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Our long awaited winter has finally arrived with a vengeance. Last week solid ice on the road caused a school bus to overturn, put a semi in the ditch and closed down highways and byways. It brought a lovely quiet to our busy street.
http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/20131113/bears-still-roaming-anchorage-neighborhoods-midway-through-november
On TV, scenes of villagers on the coast watching high water eat away at their shores which lay unprotected by the ice that normally keeps erosion at bay.
Dan was fielding phone calls from nervous fruit tree growers watching the buds swell on their confused trees foreshadowing a less than fruitful spring to come.
In spite of the balmy weather it was time to ready the cabin for winter, get the snowmachines running, get the skis and snowshoes out, put up the bird feeders. Its November. We’re already more than a month late.
In pleasant, late summer-like weather we walk to the cabin on a bed of golden yellow birch leaves the air filled with the bouquet of highbush cranberries everything speaking of Indian Summer. With no need for winter gear we leave our boots and down at the trail head.
At the cabin we tune into Science Friday and listen to two climate scientists, one from Princeton, one from UC Davis, in ever so civil a manner, debate the fine points of the cause of Typhoon Haiyan. Yes they agree, the ocean that spawned this typhoon is warmer than it has ever been, the warm water goes deeper than it ever has, the sea level is higher than it has ever been and the air above it carries more water than it ever has all factors that feed typhoons and hurricanes. But no, although disagreeing in degree, they can’t quite say that climate warming fed this particular typhoon. The show host, sounding somewhat perplexed, wonders how many big storms it will take to come to that conclusion. Princeton thinks probably by the end of the century, convenient for him since by then he will be long gone.
Their hedging brings to mind the environmental scientists in “The Firecracker Boys” who lost their jobs and had careers ruined because UAF was in danger of losing federal funding unless UAF researchers to confirmed that there would be insignificant impact to the natives of Point Hope Alaska if engineers used an atomic bomb to blow up their harbor to create a deep sea port. An atomic bomb. It never happened but only because Point Hope Natives were able to stop it. What hasn't stopped is corporate America using their money to for fake science.
Late on the third day of our stay the slightest hint of a flake or two began to appear out the cabin window. By evening it was building fast on the trees, the roof, the deck. We had that childlike delight we get every year at first snow especially when it comes in the woods. We thought if it snowed all night we could have a good base of 4 or 5 inches. In the morning it was still coming down 5 inches well passed. By midday I made my way to the bridge with a shovel determined this season to keep the bridge from breaking under a heavy snow load like it did last winter. I found myself wading through soft downey powder up to my knees and still building. More than we wanted since in two hours we needed to head down the trail for the train home, the trail now buried beneath a foot of snow.
We went back and forth on the options - snow machine, ski, snowshoe, walk. Dan ran the machine around the cabin and decided the snow was just right for packing, perfect for compressing under the weight. A few more inches or a bit different in the density the machine would tend to surf, rocking from side to side, sometimes to far to one side or the other dumping the driver who then flounders around in the snow trying to get upright in order to wrestle the machine back to ridable position where just a few more yards down the trail he could do it all over again.
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I opted to walk. The trail would be too marginal for the snowmachine to take the added weight of a rider on the back. I let myself think I could just amble down the trail packed ahead of me by the snowmachine with something nagging the back of my brain about why that might not work. I forgot it takes a good day for the packed snow to set up. Ten minutes of walking on a base the consistency of soft sand made me wish I had opted for skis. The feet tend to break the surface just enough and then slide just enough that if not for my walking sticks I’d be falling all the way to the tracks. Ten more minutes of it and I switched to walking in the deep snow. Though it was up to my knees it was the softest of powder and would billow in front like loosened down. It seemed easy because it beat walking on the trail but it was deceiving. I wasn’t expecting to get so wiped out. Two hours later later I caught up with Dan at the trail head and the other denizens of cabin dwelling who joined us this weekend all of whom seemed as wiped out and snowy as I. We bundled up in down to wait for the train in an early twilight caused by gently falling snow. It seemed to take forever to arrive, creeping slowly around the bend its big headlamp aglow lighting up the sky.
Mother Nature finally got off the fence.