Memorial Day Weekend Fun

Went paddling with friends on the Dennison Fork of the 40 mile river.  Great weather and lots of fun.

Evening Calm

There was a community information meeting last night on the fire. There were a couple of new fires started in other parts of the state, so they shifted the initial attack crews and put on a Type 2 team.  There are lots of resources devoted to the fire.  The Incident Command Post is at the ski area at the bottom of the hill.  Last night engines were patrolling the roads and one was parked in my neighbors driveway prepared, just in case.

Here's a map of the fire perimeter, as of last night.  The white hatched lines are dozer lines, the black line is where they have hand crews staged.  The red lines are areas where the fire is still not contained.  Our house is on the north side of Monte Verde Road - one of the line that is closest to the fire.  With an up-hill slope of black spruce in between.  The location of the fire start is marked with an X and a circle on the map. We are lucky that the winds were blowing from the south when the fire started!

The fire is very well staffed.  This helicopter is picking up supply loads to drop for the smoke jumpers.

Check out this time-lapse photography of the fire: click here



Back on the home front... the ironwork art for our loft railing arrived today!!  I'm very happy with it :-).

Update

No smoke in the air this morning!  :-)

Today's Daily News Miner Newspaper Article

The crews are staging out of my neighbors yard. I talked with one of  the  crew bosses this morning and he said that they have put engines up to the top of Moose Mt. Road (up to the ski area) and have run water hoses down.   Sounds like they have fire line around about 60% of the fire.

Yesterday there was quite a lot of air traffic.  This was particularly exciting because the helicopters with water buckets were flying directly over our house.  But they were traveling farther and farther away to drop the water.

The aircraft is just starting up again this morning (~11am).  There is a public meeting tonight so we'll get more information then.

Moose Mt Fire Info

Smokey all night.  Fire crews in and out on the road an or neighbor's trail.  Not too much excitement now...

"Incident" website

DNR "News Flash"

Basic Information

Incident Type	Wildfire
Cause	Under Investigation
Date of Origin	Friday May 20th, 2011 approx. 03:31 PM
Location	Near Fairbanks, Alaska
Incident Commander	Blankenship, C

Current Situation

Total Personnel	130
Size	700 acres
Percent Contained	10%
Fuels Involved	Black Spruce, White Spruce, Hardwoods
Fire Behavior	Friday saw extreme fire behavior with 100 foot flames and rapid fire growth. Fire weather is moderating today with slightly humidities and cloud cover, which will help firefighters.
Significant Events	Fire started and grew to 700 acres

Outlook

Planned Actions	Crews will continue to cut dozer and saw lines today. More retardant, scooper, and helicopter work planned.
Growth Potential	Extreme
Terrain Difficulty	Medium

Current Weather

Temperature	66 degrees
Humidity	14%

And a few other photos to keep your mind off the fire...

Who can tell us what this is and where it came from??  Pop??  Lauret??

I got to spend Easter with a 4-year old who took this picture ... Very artistic, if I do say so myself Alexis & Amy!

I went to Seattle in April to give a talk at a meeting.... And get an early dose of spring-time...

Its the...  

This is my favorite sculpture in the Seattle sculpture garden.  

I can't tell if the boulder is advancing by getting up on the cement platform, or by getting off...

As of two weeks ago, paddling season has officially begun...

Yes, those are little icicles dangling in the water...melted I'm sure by now!

The official sign of spring in Fairbanks - when the baby reindeer are born at the University experimental farm...These guys are curled up in little brown balls - born just hours earlier...

Reining deer - not to be confused with bowing oxen...

Fire Season Has Begun - A Little Too Close for Comfort!

I was in Home Depot picking up door hardware for the finishing touches on the house when my friend and neighbor Laura called to tell me that there was a fire on Moose Mountain.  I've worked enough with Alaska DNR Division of Forestry and Alaska Fire Service to know that they would be on it asap so I wasn't too concerned.  I called Jen Northway, the coordinator for the Alaska Fire Science Consortium to see if she had any intel. I casually finished checking out. I called Joe to see if he was home.  Yes, he was.  He could tell there was a fire, but everything seemed okay.  When I got out to my car the winds were so strong, it blew my shopping cart across the parking lot.  

As I drove home I grew more and more concerned upon hearing the news alerts on the local radio. My co-worker forwarded a University text alert: "UAF POLICE: Wildland fire in the area of Monteverde Road and Moose Mountain."  We live on Monteverde Road - about 1/2 mile from Moose Mountain Road...  Joe called me to say the smoke plume was getting bigger.  I asked him to go into the house and get the cats in their boxes (no small feat, I knew - especially since girl cat is nearly too fat to fit in her box!)  I thought about the most important things to load into the car.  Wilson and the cats, the photo of my grandmother on my dresser, the computers.  I wished that I could locate the recipe book that my grandmother had hand written for me for Channukah when I was 14 years old.  I had looked for it at Passover, but I had packed it away someplace "safe" before the house move last summer.  And I could not find it...

When I got home, Joe was moving the scrap cardboard that had been piled up near the house.  He had gotten the cats in their boxes and shut off the fuel lines and the gas.  We spent about half an hour wandering around trying to tidy things up - getting flammables away from the house and shed.  Marking the water lines on the house, moving the boats to the end of the driveway.

It wasn't too long before a fire crew showed up, dressed in yellow nomex shirts and blue pants.  They were a structure protection crew from Ft. Wainwright.  They asked me which structure I would like them to focus on for protection, the new or the old.... no brianer!  Voluntary evacuation, they said.  Their first priority is protection of life, then property, implying that if we're here, less time and energy they'll have to save the house.  They did a quick hazard assessment and parked their engine at the end of our driveway.

Mean-while helicopters are flying over with water buckets, tanker trucks with retardant loads, and surveillance ships are buzzing the house.  Neighbor's chain saws are whining as people cut trees.

I loaded the cats, Wilson, the computers and my grandmother's photo into the Subaru.  But it was too exciting to head off the Mountain, so I parked in my neighbor's driveway across the street.  The engine crew wouldn't let us park on the road.  It was their escape route.  And engines were protecting only the houses on the north side of the road.  I headed back to help Joe cut the spruce trees behind the house and to pick up the highly flammable lichen encrusted limbs and toss them away from the house.

Mean-while, five, 20-person hot-shot crews have hiked into the woods.  My neighbor Pips Veazy could see flames through the woods from her upstairs window.

Tom called from the Seattle airport.  He's on this way home from an NSF panel review in Chicago.  He's missed all of the excitement this year.  Ice storm in November, snow storm in March - and now fires in May...

By 8:00pm the sun was lower, temperatures were dropping and relative humidity was on the rise.  At around 9:30pm the structure protection crew headed out.  The fire chief said that the fire had "laid down" for the night and that they were passing things off to the DNR.  Fortunately, he said, this is one of the only fires burning in the interior right now, so there is not much competition for resources.  They are going to hit it hard tonight, but tomorrow is forecast to be hot and dry with more winds, so activity could pick up again.

I drove back up the driveway and let the cats out of their boxes.  They were whining and scratching so much at the door, that I didn't have the heart to keep them inside.  Before I let them out, I gave them a super tasty treat, in the hopes that they would come back in again later.

I texted back my co-worker to thank her for the text alert and to let her know that things had calmed down for the night.  She wrote back glad that I "could get some rest (maybe)."  There are too many aircraft and chainsaws to rest too deeply, I replied, but I feel safe for the night.

Local news coverage: http://newsminer.com/view/full_story/13357144/article-Crews-controlling-700-acre-wildfire-north-of-Goldstream-Valley?instance=home_lead_story

Spring Fun!

Spring is here and we've busted out to enjoy the warm weather and sunny spring days! :-)
Tom is back flying again.  A couple of weeks ago we took a day trip up to Bettles.

Late afternoon sun on the Yukon River.

This could be the farthest north phone booth in the USA ...Yes, there is a phone in the booth - but it doesn't work!

The next day we headed out to the Chena State Rec area for an afternoon ski.

We skied to the remains of the Lower Chena cabin, which saw its demise just a few weeks earlier.  A group of fire fighters from one of the military bases were responsible. Yes! That's right, fire fighters.  They had stoked the wood stove and hopped on their snow machines to visit their buddies in the cabin a few miles up the trail.  When they came back there was nothing left but the roof and the picnic table...  Poor fellows will never live this one down...

Over spring break we headed up to Healy to get out of town for a few days.  Still gorgeous weather, we skied out the Stampede Road for a few miles.  Our friend, Ben Huff, had just been out on this trail a few days earlier with Ned Rozell, Ed Plumb and the family of Chris McCandless.  Keep your eye out for the story in Outside Magazine!

A spectacular view of Denali from here - but not sure if you can make it out in the photos!

The trail/road was a bit drifted in spots - mini moguls!

Wolf tracks in the wind blown crusted snow.

I'm fairly sure these are lynx tracks - looking for dinner...

The Alaska Range in the distance.

And then the next day to ski in Denali Park.  We had stopped here for a snack and hot tea.  As we enjoyed our lunch, the young bull moose in the distance came closer and closer, eventually deciding to head straight toward us on the trail....We shooed him away and he skirted around us, wading through the deeper snow.  Its no wonder the moose like to follow the trail.

Hope you all are doing well.  Happy Spring!