Thanksgiving Holiday: Completed

'This pie ain't big enough for the both of us.'

The Fox Spring

I, like many interior residents, do not have running water at my cabin. That means every drop of water I use, I have to go get somewhere and carry it back to my place in a big jug. There are several places to get water, but my favorite is the Fox spring. Located in the town of Fox (pop. 350), there are some pipes bringing water from a natural spring to an accessible spot. I think it tastes better than the water you get in Fairbanks, and it's free, and it's so much more fun to go to Fox.

There is a three-sided hut built around the pipe outlet, with a light. Over the course of a winter, a lot of ice builds up from steaming and breathing and sloshing. The build up is in the form of fragile crystals on the ceiling and thick layers on the floor.

There are two pipe outlets, and once your jug is in place, you press and hold the button until it's full.

This is the button you push to make the water come out. Don't try it without gloves. I once lost a quarter-sized chunk of leather off a mitten when I tried to let go.

Incidentally, I lost the feeling in several of my fingers while taking the pictures for this post.

Ain't Alaska neat!

Cold, Dark

WTF, right? They're called light pillars, because they look like pillars made of light, which is exactly what they are. The cause is flat crystals of ice floating in the air. If the air is still enough, the crystals float with their flat sides down, and a bunch of them together is effectively a big mirror. So light shining upwards gets reflected back down to your eyeball, and you see light that appears to come from up in the air.

So basically, any light source which leaks a significant amount of light up into the sky can develop a rod of light above it, which is the same color as the light on the ground. What I find interesting is the different color rods seem to happen at different heights - I don't know if that's a coincidence or not.

Usually this happens when it gets really cold and the air is full of 'diamond dust' ice. So yeah, it's cold out there! Winter happened. The days are getting short (today's sunset was at 3:30 in the afternoon) and word of mouth is that it reached -60ºF at Chena Hot Springs last night. Evidence of the cold is even making its way inside my little cabin:

That's the frost accumulation at the corner of my window (inside!). It's also creeping in along the edges of the door, particularly on the metal latch and hinges:

Must be all cold and lifeless outside, right? Not so! The redpolls started showing up at my feeder about a week ago, and now rival the chickadees in numbers:

Despite being barely 5 inches long and weighing less than half an ounce, the hardy little guys don't fly south for the winter, preferring to stick it out right here.

The male Hairy Woodpecker is still around too! At the northern edge of their range, some of them fly south for winter. I haven't seen this guy for at least a month and assumed he'd done so, but he showed up the other day. No word on whether the female and youngster are still here:

The Gray Jays rummage around and occasionally pull surprising things out of the snow, like tater tots:

If they can deal with it, what's your excuse?

Birds: Sharp-shinned Hawk

Sharp-shinned Hawk, a small woodland hawk and a skillful flyer, weaving through thick forests to snatch smaller birds right off their perches.

Alaska bird checklist: 34/489