The Light and Dark of It
We already explored the effects of living in virtual darkness
during
Alaska's winter solstice. But what about the flip side of
living with 22 hours of light during the summer solstice - what
would
that do to your psyche?
. Photographs by Chad
Windham.
With the exception of obituarists and Dear Abby, journalists tend
to be gluttons for life-threatening situations. It was for this
reason that my photographer,
Chad Windham, and I found ourselves on
a white-knuckle flight around the summit of the 20,320-foot Mount
McKinley in Alaska's
Denali National Park during last year's
winter solstice, and it's the very same reason why we decided to
return during the summer solstice. Only this time, we decided to up
the adrenaline ante by actually
landing on a nearby glacier,
God willing.
Of course, this isn't the sole purpose of our journey. After
hanging out in Fairbanks last December to see what life without
light was all about (the town plunges into 22 hours of darkness
during the shortest days of the year), it was decided that the
opposite would be interesting as well. How does one sleep when
there are 22 hours of daylight, especially when those other two
remaining hours aren't really all that dark, anyway?
Naturally, we had to find ways to fill all those hours - and how
better than with perilous activities, like landing a five-seat
Cessna 185 prop plane on a pack of ice high up in the jagged peaks
of the 600-mile Alaska Range? After getting my will in order, I
quiz the pilots at Fly Denali as to the exact stupidity level of an
excursion such as this. "How do you know you aren't landing on top
of a crevasse?" I inquire. "You don't," says pilot James Hoffman.
Fabulous.
Weather had thus far squashed this crazy idea on three separate
occasions over the past two days, and we were tempted to take the
hint, but on this day, it's gorgeous. There would be no pardon.
While our pilot, Eric Denkewalter, finishes off his preflight
checks, we chat with his wife, Geri, who does little to relieve our
apprehension. It turns out she has just returned from having lunch
on our destination, Ruth Glacier. (Things are done a little
differently around here - the local deli simply won't do.) "There
are lots of avalanches," she tells us. "You can hear them all
around you." I feel the tears well up.
It turns out, however, that our fears are unfounded. The 45-minute
flight over Denali National Park to
Mount McKinley feels like a
trip to heaven itself. The melt ponds of the glacial environment
look like small pools of electric-blue popsicle juice scattered
around the numerous glaciers that converge from nearly every
direction. We fly as close as 500 feet (the closest we are legally
allowed to get) to monstrous peaks, though it appears as if we are
one sudden wind gust away from planting a big, wet kiss on them.
Then we see the "airport."
The Don Sheldon Amphitheater, a part of the massive Ruth Glacier,
looks just like it sounds. The towering peaks of the Alaska Range
form a natural amphitheater on three sides, and somebody, at some
point, was brave enough to test its surface as a landing strip.
When the whole thing didn't cave in on itself or tumble down the
nearby mountains in a roaring fit of snow and ice, the idea for one
of the most spectacular tourism spectacles I have ever been privy
to was put in motion.
The plane slightly jolts when Eric lowers the landing skis, and
though it's a completely unnatural thing to do, touching down here
suddenly seems quite obvious. We hit the snow at an elevation of
5,700 feet and bounce around a bit - much in the same way a
beginning skier might depart a chairlift. Then all is quiet. We pop
out onto the 1,000-foot sheet of ice like giddy schoolchildren.
Ten miles to the northwest, the north and south peaks of Mount
McKinley loom over us like sentinels of the fortune of Mother
Nature herself, though they seem a snowball's throw away. It's
around five p.m., but the sun remains intense, just as it does
pretty much the whole time we're in Alaska. Though we're surrounded
by snow, it's hot enough to remove our jackets. We realize man has
no business being here - we're witnesses to something that
represents little more than a postcard to the majority of people.
Though residents report feeling reenergized in the summer,
my internal clock's tendency to wake me up at four a.m. each day
we're here is causing me to beg to differ. The hotels claim to have
blackout curtains, but we seem to have differing opinions on the
definition of
blackout. You've seen
Insomnia, right?
It's not quite that bad, but I can't seem to nail down my required
eight hours of beauty sleep either.
"I get sluggish in winter," says Dan Unkerskov, head brewer at
Silver Gulch Brewing & Bottling Co., where a gaggle of classic
Alaskan characters gathers every Friday during the summer for free
beer. "In summer, we all get
sleep deprivation without realizing
it. It's definitely cool to sit outside at two a.m. and read a
book."
Silver Gulch is one of numerous Alaskan microbreweries churning out
excellent suds, though its motto is more noteworthy than its Pick
Axe Porter. "Fairbanks: Where the people are unusual and the beer
is unusually good." When we meet Fairbanksan Justin Rousseau at the
brewery, he does little to challenge this theory.
Rousseau is a dead ringer for
Colin Farrell, if Farrell had moved
to Alaska and lived in a coal mine instead of pursuing an acting
career. (In fact, when Rousseau inevitably becomes famous for
something or other, we're convinced Farrell will get the part in
the Hollywood movie of his life.) Rousseau is the kind of guy one
can only encounter in Alaska: a gangly, unclean, bearded wild man
who looks as if he walked into the woods somewhat normal and
emerged significantly less so. He's a land surveyor of Sioux Indian
descent and quite possibly the most quotable person I've met in my
10 years of journalism. When Chad asks to take his picture, he
tells us that his convertible pickup truck, a custom Rousseau
invention, is even more photogenic than he is.
"I was doing the
Dukes of Hazzard thing for a while," he
reports, referring to jumping in and out of the truck via the
window because the doors would no longer open. "[But] that pretty
much sucks in a truck, so I just cut the top off. It's real cool.
Really cool in winter."
We eye the truck and are indeed impressed. It looks like Rousseau
literally took a chain saw to it, cutting away the entire bed and
cab, right up to the steering wheel. Around here, nobody bats an
eyelid.
"The Lower 48 is kind of compressed," continues Rousseau. "You have
to mind your p's and q's more. Here, you can do your own thing and
drive a beat-up old pickup truck with the top cut off, and nobody
seems to notice." Yeah, they definitely do things differently
around here.
The two biggest attractions in Fairbanks during the summer
are the riverboat
Discovery, a supertouristy ride down the
Chena and Tanana rivers in an authentic stern-wheeler riverboat
(the highlight of which is the tasty smoked salmon treats they pass
out to the 900 or so tourists on board), and panning for gold at
the El Dorado Gold Mine, a surprisingly fun way to pretend to
strike it rich.
You cringe at the cheesiness until you see resident miner Dexter
Clark sift through a random load of dirt until gold appears. Chad
and I give it a try and net a total of $24 worth of gold between us
- not enough to buy an hour of darkness, though, which would be
kind of nice at this point. "When you get tired, you close your
eyes and go to sleep," Clark tells me. "Don't you know that
trick?"
But the problem in Fairbanks in the summer isn't going to sleep
(although exiting a local haunt like the Marlin bar at two a.m.
into broad daylight doesn't exactly help you to know when to say
when), it's
sleeping in. Unless your bedroom is underground,
the chances of waking up to the annoying blare of an alarm isn't
likely. How does 4:55 a.m. sound? My thoughts exactly.
While a visit to Fairbanks and the surrounding area in
winter mostly involves a search for the elusive northern lights, a
summer trip to the area revolves around the pursuit of the midnight
sun (and let me tell you, it's a heck of a lot easier to find). The
difference is like … ahem … night and day. Fairbanksans go all out
for summer solstice, planning all manner of midnight activities and
uttering such non-Lower 48 colloquialisms to each other as, "Have a
good solstice." (After nearly eight months under the paralyzing
grasp of relative darkness, you'd say silly things like that
too.)
In Fairbanks proper, the midnight sun is hard to spot. It sits so
low on the horizon that the surrounding hills block it from view
from most vantage points. So, after attempting to see it at the
Midnight Sun Baseball Game (no) and the Midnight Sun Festival (no),
we head up to Ester Dome, one of the highest points in the
Fairbanks area.
If you've never seen the midnight sun, it is a glorious sight
indeed. You can never quite get over the fact that what your watch
says and what the sun says don't exactly square up. On this night,
nearby wildfires have lofted a smoky mist into the valley below,
creating a natural filter for the sun's fiery orange glow. The
sun's rays shimmer through the fog, creating a reddish haze across
the valley. It's a perfect backdrop for something like … an album
cover. Supposedly, the sun is down for two hours on this particular
night, though it never truly goes away.
While everyone seems a tad happier - and a tad less insane -
in the summer, I can't help but think that the charm of Fairbanks
lies in the snow and ice. Take the new Museum of the North, for
example. It's now fully up and operational at the University of
Alaska. The stunning architecture is meant to evoke Alaska's
glacial landscapes - but it somehow falls short when the luminous
pinks and blues of the low-lit winter skies aren't bouncing off its
whitewashed walls.
Still, the museum's exhibits (notably Craig Buchanan's junk-strewn
Great Alaska Outhouse Experience and the conceptual prurient
photography of Mark Daughhetee) are worth an afternoon stroll. And,
of course, the building remains the most architecturally
interesting of all the others in the state - that hasn't changed
since last winter.
In Denali National Park (125 miles south of Fairbanks), we discover
a cozy little restaurant called McKinley Creekside Café. It's full
of Alaskan charm and tasty entrées like coconut-battered salmon and
perfect Alaskan halibut and chips. Everything is going along
swimmingly until a transformer blows in nearby Healy, cutting the
electricity to the entire area.
Being journalists and all, Chad and I are cashless. The power
outage means, of course, that the Creekside cannot run our credit
cards. In the Lower 48, we'd either be washing dishes or leaving
the rights to our firstborns as collateral until we could return
with payment.
"Lunch is on us," says assistant manager Leigh Anne Williams, a
Georgia transplant going on her seventh year in Alaska. Yeah, they
definitely do things differently around here. Perhaps it's the
light?
"Obviously, the 22 hours of light is better for your psyche," says
Ryan Binkley, captain of the riverboat
Discovery. "In
winter, you get cabin
fever - the pioneers would literally go
crazy. When spring comes, it's a weight off your shoulders."
So in the end, Alaskans tend to put up with the unrelenting
darkness and bitter cold of winter as a penance for what many
consider to be the perfect summer. After all, what other reason
could there be for wanting to colonize the harsh extremes of the
last frontier?
Well, there is that business of the Permanent Fund Dividend as
well. What's that, you say? You're not familiar with the good ol'
PFD? Well, neither were we. Turns out, up this way yearly checks
relating to oil royalties - sometimes upward of the $2,000 range -
are doled out to all permanent residents of Alaska …
just as a
way to say thank you.
I told you, they do things differently around here.
What You Should Know
American Airlines offers daily service in the summer to Anchorage
from Dallas/Fort Worth and
Chicago, and offers daily codeshare
service year-round via
Anchorage and
Seattle on Alaska Airlines.
For more information, visit
www.aa.com.
El Dorado Gold Mine
www.eldoradogoldmine.com
(866) 479-6673
Fly Denali
www.flydenali.com(907) 733-7768
McKinley Creekside Caféwww.mckinleycabins.com(907) 683-2277
Museum of the Northwww.uaf.edu/museum(907) 474-7505
Riverboat Discoverywww.riverboatdiscovery.com(866) 479-6673
Silver Gulch Brewing & Bottling Co.www.silvergulch.com(907) 452-2739