As the 2013 equinox - autumnal for those of us in the northern hemisphere - arrived about one hour ago from when I'm posting this, I thought it an auspcious time for members to show off....or bemoan....their current conditions. Of course we already know that those in SoCal never see any change in their perfect weather, so there cannot be any reason for any of them to chime in. Never. Ever. So, how's the weather in the Heart of the Alaska Range? Well, maybe summer has just ended but for us, winter has just begun. As in - * on Wednesday, we got an honest one foot of snow (30cm), and it's here for keeps although it's packed down to a crusty 3-4 inches (10 cm). * on Thursday, we awoke to +16ºF (-9ºC) temperatures. But, hey! At least there is a "+" sign in front of that number. * recent high has been +34 / +1 degree. Any moment now we will drop below freezing for good for the next eight or, if lucky, seven months. We live at the nether end of Alaska's fabled Denali Highway. We just drove up 13 miles, and encountered drifting in all the usual places, and continuous winds so strong neither of us easily could stand upright, or even open the truck doors from the windward side. On the other hand... we just had a band of 40 caribou cross our river just below the house; we had another band of 130 on the move seven miles away; and a band of about 25 swimming across the lake four miles south and we had one cow moose and yesternight's sow grizzly + cub tracks just across the river. And there are between 12 and 20 bald eagles continuously on the few-hundred-yard/meter stretch of river above and below our house. The snow is confined strictly to here. It begins eleven miles south of us and vanishes about 20-25 miles north, so it's just here along the E-W trending high peaks of the Alaska Range. And that's how we greet the end of "summer".... Pix available if I extract them from the camera.
