in the pit to see the PSU ATHOS laser.

"Hey do you guys see that dark line off to the right? I think it's the north pole.. it must have fallen over" - crew memberAustin giving a thumbs up for crossing the north pole. The GPSs on the plane went totally out of wack when we did this!
I went and sat up in the cockpit when we did a missed approach at Barrow. Henry gave me some pointers on getting some neat pictures.Barrow looks much nicer in the winter than the summer..
Sun sets around 9:30pm nowadays.
Another day well spent. I'll have a map of our route one I get the GPS coords. uploaded and made...

We Are.. Penn State!

Finally got together with the Penn Staters tonight for dinner. From left to right you have me, Dave (my old classmate), Hans (my old cloud physics prof. and neighbor), Jing (just met him), and Dr. Brune (head of the PSU meteo department). Chad is the only one missing - he had to head back to PA a bit sooner. It was great seeing them and a really good refresher for me.

Snowy morning in Fairbanks

We got about 6 inches of WET heavy snow overnight.. you know, east coast style.It was beautiful on the side roads..

but nasty on the main roads.
Despite the weather we got to see some airplanes today. These are the research aircraft here for the big project.
This P3 is one of the hurricane hunters! Sadly I could remember tracking every single one of the hurricanes.. since.. uhh.. 1996? They have stickers on the P3 showing which storms this plane flew into.
We got firsthand tours of the research aircraft.
And look who was on board! It's Dave and Jing, laser beam extraordinares!The snow flew away and the skies cleared up to a nice breezy day...

Skiing in the White Mountains

High today: 36
Low today: 5

A place exists only 35 miles north of Fairbanks that I didn't know about. Well, I knew about it but didn't know that it was so close! To make up for our busted Denali Hwy trip, the group of us up for it went up to the White Mountains to go skiing.

I actually brought my bike just in case I had to bag the skis. It was my first ski trip and first time not on groomed/track-laid trails, but wanted to see if I could do it. It was 7 miles to Lee's cabin which is where the girls and I stopped to turn back around. The guys were skate-skiing so they went off ahead of us. It was a ton of fun skiing.. I think I could really get into it.. I just love my bike too much to commit to something else. :-)
Kris, Valerie and Kristin before we started out... followed by Steffen and Trevor.
Woohoo we made it!! By mile 10 on the way back I was starting to hit a wall physically. The trip was great though.. can't wait to do it again next year! Glad I got to get out here before the snow is gone.. the original owner of my skis suggested getting up to Lee's cabin so here you go!

Denali Hwy Bust

About 200 miles south of Fairbanks there is a highway between the Richardson and Parks Hwys that is closed to vehicles, but is snowmachined and skied all winter. It has spectacular views of the Denali range. A nice, big open world of white!

Friday night we drove down to Delta and stayed at a cabin owned by a friend of Julie.
It was a super cute little place but had a tiny woodstove so Debbie was nice enough to put some more wood in it when it dipped to near 30 degrees in the cabin around 3am. I was so warm in my sleeping bag it didn't bother me. :-)
Next morning we got up early to drive down to Paxson. The "highway" was in interesting shape, as they always seem to be up here. This was my first time driving down this way.
The views were spectacular once we got into the mountains. It was a beautiful morning but the wind was howling pretty good through some parts.
Got down to Paxson and met up with the others who stayed outdoors for the night. I am glad we had four walls around us even though I heard the auroras were amazing that night. It was about 10 degrees when we started the trip.

Check out Kris' sled.. that thing was massive and heavy as all get out.. I was tempted to jump in it and have him pull me around. It was long enough that I could have laid completely down in it. Ted only could ski a little bit because one of his dogs was sick and he had to get her to the vet.
Here are the biker chicks getting ready to go. Conditions were awesome for the first few miles.. it was cleared off and not a whole lot of drifted snow at first.
I enjoyed riding on the snow more than the pavement. I kind of get bored on pavement I guess.. with snow it's a constant thinking activity trying to pick the best path on the road, avoiding ice, keeping your wheels straight and not sliding and skidding around. My favorite is when there's a slight fluffy layer on top. Here is John skiing with his dog pulling his sled.. another good reason to have a dog!
We got into some pretty good headwinds throughout the ride. Parts of the road were unridable and we had to hike a bike.
The views were spectacular, the road conditions were in fairly good shape, but the wind was howling in spots. We got notice by some snowmachiners that there were 40-50mph headwinds ahead. We weren't sure if they were over-exaggerating or what so we continued to move forward. Two of the skiers got to the area first and turned back around. When we met up with them we decided it would be smart to turn back. We only got 10 miles in. :(
But but but.. it looks so nice and peaceful! I will say though, I don't think us bikers would have made it the entire way. One of the girls was having some major mechanical problems with her gears which I'm pretty sure was just very dirty cables.. but it was enough to reallly slow us down. I couldn't keep my feet warm but thanks to Trevor I got the feeling back in them for the ride back.

On the way back, I decided to try my new, bendable, small tripod called the Gorillapod. But, I tried to run back to my bike and get on within 10 seconds and I didn't quite make it.. haha! I thought I would post the pic anyway because it's funny.
Bummer with the trip.. oh well, still learned quite a bit about long winter riding...

The Latest

Well this weekend I plan on doing an 84-ish mile bike trip (42 in one day, 42 out the next). This should be interesting as I haven't been riding as much as the summers and road will be all snow. I wonder how long it takes one to bike that long on snow? Every time I've ridden in the snow, I've gaged my rides by hours rather than miles, since it is much much slower on snow. 3 or 4 hours? Sure, no problem. I bet though that this will be more on the rate of 8 or 9 hours depending how fast the other bikers are and on the grade of the road. I really don't know what to expect though.. maybe I am over-guesstimating.. and if we get the snow the forecast is calling for, we might not be able to do it at all. I hope we can though.. I hear the views are amazing!! This will be a good experience to figure out if I want to get more into the endurance riding/racing too. Give me that mountain air!!
If we go and make it the whole way, this will be my greatest mileage in 48 hours. ;) Stay posted..

I Have a Home!!!

High today so far: 31
Low today: 9

After several weeks of cabin shopping, I finally found something that didn't make me question one thing or another. The distance is perfect - 2 miles from the edge of UAF campus, accessible by bike and possibly by ski with a little bit of road hopping.


It's not the most flattering place.. it's not fancy log cabin or anything, but I think it's exactly what we need and the price is very right. The people who just moved out left a bunch of crap around the place and inside.. but once it's all cleaned up and Carrie and I put some rugs down and some pictures on the wall and some rustic decorations up I think it will be perfect. It is a 20' by 40' cabin, as compared to the other one that I almost signed off on that was only 19' by 21'. It has one big room that we'll use as a living room/kitchen, then two separate small bedrooms with lots of storage space. I love the big front porch (can we say BARBECUE?!!?) and the fact that we can easily put three cars in without blocking one or the other. We could probably fit 6 or 7 cars in the driveway by blocking people in. The outhouse isn't too far away from the front door so when its 40 below it will be a run in - run out event. There are motion detector lights too which is nice to know if there are any lingering moose around. We can't see our neighbors from the cabin, which is also super nice. A few of the other cabins I looked at, you were looking into your neighbors' window.

The place is mine April 15th.. so let the fun begin!

Crazy Friends

Ed and Brian did the Wilderness Classic race last week which is the only unsupported wilderness race in Alaska. Check out the article on their adventure in the Newsminer from Thursday. They had a slideshow of pictures and stories yesterday at Ed's house which was sweet and awe-inspiring. I'm still amazed by the beautiful places that you can reach in this state if you really want to! The pictures in the article aren't a quarter of what they encountered!

Ice Climbing at Dragonfly Creek

High today: 33
Low today: 23

A year or two ago I was in Pittsburgh playing Cranium Conga when I got a card that said "write down something you would like to try someday" (or a sport, or skill, or something..) and well, I put "ice climbing" down. No one playing the game guessed my answer when I told them the first letter of what I wrote down. I very clearly remember my sister telling me, "you want to go ice climbing?! You're crazy.. you're going to die before you're 30!" Well guess what I did today!!! Heck yessssssssss! I've been excited for this trip since.. uhhh, November!

The conditions down the Parks were by all means of the word, crap. (that one's for you Jim)

We got to our destination down near Denali around 10am welcomed by breezy conditions that were colder than expected. By the time we walked down the gully a bit, the wind was gone and it snowed on us the whole time. Here I was very worried that winter was over already!! I was very happy to see the flakes in the air again.

Adam takes a first glance at what we're climbing on.

This was a pretty sweet trip because it was a beginner's trip but most everyone was well prepared and did fairly well. The ice was in great shape too. (I imagined it to be much worse)

The creek we were on flowed down to the Nenana River. It is still weird to me that in a month and a half this will be floatable... there are some signs of breakup though..

Ted is climbing on the left in the picture below. I was happy to see a familiar face on this trip. He did an awesome job, too. He even went all the way up one-axed!

Below is Randi, who I just met today and is awesome. She's from Illinois and is spending a semester up here. She has another year left after this but wants to move back to AK already. It was really weird meeting her because she not only looks like another Randi I know from State College, but she also sounded like a good friend of mine from school when she talked.


Below Malin is trying her hands at repelling on the rocks. I decided to stay to the ice because I figure we have all summer to repel off of rocks.. the ice will not be here forever!

Do you like my orange hat? I know it compliments the green sooo well :-P

Thanks to Ted for taking a few pics of me climbing. This was my last ascent up and the hardest. The one side of the ice was more difficult than the other.
We were out there for about 6 hours, but it seemed like it may have been 2 or 3. This kind of made me sad when they said we had to head back to Fairbanks. I was ready to camp out and just stay there for the rest of the weekend!! Definitely an awesome trip though and something I want to do again.