Light, Camera, Action!

 The Aurora Borealis, or more commonly called the Northern Lights, are an awesome phenomenon seen as you get closer to the north and south poles.

Captain Obvious will tell you that you have to be lucky to see the Northern Lights, as well as having a dark, cloudless sky. Until the end of July, the nights never really got dark while I was in McCarthy. May, June and July, you could sit outside on the picnic table at 3 AM and still read a book without any extra light source. Once August hit, it started getting darker.  And by the end of August, you actually needed a flashlight to walk around after 9 PM.  That’s when the magic started.

While in McCarthy, I think I saw the Northern Lights three or four times, and on my journey home, I saw them three different mornings. Due to the light spectrum and our eyes, you really can’t see the northern lights at this latitude without a filter of some sort, like your camera. That’s when you’re able to see the intensity of the different colors associated with the Northern Lights.  Green is the most common color you see with the northern lights.  Other colors include red and blue. If you’re lucky, you get the purple, yellows, and pink.

Here are some random pictures of the Northern Lights that I saw while in Alaska and Canada. 

Be Prepared!

 That’s right, you knew that there would have to be a Boy Scout reference someplace in all of these blogs.  But it’s so appropriate when you’re in the back country.  

Martha, Annie, and Cal learn this lesson while hiking around McCarthy.  I had warned them never go on a hike without your bear spray and/or a bear bell. Martha was a little slow agreeing to do this at first, but after several full-time residents of McCarthy discussed it with her, she got the picture. Then separately, Martha, as well as Annie and Cal, saw first-hand the reality. No, they didn’t encounter a bear, but more than once while hiking on the trails, they saw fresh bear poop.  That’s good enough for anybody to know that the bears are right there with you.  Better safe than sorry.

Being prepared was also important for me on my travels home.  My first evening stop on my journey south was at Destruction Bay?  Destruction Bay was even smaller than McCarthy. They had one filling station, one restaurant, and about six buildings.  But what they did have was an awesome campground, just outside the city limits, right next to Lake Kluane.  There were roughly 40 RV and tent camping spots spread out in this campground, with plenty of outhouses, and even a playground.

Martha and Libby, as well as Annie and Cal, were all able to camp while on their trips in and around Alaska. They had great weather, and Martha brought all the right equipment.  That meant that I had the same equipment as I drove home, too. But unfortunately, at this point in time, the weather has turned cold. Temperatures at night are dropping down into the 30s and sometimes below freezing.  I didn’t quite have all of the right gear to handle the cold weather.  But I was still prepared for camping.

Yep, that’s right. You see that Therm-a-rest air mattress on the left-hand side of the car. Well, you’ve heard of Glamping, this isn’t it. While carrying home lots of gear, I found a way to whittle a little space in order for me to sleep inside the car. I’m gonna call this, Cramping.  I found just enough space for my head to touch the back of the driver seat, and my toes the closed hatchback door.

It actually was pretty cozy. I cracked one of the windows at night to allow fresh air to circulate. This was important to reduce the condensation buildup from freezing on the inside of the windows. Yes, it dropped down cold enough to freeze water, but I was pretty toasty inside the car.  

However, I found that Cramping has one built-in flaw. You think getting out of a tent at night can be difficult when unzipping the tent flaps.  Try getting out of a back door of a car, laying on you back, when three-fourths of your body is horizontally passed the door.  And as anybody who has gone on a cold night campout, once you are in your sleeping bag, you’ll use every Jedi mind trick you have not to leave your sleeping bag to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Lucky for me, that didn’t hit until my normal 5am wake up.  Unfortunately for those who camped around my car, we found out about flaw number two of Cramping.  Byron forgot that when you lock the car doors and then try to exit the door without mechanically unlocking it, it sets the car alarm off. So as I was trying to leave the car at 5am, the car alarm goes off.  Be prepared!  Luckily, I had put the car fob by the door, so I quickly found the key fob to turn off the alarm.  Problem solved.  Slightly embarrassed, I climbed out of the car and waited for someone to come running to see what was wrong with me.  Luckily, I didn’t hear anybody else rustling around yelling or screaming at me.  But what I did find was this,

I can rationalize that my car alarm really wasn’t about me forgetting to mechanically unlock the door as it was to announce, “hey everybody, get up and look at the Northern Lights.”  I’m not sure if anybody else actually did get up, but if they didn’t, they missed a pretty good show.

Bingo!

 Bingo!   (And some of you probably didn’t even realize we were playing animal bingo.)

That’s right, I finally got the elusive Crossing Caribou .

And those Stampeding Sheep, actually turned out to be Sleeping Sheep (or Glaring Goats).  I’m not sure if the picture does it justice, but that white dot up in the rocks, in the picture below, is a sheep.

I also saw Musing Mule Deer along the road. But by this time, I was tired of taking pictures of the animals, but trust me, they were there.   The beauty of the streams and lakes that I was driving next to was overwhelming.

Scenes like these went on for miles, and again, words don’t describe the actual beauty of it.  

Let’s go!

 North to Alaska, the rush is on …. No, wrong song again.

Home, home on the range , …. That’s more like it.

Driving has never been a problem for me. I actually find it very relaxing. In college, it was one of the best way for me to construct a paper or think through a problem.  I would get into my car and drive from Lawrence to Baldwin down Highway 59.  Mowing a pasture, or yard, is also a great way to think through issues. So just imagine how many books and novels could be written in my brain while driving home to Kansas from Alaska.  Lucky you, you get blog posts.

Being an early morning riser, I’m able to get out and get started down the road before most traffic and construction. You also get to see the city in a completely different light. Starting in Anchorage and heading south, let’s go.

This country and state of Alaska is really beautiful. It’s also enormous with tons of space. I’ve always been partial to the Rocky Mountains and cold weather, as most of you know.  This takes it to a whole new level. And so. You get pictures of mountains and scenery more than anything else in this blog.

I also didn’t expect for the radio or cell phone connectivity to be non-existent while traveling on the highways. But that happens a lot, especially when you’re in valleys and driving in the middle of nowhere, literally. However, the silence is actually kind of nice. Even when I may have connectivity, I find myself driving in the silence, and enjoying it.  The drive actually reminds me of driving to Western Kansas, except for the mountains, the endless number of Aspen and pine trees, and the streams and lakes next to the highway. OK, maybe I closed my eyes for a second.

One thing that I really appreciate is the DMZ area next to the highways. 

No, don’t look at the mountains in this picture, look at the side of the highway.  Alaska and Canada have done a good job by freshly mowing down the brush and trees for about 100 feet on each side of the highway. This makes for a good fire break, if there’s a forest fire, to prevent the fires from jumping across the road.  It also gives the drivers on the highway, the ability to see wildlife coming out of the trees and crossing the road.

This is really important when you have browsing buffalo (anybody need a ride),

Crossing Caribou (I haven’t seen any of those yet), meandering mama moose and babies (the mama moose was faster than me getting my camera),

Stampeding sheep (it was 6 AM and too dark to get a picture), and pesky porcupines, who think they want their half of the road out of the middle.

I also get a kick out of driving by places and see how appropriately they’ve been named,  like Tok (pronounced with a long “O”), the highest, I mean the northern most city surrounding the Wrangell - St. Elias National Park.  I also liked following:  La Prairie, a sign across the driveway, similar to our Bonita Prairie, but their pasture was filled with Aspen and pine trees, and Stoney Creek.  Yep, no water just a lot of rocks.  How about Destruction Bay, the city where I stopped after driving day one. It was all in one piece, so I’m not sure what actually got destroyed. But that’s a whole other story.