Curses!!!

For those who submitted comments which didn't show up on the last two posts (and are now there) - SORRY!!! Some spammer put a b.s. comment on a bunch of blogs last month including mine, and I guess while I was trying to figure out how to delete it I accidentally changed a setting which subsequently blocked comments unless I approved. I can't tell you how many times I checked the blog for comments, saw none, and wondered where everyone had gone (especially the inimitable Pail Rider)!!! Well, welcome back! And thanks so much for the comments.

Not surprisingly, it's a winter wonderland around here now. So far this season in Anchorage we've had 17.9 inches of snow, with 14.8 inches of that in November (the October snow melted the following day). The majority of the November snow is still around though it shrunk up a bit today under balmy 34 degree skies. Oh, and for the record, the first November snowfall of about 6 inches resulted in 146 accidents and 86 single-car "ditch divers", and that's just what was actually reported to the police. Oops.

On another note, I've heard that you could see Denali from Anchorage (known Outside as Mt. McKinley), and always kind of wondered if that was true because it didn't really seem possible. Maybe just a bit of puffery by the tourism board or something. Well, I went out on the coastal trail along the Cook Inlet the other day for the first time, and on the way back in I saw some white clouds hovering suspiciously above a thick layer of dark clouds far off to the north-northwest. A quick look through the 10x binoculars (and then the 12x camera) confirmed some of that white was clouds, but at left was clearly a snowy peak illuminated by the setting sun. I'll be damned - Denali is 135 miles away from where I was standing on a direct line as the crow flies, and there it was. That would be like seeing the St. Louis Arch from Osage Beach at Lake of the Ozarks, or from the Mizzou campus plus 20 miles. I know, I know, newsflash - at over 20,000 feet it's a big mountain.

I noticed the term Outside for the first time a while back in an article in the paper about poachers being "held in an Outside jail." I assumed at the time, I think not unreasonably, there was a town called Outside (after all, there is a town called Unalaska, Alaska). But then it popped up weeks later in a couple of unrelated stories and I figured it either had to be a real hotspot at the center of a lot of news stories, or it was slang for the Lower 48. It's the latter. I like it.

Thanks to my cousin Crystal and her man Trevor I got hooked up with some snowshoes, and tried them out today for the first time. They would be those yellow things down in the snow, and they're really great.


And another pic back at the truck after I was done with a clearer look at the new kicks:

Be careful - don't let that blazing 3:30 pm sun blind you! We're down to 7 hours of daylight (compared to 10 right now in St. Louis), on our way to 5 1/2 at the solstice in about a month (compared to about 9 1/2 in STL). At that point the sun will rise at about a 10:15 am and set at about 3:40 pm. For some reason the crazy sunlight in the summer never really threw me, but not unexpectedly the winter thing is already kind of weird. Not so much for total hours of sun, but for how extremely low in the sky the sun is while it is actually up and the long, long shadows even at mid-day. I can't imagine what it's like up North. Conditions haven't been too picture friendly, especially on days I've happened to be out and about, but rest assured I'll hook it up here at some point. Plenty of winter ahead. And I found a great place to get a picture of downtown with the Inlet in the foreground and the Chugach Mountains in back - if only I was ever there when the weather was cooperating (tried today before I headed out snowshoeing - no dice).

When I lived in CA it wasn't cold during the winter, and one of my beefs with STL weather was that it would get painfully cold at times but without the benefit of much snow, or snow that lasted for more than a day or two when it did fall. I figure if you're going to endure cold, you may as well get something out of it (like when I was a kid in Michigan with plenty of sledding, cross-country skiing, ice skating, snow forts and snowball fights). We're well on our way up here so far snow-wise, I've had my first ever snowshoeing experience, and I wouldn't be surprised if a rented-gear cross-country skiing excursion popped up here on the blog before all is said and done...