As I stumble along this journey in life there is a persistent idea that won’t leave me alone. I want to share the adventure. Being in Alaska, I get to live other people’s vacations. Literally. Right now it’s only 2-3 hours of their vacation, but in winter I get to spend an entire week with small groups, ushering them from adventure to adventure.
The thing is, not everyone can go to Alaska. Whether due to work schedules, finances, or health concerns, many people will just watch the Alaskan adventure shows and dream. Some of those constraints can be worked around with some imagination. It really isn’t that expensive to buy a plane ticket to Fairbanks. Lodging is less expensive in the winter. But it is still intimidating if you have never done it. And some people, like my mom, are unlikely to ever be able to physically come explore here.
So what I want to do is to make short videos, maybe 5 to 10 minutes long, that give bite-sized pieces of my tours. I want to make them with my mom and people like her in mind. That way she can have many mini tours as if she was here. She can see the places I go, and hear what I share with my guests as if she was with me.
Now, video editing scares me, and I know the first several I do will probably not be so great. But there are classes for that, and doing always helps me to learn. I’m also intimidated by the idea of comments. You guys are awesome, but I have made the mistake of reading comments on YouTube. Yeah, I’m putting out all the reasons that this idea scares me. Oof. Those aren’t the things I need help with.
What I want to ask for help with is a name. I don’t think Caosville is the right name for a channel like this. Caosville is a place. Tours are more. My mom suggested Tiny Travels, but I don’t want people thinking tiny house. I’m open to suggestions. I don’t want to limit myself to Alaska, since there are other places to explore. For example, I learned a couple of years ago that working in Antarctica is a possibility. That would be amazing. I also want to visit other places in the US, maybe around the world.
So, any ideas? It doesn’t have to be immediate. Just let it simmer and throw out whatever comes to mind. I’ll ponder on your responses and see what I can make happen.
I’m sure everyone has their aurora stories from May 10th and 11th. Whether you saw it for yourself or not, there was a flood of photos online. People as far south as Florida saw the aurora due to a massive sunspot/coronal mass ejection/geomagnetic storm. Yes, I’m throwing word salad, but they are all correct and in the correct order, but I might not be able to properly explain it all even though that is part of my job.
Summer tours are all about wildlife and totem parks for me these days. In winter I facilitate people’s northern lights adventure. Whether I’m driving them to and from Borealis Basecamp or guiding a week-long, small group tour, seeing the aurora is always the goal. Let me share with you what I tell all of my guests about what they hope to see.
I always start the aurora speech by saying that you need three things to see the northern lights. First, you need a dark sky. That’s why there’s an aurora season up in Fairbanks from late August to early April. Nobody up there was able to see this last one because it wasn’t dark enough. Second, you need a clear sky. The aurora happens anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000 feet up, but the clouds are much closer to earth. Cloudy skies are like Mother Nature pulled the curtains closed on the show. Third, the sun has to be active enough to make the show happen in the first place. That’s what happened two weeks ago.
I can’t always trust my apps. It was, in fact, a completely clear sky. The Kp index shows the amount of energy hitting our upper atmosphere. It’s like when the weatherman tells you it’s raining, but doesn’t indicate what it’ll be like later. You need to look at other data for that.
If you want to see the northern lights you can look at aurora forecast apps or websites like spaceweatherlive.com Or you can type aurora forecast into your favorite search engine. UAF has a really good forecast page and hosts a skycam located north of Fairbanks that can allow you to watch the entire night sky from anywhere.
The sun is more than a bright, shiny thing in the sky. It has its own weather and a very tangled magnetic field. I barely understand what goes on to cause sunspots and coronal loops, but I do know that sometimes those loops will twist until they burst and fling plasma, or energized particles out into space, creating the solar wind. My favorite analogy is to compare the sun to a pan of tomato sauce simmering on the stove. If the heat is up, it will splatter in all directions, leaving a red ring on the stove top. If you leave something near the pan, it will get splattered with the sauce. This is what the sun does, only in all dimensions. If a “splatter” hits earth, we have an aurora event.
The charged particles on the solar wind could be damaging to us if they were to all hit earth, so it is good that we have our magnetic field to act as a shield. Most of the particles will be deflected and continue on through space. Some will follow the magnetic field lines down into our polar regions, forming an auroral ring. That is where they encounter the gas atoms and molecules in our atmosphere and interact to cause that glow.
In the upper atmosphere, charged particles will hit gas atoms, most often oxygen, and transfer energy to the gas atoms. This pushes the atoms to a higher energy level where they become unstable and want to shed the extra energy as soon as possible. They do this in the form of photons, also called light particles. If there are enough photons you will see the lights.
The aurora guides I work with tell me that the Kp index is not the best indicator for a later show, but it is easy to understand so I like to start there.
The Kp index goes from 0 to 9. 0 is exactly what it sounds like. Nothing is hitting our atmosphere and there will be no lights. 1 or 2 on the Kp index is very faint. It might look like a mist or fog, but glows green when you take a picture with your camera on night settings.
Aurora at 1 on the Kp index. It appeared as a mist to the naked eye.
A Kp of 3 to 4 is much more visible. In fact, this is usually a pretty good show. It typically shows up as a green ribbon across the sky, sometimes splitting into a curtain of light or spreading across the sky. With more energy, there can be more color. Different energy levels can cause photons of different wavelengths, making different colors. Most often, that appears as layers of magenta and white in a curtain of green.
Aurora at Kp 3.5 last February. The camera makes it brighter, but it was still quite visible to the naked eye.
At a Kp of 5, 6 or higher, the aurora will often dance. At 7 or 8 other colors are more likely to appear. With more energy hitting the atmosphere, charged particles can plunge deeper and nitrogen molecules can get in on the show. Where oxygen glows green, white, and magenta, nitrogen will glow red, blue, and deep purple. It makes for a very colorful show.
May 10th was a very bright, energetic aurora. It hit higher on the Kp index than anything we have seen in years, as shown in the screenshots at the beginning. Amazingly, the sky was clear and dark enough that I was able to get some beautiful photographs. I hope you enjoy them.
If you want a chance to see the aurora for yourself, come up to Fairbanks for a week in winter. Be prepared to miss out on sleep. Plan to check out some of the museums and spend time out in the snow. You might not want to live there, but I’m sure you will see why some of us don’t want to leave.
Life has been flowing on, and I have been living it. I took the winter of 2022/23 off of driving and instead I stayed on-site at Borealis Basecamp where I was RA for staff housing and helped get their on-site laundry running. That part was wild! The equipment arrived too big to fit in the room they planned to use, so the washer went there while the dryer was placed in the housekeeping room that was the equivalent of 2 blocks away. We would use sleds to haul wet linens uphill to the dryer. But it worked!
At the end of April 2023 I became roommates with my friend’s daughter. She wanted to get out on her own and her planned roommate bailed on her. It has worked out for both of us. Especially since I also decided to try to see more of Alaska and took a job down in Ketchikan. I drive 2.5 hour tours for cruise passengers to look for wildlife and see totem poles. Yes, I’m using present tense because I returned for this summer. I feel like I have found my niche.
Once upon a time I thought I was going to be a teacher. I have always loved learning things and sharing with others. But I realized that I don’t love bureaucracy. I don’t want to deal with the school system. Then I became a bus driver because it paid the bills.
Misty day at Herring Cove
Today I am a tour driver/guide. This is my second summer in Ketchikan, but it started with keeping my shuttle guests entertained on the 45 minute drive to Basecamp. I wanted to give them a sense of place and an idea of what to look for. Last winter I also worked for another company that does small group, week-long Northern Lights tours in the Fairbanks area. That solidified my sense that I’m in the right industry, and it has given me ideas.
This site as a blog has not worked the way I would like. Most of that is on me. I hate to promise anything in case I can’t make it happen, but I want to start sharing some of what I am learning in my adventures. I mostly have my mom in mind. She will probably never make it up here to visit me so I want to bring my adventures to her and people like her. I want to share the cool things that I learn and maybe encourage people to find a way to have their own adventures. That means I have to learn how to do things on my own website. I’m intimidated, but I’ve done hard things before. Let me stretch my knowledge and abilities and see what I can do.
I get all kinds of big ideas. I tell myself to keep up on this blog as a record of what I’m doing in my life, but then everything seems too mundane to write about or else I’m so deep in the middle of it that I forget. Or it could be I’m in places without internet to upload anything. So what I do upload is usually to Instagram because then my mom will see what I’m up to.
I started this post on July 13, a week and a half into an adventure driving bus for fire crews. Then I got stalled due to lack of internet and mental bandwidth. I know, not the best reasons, but life has a way of flowing on.
This post started life as a photo dump with planned captions. I will just add to it. Enjoy!
Late June there was a lot of smoke in the air, first from a wildfire down near Delta Junction (100 miles south of Fairbanks) then from fires much closer. The Minto Lakes fire got started northwest of Fairbanks and was working its way up along the Chatanika River. Transportation was needed to get fire crews out to where their work was. A friend of a friend knew a guy who needed drivers. He has a fleet of buses that he supplies to the Forestry department, but they can’t go out without drivers. I had the qualifications and the ability to say yes to the opportunity. The first crew assigned to me spent time on structure assessment, then one evening got the call to respond to a different fire. There were plenty of dry thunderstorms to spark off more spot fires. This one was not easily accessible, so once we arrived as close as the bus could get we had to wait for logistics to work out how to get them there. This photo was taken at 2am, when the crew finally bedded down to get some rest. The next morning a helicopter came to fly them to where they could work the fire. The thunderstorms didn’t stay completely dry. We had some good, thick, wet clouds come up. Later that day there was a big, heavy storm that blew over a few trees and soaked the crews. I missed it because I was on another adventure, delivering a second crew to the spot fire.The first crew I took got in by helicopter. The second crew were able to access the fire from the far side of the Fort Knox gold mine. We drove 10 miles through to get them to where they needed to be. That haul truck is so big that we drove in a single wheel track. What is a four lane road to normal traffic is a two lane road to them. It was a pretty cool experience. My accommodations weren’t fancy, but I was comfortable enough. In the morning I would fold up and stow my bedding and the crew could fill the cargo cage with their gear. I never had to worry about getting rained on.This was the main campfire at the drop point where I was stationed. Most crews had their own sites, but this one served the smaller groups like the dozer crews, medics, and single fire trucks. I love the way they set up this firepit. It made it easy for multiple people to cook their dinners at the same time, and there was almost always a pot of hot water available. Skip forward a month into August. Sunset rainbows are awesome. I wanted to make a joke about how there probably is gold at the end of this rainbow if you are willing to do the work, but then I realized that isn’t a joke. It is a simple truth. Back to the regular job… This is a taste of the good life. The last Saturday before we welcomed guests we had a staff only sunset cruise in the Haglund. We bumped our way up the fire break to the top of the ridge in this beast. There we had smores, beverages, and good conversations while the sky lit up. A wind storm made trail maintenance necessary. It was a great reason to go out and make sure that nothing would get in the way of guest adventures. Fortunately there was only one tree across the trail. I do love watching the sky up here. Sunsets are the best. This was just a couple of days ago. Staff did another after hours ride along the trails. Look at that fall color! Enjoy it while it lasts because the snow is only a few weeks away. Riding along the pipeline you don’t want to be overheight to make the turn. This was today. I should have been able to finish the quilting on this one this morning, but I managed to break my last two needles. Such aggravation! I’m determined to finish both this and the green version before the end of the year.
That brings me up to date for now. There’s a lot that I might have missed, but I tend to live in the present so I probably won’t go back unless I get a good enough reason to.
I’ve started another notebook journal (again) and I’m hoping it will help me develop some ideas that make it out of the notebook and onto the website. So hopefully that means more content for people to enjoy and interact with.
So I just talked with Jack Spirko of The Survival Podcast today. What a fun interview! I thought I’d be nervous, but apparently I love to talk…
If you found me because of that episode please say hi! Let me know what interested you and what other questions you have. I didn’t read any of the comments on the livestream because I would have lost my train of thought. I’d love to grow a community of awesome people.
Now I have to head off to work. As the nights get longer the aurora season is about to kick off and the to do lists never end.
Riding the trap line trail to make sure no downed trees are blocking.
*Update!* The podcast episode is live by now. I looked up the link and it should be:
We’ve been without power for a week. It’s not a huge deal this time around because the daytime temps have been above 40° and we have the Little Buddy to warm us up at night. We spend the days at work where we can charge our devices so that’s been fine. Our backup plans work.
Of course we shouldn’t have to be out of power. The reason we are is mostly due to timing. A week ago we filled up the gas cans, which was painful. But before adding gas to the extended run tank we decided to let it go dry so we could take out the generator for an oil change. It had been a week since we added the last ten gallons, so we figured it could go dry at any time. It lasted until 11:45pm on Sunday night.
Who wants to get up at midnight to do generator maintenance? Nobody! We agreed to take care of it after work the next day. Cue the backup heat. We went back to sleep.
Now, an oil change only takes 15 to 30 minutes. We should have power, right? Except that the starter pull cord broke. To fix that you have to take the entire thing apart using a socket that apparently got lost from the tool kit. So all week we’ve gone to work with the plan of fixing the thing in the evening, only to get home and say screw it we’re tired.
Today I don’t work. I woke up ready to tackle the generator. I even watched a video on how to do the job before I went to sleep in case my phone died before morning. Then we actually argued about who was going to fix it. I believe it is my responsibility to know how to do stuff. Chris feels responsible to take care of the hard stuff. After a bit I had to agree that his plan to acquire the missing tools before doing the work made the most sense.
So here I am, at home with no power and a phone that was at 5% and dropping. I might have to spend the day without it! Oh no! Then I remembered my backup battery. It sat on the shelf for a year through heat and extreme cold. Would it have power still? Yes! It read 100%. I plugged in my phone and happily got charging.
The moral of the story is that you should have backups, even if you don’t need to use them. You should maintain them in good order and remember that they’re there so they can do their job when you need them.
As soon as the generator is back online I’m going to put my battery back to charge.
One is the view just outside my door at 9 this morning. The other is from 2am. (Again, the benefit of the midnight bathroom run.) Soon both of these will disappear.
Aurora season ended a week ago at my job. Last week was all about closing things down and cleaning up before the break. I don’t think I was really prepared for the break. With the extra daylight and the busyness of season’s end I seemed to be more energized than usual. I had momentum so it was almost a shock when everything was done. Now I have to readjust.
In the last two weeks I ran several private shuttles at odd times. I drove to the Castner Glacier twice, once with a church group, then again as driver for a staff outing. I did some laundry and cleaning at the shop and showed up on last Thursday ready to do some more, only to discover that I wasn’t scheduled. That was okay. I did my own laundry and worked on a quilt until the needle broke. I had a massive headache anyway so it was a good thing to rest.
Okay now it’s picture time. A picture really is worth a thousand words because I could never fully convey what it’s like with mere words. Even photos are barely adequate. Most of this has to be lived and even then it barely seems real.
Driving down to Delta. Inside the glacier there are bands of gravel in the ice. The pebbles and dirt just float there.(Shhh, don’t tell him I put in a pic of him.)View of the world.The river was breaking up south of Salcha.
So now I have to shift toward summer. I have a lot of things that need to be done and I will have to crank out a list soon to make sure it isn’t really the same five items rotating to look like infinity. But for now I rest a bit. The world isn’t ready for me to start on all the things I want. That will come later. There is a season for everything.
Most places already have spring. Up here in Fairbanks we kinda skip spring and go straight from snow into summer. No, that’s not quite right…let me explain the seasons of interior Alaska.
Summer is green and bright.
You have Summer. That one is pretty easy to recognize because there’s no snow on the ground and even though the sun does set the sky never gets dark. Summer runs from around Memorial Day through mid August. The first night it gets dark enough to see the stars is August 14th or thereabouts.
The first dusting. Winter takes hold.
Then there’s Fall. This goes from late August until there’s snow on the ground. I have been told that the latest date on record for snow was October 19. Last year we got our first good dusting on September 19 and our first 6 inches on the following weekend. It was just in time for the wedding that rented out the entire property up at Basecamp. Those must have been gorgeous photos with the golden birch trees in the snow.
Noon at the solstice. Watching the aurora is the best part of dark winter.
Snow means Winter. Winter means darkness. Well, at least for the first five months or so. The darkest part of dark winter is the winter solstice. Here in Fairbanks that means that the sun doesn’t rise until around 11am and sets at about 2:40pm. Even though the sun is only above the horizon for 3.5 hours though, there is over an hour of pre-dawn light and twilight, which gives us around 6 hours where the sky isn’t totally dark. Every minute of that time has color in the sky. I love it!
Sunset and snow means gorgeous color in the sky.
Light winter kicks in around Valentine’s day. That’s when you suddenly realize that it isn’t dark before dinner time and you might leave the house with the sunrise. It’s a great relief, but it also signals time to find your sunglasses. The sunlight reflected off of all that snow gets pretty bright.
Light winter gets bright. At least the roads start clearing up.
That brings us to Breakup. Our version of spring. The roads are finally clear of ice. Mostly. The ones that aren’t yet clear are either slushy or polished shiny as glass. You have to be careful driving still. The snowbanks get plowed one more time to push them off the shoulders of the road so that meltwater doesn’t run across the road and turn to ice overnight. Parking lots are getting scraped clear and the thick chunks of ice are piled up to the side to melt. People bet on when the river ice will break up and move. Really! Look up the Nenana Ice Classic. I think it’s too late to buy in though. Pretty soon the creek will start to thaw out also. It’s a great time of year.
Soon. It’s getting warm enough that we’ll see this soon.
Spring? Yeah, I guess we get that too. The trees green up and the birds and squirrels get more active. Locals don’t talk about Spring though. It’s Breakup and Mud season. That’s because the ground thaws more slowly than the snow and the water doesn’t drain away very quickly. It takes until June to be fully out of Mud season and by then we are firmly into summer.
AK Tuff boots are a favorite for good reason.
That’s the year up here. Was that clear enough? Clear as mud, right? That’s okay. The seasons, like so much else up here, are hard to wrap your head around until you experience them. It’s worth the visit.
It has been two months exactly since my last post. I never mean to go that long between posts, but life is kinda weird. Either I feel like it would be just another weather report or things are so crazy that I have no energy to put words together at the end of the day. Ideally I would get into the habit of a weekly or even a daily post. We’ll see if I get there.
So the first thing on my list is that I want to acknowledge what should have been. I had a FB memory pop up this morning.
Today is what should have been my 27th anniversary, but this year will mark 10 years that he has been gone. I keep wondering what George would think about this crazy adventure we’re on. If he was here we would have made a lot more progress, that’s for sure! He had more energy than any ten other people I know. But I don’t know if he ever would have been on board with coming to Alaska. The month he spent on a longliner ruined his opinion of the frozen north. At one point he swore he would never come up here even for a summer vacation trip. Maybe that’s part of why I like it up here. It’s my adventure. I’m living my dream, not his. I certainly don’t feel the weight of dates so much anymore.
Here’s my annual reminder for everyone. Life is finite. When they put up a tombstone they put two dates and a dash in between. Everything you are and everything you will do is contained within that dash. Make the most of it. Tomorrow is not guaranteed, so make sure you live today. Find adventures small and large. Work to live, but don’t forget to live. Make that phone call, give hugs, share smiles, have no regrets. Second chances are few and far between.
Sunsets are the best! Try to zoom in and find the mountain silhouette in the background. Last night’s midnight bathroom run was above average.
Now for the adventure!
December rolled along mostly smoothly. It was cold. There was snow but it was thin enough that people were worried about their septic systems freezing up. About the only thing I remember was that on Solstice day I could hardly keep my eyes off of the sky. It was gorgeous all day!
January has been the month of crazy. We had a day where it got ridiculously warm and poured rain on top of ice roads. Then the temperature dropped and we got nearly 2 feet of snow. That all got packed into a thick layer of ice on the roads that they’re still trying to scrape off. It is not fun to drive on!
Then we had some mechanical issues to work through. The alternator on my truck died and we had to drive home on just battery power. They lasted just long enough to get us into the driveway, but the lights got dimmer and dimmer as we went. Talk about nerve-wracking! No moose were struck and we made it in one piece. Thank you God! That night the temperature dropped to -40° again and stayed in that range for nearly the next two weeks. Even though we had a replacement alternator in the back seat, there’s no way anyone wants to touch tools at that cold. The metal will burn you. Trust me. We needed to figure out how to get it to a heated shop. In the meantime we made arrangements for riding to work with our friends across the creek.
Now if having the truck go down wasn’t enough fun, when we got home from work on Sunday it was to discover that our brand new generator had gone out. At first we thought it was just out of fuel, and maybe needed some time in a warm place. No. It started sucking oil through that rubber breather tube into the carburetor. Nothing anyone did could make it stop happening. It simply wouldn’t run longer than a couple of hours before the carb was too fouled to run. The generator it replaced had quit due to a suspected electrical problem. It would give an overload warning even without things being plugged in. To top it off, our friends started having generator struggles as well. Cold may have been a factor, but not completely. We ended up moving in with them for a week until some of this could be resolved. Our RV was frozen in the meantime. Even the propane stopped flowing. Sometimes you give in for a little while and do the minimum for survival. That includes getting a couple nights of good sleep without shivering.
When things got better they did so almost all at once. The weather warmed up to zero. The old generator let itself run again. (It’s still going. The new one went to get fixed by professionals.) Being indoors and warm may have helped. The truck batteries got warmed and charged. And finally, we made arrangements to bring the truck to a church friend who has a heated shop that is much closer than the only other option we could think of. The story of how it got there is the best part.
My son and my friend’s daughter teamed up to get the truck running. First they had to convince the generator to run long enough to warm the oil pan and engine block so it could start. They put in the batteries and hoped for the best. It fired up and the clock started ticking…
The shop is about 16 miles away. They only got halfway there before the batteries gave out and the truck died on the side of the highway. Ironically, it was right next to the NAPA in North Pole. They toyed with the idea of trying to borrow a charger for the batteries, but that would take too long. Then Nena saw the tow strap. It was perfect. The hooks were small enough to work with a hook on the back of her Prius. Yes, a Prius. She hooked it up to my big truck and pulled it the remaining 8 miles to the shop. Yes, a Prius pulled my Dodge eight miles on icy roads. No, nobody got a video of it. We have plans to recreate the situation just to get video proof that it can be done…at least on level ground. The poor thing didn’t quite have enough oomph to get it up the minor incline into the shop. They had to use another vehicle for that.
So we are now back to mostly normal. The old generator is working. The new one should be home soon as a backup. The truck works fine. And then someone was made a manager at Chris’ work, then promptly manufactured an excuse to fire him so he now has no reason to not find a better place with better pay. We’ll see how that shakes out. He has some great options that have come along.
That’s my month summed up. I left out a little bit, mostly because I want to see how some things work out before I share them. I’ll try not to wait another two months before the next post.
Now go figure out how to make the most of your dash. It’s a whole new year. You have 11 months left to fill.
I had a calendar reminder pop up just a bit ago. Generator maintenance. I put that in for every two weeks so we wouldn’t lose track of our oil change schedule. This week it is hardly necessary. We have been forced to maintain the heck out of the thing! It has been bitterly cold lately, with highs of -15° and yet slightly humid. This causes frost to build up in the air intake, choking the engine to death. Friday it happened every 4 hours until we stayed up past midnight and completely took the thing apart to even clean out the fuel tank. It lasted two days. Last night it added hose pop-offs and oil spewing to its bag of tricks. We are starting to look at our budget to see where we will fit in a new one.
Look at that, no frost! Will it last?
With our current lifestyle electricity is the cornerstone of everything. If we lose power we have no way to heat this RV. Without heat we cannot stay in here. Our water and food will freeze. It is an actual life-threatening situation when the overnight temperatures dip to -35.
We are fine so far. Maybe a little bit sleep deprived, but the only casualty of the cold has been a bag of potatoes that froze solid. And a truck battery. (I might have jinxed us with that last post.) This cold is testing us but we haven’t broken yet.
I will say, though, this is the last winter I spend in an RV.
