Castner Glacier Cave

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Sunday I visited a place I've been meaning to visit since Decemberish - Castner Glacier Cave, about 40 miles south of Delta Junction on the Richardson Highway. Join me!

The parking spot is just a wide dirt shoulder on the side of the highway. I left the car there, strapped on the snowshoes, and headed up what was ostensibly a creek bed, though all I could see was deep snow.

After a while I saw, via some cracks in the snow, that the creek was about 3 feet below me, and still flowing. I was walking on it! The trail ahead got steep, signaling the face of the glacier (hidden under the snow), and this thing was at the bottom of the hill:

Castner Glacier Cave! Let's take a peek inside:

Shall we continue? Let's:

One last look at the outside, before we go deeper:

As I was looking for a good way to frame the entrance, I noticed that when the sun was blocked but the adjacent clouds were visible, you could see some luminescence in the clouds. Neat!

A little deeper into the cave:

The left hand side of the cave (looking outward) has lots of dirt and rock under a few inches of clear, glassy ice:

While the right hand side is black ice with milky streaks in it:

And looking back, the icy ceiling dips lower until you have to stoop, then crouch, then I-don't-know-what because I didn't go that far.

But that ice on the ceiling rewards closer inspection, as it's composed of these fantastically fragile little geometric shapes. These photos were taken at about 0.5x magnification - for a sense of scale, the 'cup' at the tip in this first picture is about half an inch across:

The cave was basically a photographers candyland. Between the panoramas of the entrance and the macros of the ice crystals, I shot an entire 4Gb memory card - more than 300 photos - without leaving a 30 foot radius.

But it was time to leave, so I walked back to the car and headed towards home. On the flats just south of Delta Junction there were small herds of caribou standing in the road, so I slipped the Prius into silent-but-deadly mode and crept up. I think they were licking the road. If I had to guess, they were treating the road as a mineral lick. I don't think they salt the roads in the winter anywhere around here, but I guess there's enough residual minerals to be worth licking. Besides, what else are you gonna lick? Everything else is under snow.

The light was good, so I got a few pictures:

Then, another great Alaskan sunset:

And that's the day. The end.

Spring is here.

(All photos clickable)

Well, it's coming, anyway. Right now, it's 33ºF outside the cabin. That's above freezing! As far as I know, it has only reached above freezing twice since October-ish.

Today is the spring equinox, marking what is typically recognized as the first day of spring. Which is kind of a silly concept, since winter -> spring isn't something that happens on a single day, but if you have to pick a day for it, the equinox is a good choice. What's really happening today is the Earth has reached a point in its orbit around the Sun where the day is the same length as the night. Which is not really true due to atmospheric effects. But close enough. The rotational axis of the Earth is now parallel to a plane through the Sun with its normal in the Earth direction. If you want to say the equinox is the day when day and night are equal, I won't argue with you. I say that all the time. Now you see why it makes sense to call this day the 'first day of spring'. Before today, night was longer than day. Very winterlike, don't you think? After today, day will be longer than night, and getting longer every day. Which is a spring state of affairs, don't you agree? It's all about how much sunlight we're getting.

By the way, Arkansas, starting today, Fairbanks' days will be longer than yours, culminating in the summer solstice midnight sun.

So anyway, it's a beautiful, warm, sunny 33ºF day in Fairbanks. Yes, warm. What feels 'cold' or 'warm' really is a relative thing. A couple of years ago I camped at the Great Sand Dunes in Colorado, and the overnight low was 0ºF. I was like 'Wow, it's really cold.' A year ago Christmas break I experienced 12ºF below zero, not far from the same place. That was the coldest I'd ever been, and I was like 'OMGWTFBBQ!!!11' I spent this winter in Fairbanks, where it got down to 45ºF below a few times, and 20ºF below is generally considered the cutoff for it to be 'cold'. Yesterday morning I hopped in the car on a 15ºF below morning, about the same temperature as that which freaked me out a year ago, and said 'Woo, it's kind of chilly this morning.

Several small songbirds are fluttering around outside my big picture window, checking the bird feeders (which are empty). They take a mouthful of snow before they move under the trees to forage. That's how they drink when all the water is frozen up. I think I'll buy them some birdseed.

Best of 2010

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So everybody's doing these 'best photos I took this year' posts, I might as well do one too. Here are what I think are the best photos I took in each month of 2010.

January - saw a bit of snow cover on Mt Magazine for a week or so. Walking down the trails on the west end, I popped out of the fog at a viewpoint to see that the top of the mountain was above cloud level, and the river valley was replaced by a sea of white puffiness.

February - I got a narrowband filter for minimizing light pollution and played with a little astrophotography. This shot of the Orion, Horsehead, and Flame nebulae was the result of an hour of taking 3 minute exposures from the abandoned charcoal plant west of Paris. If you get creeped out by hanging around by yourself in dark, empty places, astrophotography is not the hobby for you.

March - field trip to the Houston NASA center, and the hotel we stayed in was right down the beach from the Kemah Boardwalk, a little amusement-park spot out on a pier. This HDR shot was taken from a dock about half a mile away as some late afternoon clouds passed over.

April - another HDR shot, I saw this band of cloud over Short Mountain, with the Sun's backlight making the edges glow. 'Don't shoot into the Sun' is one of those 'rules' of photography that I usually have good results when I break it.

May - I went waterfall crazy. Lots of tramping around in the woods on rocks and soggy ground, lots of good waterfall shoots to choose from. I like this low angle of Eden Falls, near Ponca, better than the more typical, obvious shot.

June - dawn at Fort Smith National Historic Park with a nice white canvas wagon to reflect the soft light. The cannons were nice in the light too, save the bird crap.

July - I got some great macro shots of dragonflies in a swampy area, but this takes the cake for sheer technical difficulty. Specialized equipment (camera attachment to telescope and solar filter) and precise planning (the event was only visible from a small stretch of highway near New Blaine, and was over in less than 1/4 second) combined to get this shot of the International Space Station transiting the Sun.

August - moving to Alaska! The entire drive up was pretty incredible, as was as a late-month trip up the Steese Highway through the White Mountains north of Fairbanks (see top of this post). But this visit to turquoise-colored Bow Lake (on the Icefields Parkway in Canada), with the falls in the back fed by Bow Glacier, and the crescent Moon hanging above, stands out as one of the more spectacular moments of the year.

September - saw my first aurora. This was taken over a wash of the Chena River, where I could get a mirror reflection from the water. A satellite flare just happened to pass through the field, leaving the streak in the middle.

October - a late night trek up Murphy Dome with some friends yielded a few minutes of clear skies and aurora shining through the full moonlight. These arcs of aurora seem to be rising from this tree like a ghostly fire, with the Big Dipper shining through from behind.

November - a drive south on the Richardson Highway through the Alaska Range to the small town of Paxson. The setting sun (in early afternoon!) put a subtle glow on the top of this mountain, highlighted by the fact that the rest of the scene is mostly colorless. This is the best thing about shooting in snow, the soft colors that get drowned out other times of the year.

December - standing in the treeline on the edge of the frozen Salcha River, at 20ºF below zero, watching a Timber Wolf feed on a carcass buried in the snow. Everything is so quiet and still in winter that it could hear my camera shutter click each time I took a shot, and looked over in my direction.

Now let's see what 2011 turns up.

Murphy Dome

(Clickable)

Last weekend Lee, Alex and I went up to Murphy Dome, which we've been told is a great place to watch aurora, because a geomagnetic storm was predicted. We got there a bit after sunset, which meant it was still quite bright to the west, and Denali was visible on the horizon:

It was a full moon, so the moon rose right around sunset, into a layer of clouds which made a very well defined 22º halo. There is a military radar site on top of Murphy Dome, and I framed the radar site inside the moon halo:

That was, incidentally, the first real picture I've taken with the wide angle lens.

Turns out the aurora didn't put on much of a show that night. The magnetic storm prediction was off. It did show up for about 15 minutes, and must have been pretty bright to still be visible through the clouds and moonlight. I was shooting a dim green aurora stream going into the moon halo when I happened to catch a purple meteor fireball as well. 3 phenomena in one picture!

I shot a few of the aurora and the Big Dipper using a small tree as a foreground object, one of which I really liked (see above). We wandered around in the snow for a while, which was already a foot deep in places up there. The full moon reflects off the snow well enough that you can see clearly as if it were daytime. Fairbanks could be seen in the distance:

And that's pretty much that.