Before sunrise this morning I drove to work facing the full moon the entire way. This might be my new favorite sight. 10:20am sunrise. A view from my work. Noon at Basecamp, and the sun hasn’t gotten above the taller trees. 1:35 pm today. The days might be short, but the colors go on for hours. An afternoon drive. I get to share these views with the guests I drive in the shuttle. They think they are coming here to see the aurora, but that’s just the cherry on top. 1:40pm and sunset colors are already flooding the sky. 3:30pm. The sun is mostly down, but there is still color and light. This is my view of my friend’s cabin across the frozen creek.
Before coming to Fairbanks I knew that daylight would be an issue. At the summer solstice the sun might set for 3 hours, but it doesn’t get dark. In winter it is the opposite issue. Days get shorter and shorter until the sun is only up for 3 hours, but here the darkness is not complete. Sunrise colors start an hour or more before the sun shows up and last longer too. Sunset colors can be in the sky up to 2 hours before the sun goes down and they take time to fade along with the light. On a really good day there is color across the sky and reflected from the snow all day. It is a constantly shifting light show and the sheer beauty makes up for all the challenges that come from living up here.
I drive a shuttle van to bring tourists to and from a destination with an aurora borealis theme. People who wanted to go to Iceland or Norway to see the Northern Lights have had to shift their plans to Alaska. They always ask me about the chances of a good show. I always tell them I can promise nothing on the aurora, but I also always point out the colors in the sky and tell them how much I love watching the shifting of the light. I’ve had more than one person thank me on our trip back into town. I’ve been told that even with a good aurora show overnight they still loved watching the daylight almost as much. When something is in short supply you find a greater appreciation for it.
I hope I never get tired of seeing all of this beauty in my world.
We all know how it started. The legend of the first Thanksgiving is a story about a party to celebrate community and a successful harvest. They feasted in the knowledge that they would have food to last until they could grow more.
We all know what it has become. Thanksgiving is a day off work, a day of cooking and family and maybe football. The entire season has turned into a social media game of talking about what’s good in our lives. Some people dread it because their family is toxic or gone. Some dread the traditional dishes. Some dread the cleanup.
I recently saw a post on social media about how some people can’t bring themselves to play the “gratitude game” because they can’t see anything positive, especially this year. That thought hurts my heart. It’s easy to list things when times are good. It takes a proper mindset to find good things when times are hard. In fact, I would say that hard times are the best times to develop your gratitude muscle. That’s when you need it most.
In early October of 2012 I was struggling with a bit of depression. Times were good. We had a new house and property out in the country the way we had talked about for so long. As much as I loved it, I was struggling with the transition. I had lived in the old house since I was 4 years old. I felt off balance and rootless. So I decided to use my blogger account to write about something good every day from October 1 until Thanksgiving. I wanted to adjust my mindset to see the good instead of focusing on what was different.
Anyone who knows my family knows what happened. On October 9th I was met by a supervisor while I was driving my bus route. Another driver took over my run and the supervisor took me to the hospital where my husband had been admitted following a heart attack. Any hard times I had thought I was struggling with were nothing compared to what was ahead of me when I learned that he wasn’t coming home. We buried him ten days later and I tried to stick with my gratitude activity. I could have been destroyed without it. Even if I didn’t write a post I kept trying to think of something good in my life every day. Just for me.
I still do it to some degree. When we spent the night at -31° I laughed and said it’s part of the adventure. I push myself to accept hard things so I appreciate the easy things. I’m not comfortable with getting too comfortable. I don’t want to complain. I have chosen the path I’m on and one day I might have to throw a party to celebrate the best things in life.
This year my gratitude list starts with my boys. They are the reason I held myself together for the first few years. Then when I realized I wasn’t living a life that I wanted them to copy, they are the reason I started looking for something more worth living. No one should live to work. You should not simply be a slave to the paycheck. Work should enable you to shape your life into something you can enjoy. That’s what I’m trying to build.
These three young men are my greatest pride and inspiration.
My oldest son is in charge of my property back in Oregon. He makes sure that everyone gets their rent in so that the bills get paid. He has my mom and a family friend to help as needed, but he’s doing well.
My youngest son is also back in Oregon. He finally has his driver’s license so he can get to work on his own. I’m so proud to know that he is becoming more independent.
Keeper of the flame? Well, keeper of the generator at least.
Then there is the middle son. His enthusiasm made it possible for me to take the leap in buying property in Alaska. His commitment to follow through made it possible for me to have enough confidence to leave my well-paid (if miserable) job to come up here. Now that we’re up here he is the one who keeps the house running and warm while I earn money to pay for things. He has been looking for work and should hear back from one soon so I’ll have to take on some of the tasks he has left me out of, but I’m okay with that. I have to stand on my own at some point.
Life is good as long as it is lived. Gratitude should always be more to benefit yourself than to impress others. We might not be able to gather together, but if we know that our loved ones are happy and safe that should be enough.
Happy Thanksgiving. I hope you can find some way to improve your life over the next year so that you can have more to be thankful for.
I’ll leave you with a blast from my past. I’m thankful that I don’t always have to be the one doing the cooking.
He of little fur enjoys days curled up on the couch blankets.
I knew the Alaskan winter would be tough for this dog. Clay is a Pitbull/Australian Shepherd mix, and has a short, single coat. Even back in Oregon he preferred curling up in warm spots or diving under my covers overnight.
Planning ahead, I bought a dog coat for him. I’ve also gotten him a sweater and booties to protect his feet from the ice on those trips outside in severely subzero temps. He hates them all. He also likes to run across the creek after he does his goofy stunt of hiding behind a tree to take care of business. There are other dogs to play with over there and possible snacks to snarf. The problem is that he has so little insulation that we don’t want to let him stay outside for long and it’s hard to keep track of where he actually is. I do worry that he’ll get too cold. He certainly complains about it enough.
Then came last night. I was playing with his paws again. I do it as a trust exercise ever since he panicked that one time he had a blackberry thorn stuck between his toes. This time I noticed a change. He has grown extra fur between his toes and it partly covers his pads. It gives me hope that he will adapt to the cold. I doubt that he’ll grow an undercoat, but at least his feet will be protected.
Fuzzy toes
This entire adventure has us all learning and adapting. I figure that’s a good thing.
It’s still cold. But Blue lives. My son got it warmed up enough to start and we have had it running since. I’ll turn it off when I can plug it in to reliable power or for brief times in the store. Of course it might work out better if the truck could build up some heat. I nearly freeze on the drive home from work. Putting cardboard over the radiator didn’t help one bit. I’ve been thinking the thermostat is not working right but now someone told me that Cummins engines have a thing where they don’t heat up in extreme cold. I’ll have to do some research and talk to the right people. I’m no mechanic, but I know things could be better.
The real star of the week has been the Scone. It’s really a Scion A-somethingorother that I bought for cheap off of marketplace. It has a manual transmission and it runs good. Best of all the heater works great! And it starts well even at -20. As much as I love Blue this one isn’t bad.
I knew that the DOT puts in a good effort to keep the roads clear and safely driveable for those of us with common sense. Sometimes it takes a few days to get to all of the roads and the snow gets hard packed into ice. The other morning Chris and I drove past a convoy of four graders that were stairstepped to scrape the ice from the truck lane at a RR crossing. The blades on each grader had teeth to bite into the ice and break it up. It looks pretty effective.
Snow clearing for DOT may have found a place on my list of possible future jobs. Nobody would expect me to drive fast and everyone smart would be appreciative. Plus I would get to work with heavy equipment. That’s been on my list for a while now.
One thing I say a dozen times a day is how much I love all the colors up here. Sunrise is ever closer to 10am and sunset is before 3:30pm now. At the solstice the sun will be up for just about 3 hours total, but that doesn’t mean we are without light. Two hours before sunrise it starts to get lighter and the skies are painted with pastels. Then two hours before sunset I start seeing those sunset colors showing up among the clouds. The light and color lingers even after the sun is down and the camera in my brain is filled with amazing views and compositions that I could never capture on my phone camera. I think the only way to really see it is to be here and to soak it in.
Yesterday we went to a tourist spot that is also a favorite of the locals. Chena Hot Springs has been a resort destination for over 100 years. I’ve been there twice now and can definitely say that the colder the weather the better it is in the pool. The hot springs themselves run at over 150° and are used to heat the buildings, greenhouses, generate power, and the pool. The outdoor pool has plenty of cold water mixed in, but it still runs hot and sulfurous. My friend’s stainless steel ring turned an odd bronze/black color after spending a couple of hours in the water.
After soaking in all that heat it was extra hard to get into Blue and drive nearly 80 miles home without heat. I’m going to have to get that fixed. I’ll also have to remember to bring blankets for the next time we go on an outing.
This whole adventure has a steep learning curve. I kinda jumped in the deep end by starting out off grid. But I’ve come to see the lack of cabin as a blessing in disguise. I’m able to be minutes from knowledgeable help if something goes wrong. By next winter we’ll know what we’re doing and it will be easier in a cabin. In the meantime there’s so much to enjoy along the way.
I was talking with one of my coworkers back when we hit -30. It’s her first winter too. She came up from Idaho to live with her sister. When I asked if she had gotten her vehicle winterized she said not yet and told me the most ridiculous thing. Her dad has a friend who runs a car dealership. They often went to him for a friends and family discount. She asked him about winterizing her car since her sister had told her how important it can be up here. He looked into it and came back to tell her he thought it was a complete scam and he recommended against it.
If winterization is a scam, the entire state has been bamboozled!
Almost every car you see will have a plug hanging out of the grill somewhere. Some people even keep their cold weather extension cord wound up on the front of the vehicle. Every workplace, school, apartment building, and hotel has plugins for each parking space. I have had guests wonder what the plug is all about, assuming that we have a lot of electric cars up here. We don’t. This just powers the heating pads that get installed on the batteries, engine block, oil pan, and transmission pan.
If the temperature gets colder than about -10° the oil thickens up. One ad on the radio compared it to sucking honey through a straw. It can’t flow enough to protect the engine so the engine can run to heat up. The batteries can freeze and lose power, sometimes permanently. If you can’t warm up the vehicle enough to start then you just have to wait for warmer temps, whenever those might come along.
Blue hasn’t started for two days. I have gotten Chris to drive me to work in the Scone, but he now wants me to drive myself. The ridiculous thing is that I bought the car with a manual transmission and let him learn to drive it in the snow but I’m afraid to do it myself. Yeah, my anxiety is showing there. I’m going to leave Blue plugged in until 8:30 and see what happens. If it’s a no-start I’ll have to suck it up and drive the car. Such is my life.
Living off grid means using a generator for power. We need electricity to power either the Toyo heater or the propane heater. Electricity powers the heat tape that prevents the propane from freezing in the line. Electricity powers the heat kit that will allow my truck to start after a night of -20°.
When so much basic comfort relies on a device you tend to pay attention to it. You start to know all it’s quirks. You get a sense of when something might be wrong. And when you rely on a generator the worst sound you can wake up to is silence.
Silence means the generator quit. Silence means no heat. Silence means you better get dressed and bring it inside to figure out what killed it.
Ice in the carburetor bowl is a bad thing.
If it didn’t run out of gas, the reason the generator quit is usually related to water. Water in the fuel turns into ice in the carburetor, fuel line, or filter. Or, like this morning, condensation can build up frost on the air intake and choke it off. You quickly learn exactly what tools to pull out of your kit to take it apart for diagnosis. Hopefully it’s something that can be fixed quickly.
Living away from city sounds is a beautiful thing. It’s nice to hear nature. But in the extreme conditions where you need to rely on power, silence is a terrible sound.
I just got a text from my son asking me to put some coffee on the stove. He had to go out for a while and wanted a hot beverage for when he came back. Back in Oregon coffee on the stove would mean Cuban coffee (super strong espresso) but here we have started doing it a bit different.
Coffee, hot chocolate, or tea?
We have a regular coffee machine. It makes just enough for a cup each and does a decent job. It’s easy to clean by dumping out the paper filter and also does double duty as a generator fill timer. If we want to know how long the generator has been running we just look at the clock. Often we will unplug it after filling to reset the timer. We get 8 hours per tank of gas, and then we need to refill.
My friend works as a move out house cleaner. Sometimes people leave interesting things behind. One person left three of these stovetop percolators. She gave us two. They have proved useful for simply heating water for dishwashing and don’t put a strain on the generator like the electric one does. As long as we have propane flowing we can have hot water or coffee.
Just yesterday my son told me that he really prefers the coffee from the percolator to the electric one. If you get the grounds right and let it boil the right amount of time it can make some really nice coffee. It can be as strong as espresso but not so bitter. Add in sugar and cream or some condensed milk and you have a wonderful drink to warm up with.
…but this one has been floating around the book of faces for a couple of weeks and it makes me want to tell stories.
So far I have refrained from hijacking people’s posts with my reactions to this one, but there are so many things I want to reply! Fortunately I have an outlet that can’t be called hijacking. I just stole the meme to start with.
These are the roads I have been driving for the last month. They’re going to be like this to some degree until March or April. This being my first winter in Alaska, I have had to do some adapting. My knowledge of snow driving only came from the crap we got in Portland, Oregon. Most of the time snow there came at 30-34° and we never knew what portion of it would be snow vs freezing rain or what order it would come in. The city, county, and state barely knew how to clear it if they even had the equipment. Last time we got a big snowstorm in Portland we discovered that the city had sold off most of its snow removal equipment to avoid the storage and maintenance expense. Seattle had to send down plows to help, but by the time they arrived it had all frozen into rutted ice on the roads that made driving an absolute misery.
Here in Alaska it’s a different story. Downtown still gets some rutted ice, but the DOT doesn’t mess around on the highways. Even the smaller rural roads (like the one in my picture) get plowed. Some of them are plowed by the people who live there and use the road. It makes a huge difference when there is a significant snowfall like last Friday. I had to pull my friend’s Prius out of their own driveway because it got high centered on the unplowed snow. They ended up parking near their road where I was able to pack down the snow with my truck. There was talk about asking the neighbor with a plow to make a pass through for them.
Temperature makes a big difference in traction and snow behavior. When giving me driving advice everyone told me that if it’s warmer than 15-20° the roads are going to be more slick. Colder than 15° and they aren’t so much to worry about. The friend who drives the haul road (ice road that doesn’t go across frozen lakes) explained that the colder it gets the better your traction can be. At -20° the weight of his truck will melt a bit of the ice on the road, which then immediately refreezes, causing the tires to stick to the road. Kind of like if you were to try licking a frozen metal fence post. (Don’t try that.) The traction comes from constantly freezing and unsticking as the tires roll down the road. Even with my considerably lighter weight van I can feel the difference in traction at those colder temps.
This doesn’t mean that everyone has great traction. Good tires help. Good driving habits help more. Last week when we got a foot of snow we counted at least 9 cars in the ditch on the way into town. I tend to drive the speed that the road and my vehicle tell me is safe. If I feel a bit of sliding wobble I let off the accelerator until I’m stable. I feel zero need to go the speed limit on the sign. But I get people flying past me all the time. I haven’t yet seen any of them lose it but I’ve had other people tell me about watching someone hit the ditch in a cloud of snow after passing recklessly.
Now for the towing story. It isn’t entirely snow related, but I found it interesting. I got to spend time with some co-workers after work. One of them brought her husband who has lots of stories and loves to tell them. He was describing how he wants to get a property farther out from town and set up a mechanic shop with maybe a couple of tow trucks. An encounter with a disabled vehicle during hunting season made him think it might be a useful venture.
He was way north of Fairbanks, maybe a hundred miles or so. There’s a whole lot of nothing up there in a way you can’t imagine until you see it. He saw a guy stopped alongside the road in a pickup with a trailer. He had two moose carcasses in the back of the truck and more on the trailer. It turns out the guy was bringing back the results of the hunting party but the alternator went out on the truck. He offered to help get the truck running enough to limp back to town, but the guy declined. He was waiting for a tow truck. He had been waiting for 11 hours and the bears were starting to circle, attracted by the moose meat, but he had been required to prepay $1000 just to get the truck sent out and by golly he was going to get his money’s worth.
After making sure he couldn’t do anything to help the mechanic continued down the highway. After a while he came across a tow truck that had a different pickup loaded up on the back. He flagged him down and asked if he was looking for a disabled truck of a certain description. The tow driver said yeah, but he couldn’t find it. But there was this truck left on the side of the road so he wasn’t going back empty handed. At this point the mechanic was like WTF! The truck he had loaded up probably belonged to a hunter who was going to come back to no vehicle while the guy who already paid for the help was literally going to be abandoned to the bears. The tow driver had not even considered that the vehicle he grabbed might not be abandoned. He was persuaded to put it back and was given directions to find the right vehicle. The mechanic took this incident as proof that there is a need out there.
See? Too much to hijack someone’s post. But it makes a good post of my own.
It’s tiny and cute and puts out heat like crazy! Plus it’ll only cost us about $2/day instead of the nearly $10/day the propane was costing us. And the cherry on top is that heating oil will not freeze and leave us hanging. We’ll have reliable heat in the coldest weather. This feels like a win.
It’s too dark to get a good picture but I have a heater sitting just inside the door of the RV. There was just enough room to put the exhaust/air intake through the wall under the window. This small Toyo started out in the small cabin that Nena’s aunt built. When she left the cabin was sold but the Toyo stayed. Chris and Nena collected the necessary fittings to be able to hook it up.
I would like to say Chris hooked it up. Nena would like to say Chris hooked it up. In reality he was a good assistant and learned a lot. Actually, he had an easier time using the flaring tool on the copper fuel tubing than Nena did so he was necessary to the operation.
Today they need to make a stand to hold up the tank we will be using for fuel oil. The light was long gone by the time they started thinking about it. Fortunately for them the temperatures are in our favor. Yesterday got up to 38°, which is insane considering last week’s temps. We know they’ll be going down again soon so this needs to be done. This is the best time to get it running.
I’m so excited to have the prospect of reliable heat! I’ll get some pictures to share later on.
