One Man's Alaska

I just worked through my travel plans for next week, and it looks like the drive from Palmer, Alaska to Denver, Colorado will take about ten days. I could probably do it a day or two faster, but I'd like to visit Haines, Alaska, because I've never been there, and I also like Stewart, British Columbia.

Here are my approximate travel plans, by day:

Yesterday afternoon I wasn't feeling well, and laid down for a short nap. When I woke up, I made a cup of coffee, then tried to turn on my six-month old MacBook Air, only to find it was dead. Technically I got the spinning beachball of death, and then found it was completely dead when I tried to reboot it. In short, the computer no longer thinks it has a hard drive (or in this case, a solid state disk drive).

We're going through another one of those stretches here in Palmer, Alaska where I haven't seen the sun since, well, I don't know when. I remember thinking I should have gone to the State Fair last Monday or Tuesday, so the sun may have been out then, or at least it was less cloudy.

But today it's both clouds and low-hanging fog, and if I'm not mistaken, some of those clouds are leaving another sprinkle of "termination dust" on the mountain tops.

Now that I've told everyone in Alaska that needed to know the news, I can announce here that I'll be moving back to the Lower-48 in September, Colorado, specifically.

Today is a departure from my normal writing, and just a collection of random thoughts:

While I was on the phone with some relatives yesterday, I pulled over to the side of the road as I entered Hatcher Pass, because I didn't want the cell phone reception to get any worse. I pulled over to the left side of the road, and after the phone call ended, I made this short video of the river where I parked:

Dateline Downtown, Alaska, August 5, 2011: Wow, I know it's been cold, wet, and windy here lately, but today some friends on Twitter report the first sighting of "termination dust" on the mountains in Anchorage(!).

If you haven't heard of it before, termination dust is the first snowfall of the year, indicating the pending termination of the summer season. All I have to say is that August 5th sure seems early to me.

Not much to say today, but here's a short video clip from yesterday's "Friday Fling" here in Palmer, Alaska:

As I continue to think about moving back to the Lower-48 at the end of this summer, I was just reminded that if I do drive back, I'll be able to stop in Stewart, British Columbia, and its neighbor town of Hyder, Alaska. Hyder is the very small town of about eighty people where I drove up into the mountains in 2007, and followed a family of black bears, as shown in these two videos.

I took this video when I first stumbled onto the black bear family eating, er, something:

Somehow I managed to forget about the "snow in June" here in Alaska. This "summer snow" is from the cottonwood trees.

When I lived in the cabin in Talkeetna in 2007, right around June 20, 2007 it started "snowing" like crazy, with white stuff floating in the air like a gentle snow storm. After talking to some people in downtown Talkeetna, I learned that this cotton-like substance was from the cottonwood trees.