Settling in

So now I’m in Coldfoot.

We arrived in the evening of May 13^th, and gathered at the visitor center, still closed for the season.  (We'll open up on May 22^nd.)  Bob showed us around quickly, but soon we split up to find our cabins and settle in.

Joe and I are staying in a cabin a short walk away, but other volunteers live a mile up one road or six miles up another.  A few employees live in Wiseman, 13 miles north of Coldfoot.

It took some adjusting, but Joe and I figured things out pretty quickly.  Our cabin has two bedrooms, each with a bunk bed, bookshelf, and dresser.  There is a common area with a kitchen and a table, four chairs, and a couch.  The kitchen has a sink that drains to the outside, a good amount of counter space, a dish drying rack, and a propane stove and oven.  We have no running water or electricity, so we fill up 5-gallon jugs of water at the visitor center and drive them back once every few days, and we have a refrigerator with a freezer, but it’s powered by propane as well, and kept in a little shed just outside our front door.

One of my first priorities was unpacking my clothes into my dresser and my food onto my shelves.  It immediately began to feel like home.  Keeping my hat, sunglasses, water bottles, Orange Cat Coffee cup, electronics, and other odds and ends on top of my dresser sealed the deal.  It’s a nice little place that keeps the mosquitos out, and was pretty clean considering it hadn't been touched since last September.  Well… our fridge did have mold in it that we had to clean out, and I found a mummified mouse in a bottom shelf, but other than that it was just a little dusty.

My standards of living have definitely shifted in the short time I've been here.  Online games, YouTube, and Netflix are unavailable, and I haven’t died of boredom yet.  Beer is pretty expensive at the truck stop, and I just had my first one today since the airport in Anchorage (I had a 3.5 hour layover!).  Alcohol isn't allowed in the cabins, as they are technically federal buildings.  I know I’ve only been here a week, but I really don’t think I’m going to suffer much over the next four months.

My first meal here, by the way, was rice and tuna.  The next morning I had oatmeal with some brown sugar that had been left in the cabin all winter, and for lunch I had Ramen with broccoli.  That night, or maybe the following night, I had macaroni and cheese mixed with peas and tuna, a childhood favorite.  I had enough left over for lunch the next day, so I just stuck the pot with the lid on in the fridge.

In other words, hot meals!  Cheap hot meals!  And the cabin has a percolator, so I can make coffee every morning!  I'm pretty sure I can even avoid vitamin deficiency with the variety of food I got.  So really, it hasn't been too hard to live up here.

The training schedule has been a bit intense, and I think once we open and get schedules a week or two in advance I'll have an even easier time.  Right now, with all of us working the same hours, we’re also all trying to use the one shower and washing machine at the visitor center at the same times, too.  We have one building with free, non-government internet access, and I’m writing this there now because I couldn't do laundry when I wanted.  C'est la vie en Alaska.

Next time I think I'll talk about hiking in the boreal forest, gotta get those pictures uploaded first, though.  Well, here's a preview:

Thanks for reading!

-Rob

Days 3 & 4: The Dalton Highway

So, just to recap:  May 10th I arrived in Fairbanks, May 11th I was trained with the other volunteers on what the Arctic Interagency Visitor Center is and all about the three agencies that run it (National Parks, Fish and Wildlife, Bureau of Land Management). On May 12th we were primarily trained on how to safely drive along the Dalton Highway.

If May 11th and 12th seem a little lopsided, then you've never had to drive the Dalton.

As highways in the United States go, the Dalton, also known as the James W. Dalton Highway, the North Slope Haul Road, or often just the Haul Road, is not particularly long, only about 400 miles.  But it can't really be compared with other U.S. highways.  For one, it isn't completely paved.  Much of the length of it is gravel, sometimes mud, depending on the weather.  Even the paved sections are studded with potholes you could bottom out in and huge bumps that could tip your car over or send it off the road.

Occasionally gravel can be found spread on the asphalt, making sudden braking or tight maneuvers at high speed potentially deadly.  Or the pavement will be a washboard, keeping your car in the air so long that steering becomes impossible.

Any of these conditions can be found on straight, level stretches of road, sharp curves, or steep inclines.  Or, in one case, a sharp curve along an incline.  This is actually known as the "Oh Shit" Curve over the CB radio.

The CB is one of several strategies we were trained to employ.  There are several particularly dangerous blind hills and curves, which are essentially landmarks for the truckers and other regular drivers of the Dalton.  When a driver of a big rig (or semi, or 18-wheeler, or whatever you want to call it) is approaching one of these points, he can call out over CB, "Southbound at Mile 5" or "Northbound at Oh Shit."  For pickup trucks or anything smaller, we say "Northbound four-wheeler approaching Mile 1."  This tells anyone approaching the curve from the other direction to slow down and stay in their lane, avoiding a potentially fatal collision.

The simpler strategies we used were: slow down, stay in your lane, take breaks often, switch drivers as often as possible, slow down even more to pass big trucks and avoid holes and bumps.  50 miles per hour was pretty much our top speed, and often we were forced to go down to 30 or 20 mph on bad stretches.

So, we set out early on May 13th, and I just have to say, the sights along the Dalton Highway are gorgeous.  It begins roughly 30 miles north of Fairbanks, and runs.north through the interior of Alaska up to the Arctic Ocean at Prudhoe Bay.  The settlement there is known as Dead Horse, and I'm not sure why, but I can guess.

Not incidentally, the Dalton follows the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which delivers crude oil from the oil fields up north to Valdez in the south (yes, that Valdez).  This is one of the major reasons the highway was built in the place, to service the pipeline.

The pipeline, like it or not, is responsible for a significant portion of Alaska's economy and state budget.  As a result of income generated by it for the state, Alaska has removed all sales and income tax, although property taxes remain.

Much of the southern portion of the Dalton runs through boreal forest, a type of ecosystem characterized by spruce and birch trees, with a few other hardy species of tree and shrub.  Mosses and lichens cover the forest floor, with occasional tussocks and other grasses.

The first landmark was the Yukon River, which was full of ice floes.  This is only seen for a few weeks each year, when the ice covering the entire river breaks up in the spring.  We got pretty lucky to see it this way, even though this would be a common sight in winter on the Niagara River, which runs by my hometown.

Further north, the boreal forest ended (temporarily), and we entered tundra.  Rocky, nearly barren landscape greeted us, still gray and brown from winter, with patches of snow still on the ground.  But some life clung to this place still.

Soon we were back in the forest, and another landmark presented itself:  the Arctic Circle.  There wasn't much to see besides a sign, but people from all over the world come here to get their pictures taken in front of it.  We arrived just as five bikers from Venezuela were about to leave.  They were riding from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic Ocean.

Finally, after another 40 miles or so, we glimpsed the Brooks Range, a major mountain range that runs east-west in northern Alaska.

Coldfoot sits just within the Brook Range, and when we got here, I was thrilled.  Partly because I know I was finally going to be where I'd been hoping and planning to go since the beginning of the year, but also because I hadn't seen a hint of real civilization in 200 miles, and I knew Coldfoot had, at the very least, a truck stop.

Thanks for reading.

-Rob

Day 2-ish: Getting ready.

I think I’m going to have to start telling this story a little bit out of order.  Or rather, it’s already time to stop thinking of this as a day-by-day chronology, and start looking at big-picture topics.  I know I've only been in Alaska for six days, but still.

First, an overview of the two days before the drive to Coldfoot:

On May 11^th, the morning after I arrived in Fairbanks, Joe and I were driven to a cultural museum by one of our direct supervisors, Jenny.  When we got there, we also met Bryant, our other direct supervisor within the BLM.  Shortly after, the four of us went upstairs to a conference room where we met several others who’d be working with us in Coldfoot, but more importantly at that moment, there were bagels and cream cheese and coffee.

I’m not sure who was there when we got there, and who arrived after, but altogether I met Bob, an employee of the National Parks Service; Chad and Jacklyn, volunteers with the National Parks;  Kristin, employed by the Fish and Wildlife Service; Ryan and Sarah, volunteers with Fish and Wildlife; and Linda and Ray, and Walt and Kathy, two pairs of volunteers serving as campground hosts at Yukon River Crossing and Marion Creek, respectively.

   

We were all there for a marathon training session; the topics included the purposes and activities of each represented agency, the mission of the Arctic Interagency Visitor Center, and the experiences of and issues faced by the various people who have lived in or visited Northern Alaska, including modern day oil companies and native peoples, as well as tourists and travelers.

  

I can’t really make that training session sound interesting, or the one that followed on May 12^th.  Not without relating my own experiences to shore up the information that you can read anywhere else.  However, the topic of the day on May 12^th was driving the Dalton highway, which we did as a group on May 13^th.

                

So before we drive the Dalton highway, let’s finish up in Fairbanks.  At some point on the 11^th, Joe and I were issued a vehicle by BLM.  Essentially, we signed a form (I think we probably did, anyway) and Kelly handed us the keys to a big, ruby red Chevy pickup.  (I really wanted Ruby Red to be our call sign on the CB radio, but apparently we don’t do that sort of thing in the federal government.)  With our new wheels, we were able to get our own meals around town, go grocery shopping, and get from the barracks to the training sessions on our own.

                

We had a couple meals on base.  Dinner was $8 and was only served from 18:00 until 18:45; we were served fettuccini alfredo with shrimp, grilled zucchini and squash, and… memory fails me.  Probably bread?  Definitely a dessert.  My plate was full and I got a salad as well.  I was probably thinking that it would be one of my last big meals, and I wanted to make sure I had some greens and fresh tomatoes.

                

Our breakfast on base was $6, and probably less healthy.  Cheesy scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, hash browns, and all of it greasy and delicious.  Oh, and some kind of pita pocket filled with all the stuff I mentioned before, plus salsa.  Most importantly, there was coffee.

On the 11^th, we took our truck to a grocery/everything store called Fred Meyer.  It’s like a Walmart, and Fairbanks has two of them, and a Walmart.  We were there to stock up on food to last us through the first four weeks of our summer.  Kelly told us to ask for the bush delivery department, which…

Hang on, yeah, I should just mention that grocery stores in Fairbanks have bush delivery departments.  They do not deliver bushes; they pack up deliveries of food that are being sent on small planes to the bush.  Just so we’re clear on that.

Anyway, I asked someone at the meat counter about the getting boxes for bush deliveries for our own groceries for our long drive ahead, but he informed us that department was closed for the day.  However, he had tons of cardboard boxes we could use that he was just going to collapse and recycle.  So he wheeled out a cart of empty boxes, and we selected two each, the ones with the least visible chicken blood soaked in, and filled up our carts with the cheapest pasta, rice, beans, Ramen, hamburger meat, hot dogs, frozen vegetables, canned tuna, and many other high-calorie, low cost foods we could find.  Joe splurged on pork chops.  I made sure I got a big jar of ground Folgers.

Joe’s cashier asked him where he was going.  Mine didn’t, but I told her anyway.  She seemed amused by my excitement about it, but not really that interested.

The other interesting outing was to the Large Animal Research Station in Fairbanks, or LARS.  LARS is at least partly maintained and operated by a woman named Emma, who is a friend of Jenny.  Emma gave a group of us a tour of the facility, which runs a little bit like a small ranch.  But the animals here are kept alive, and also, they are caribou, reindeer, and musk oxen.  I have pictures of this place on my phone, but my phone and computer aren’t speaking to each other, so they are locked here with me for now.

To wrap this all up, by the evening of May 12^th, Joe and I had most of our luggage in our truck, along with a couple boxes full of food, and some more in a freezer at the BLM building in Fairbanks.  We’d been briefed on how to safely drive the Dalton Highway, we had a satellite phone (“sat phone”) and bear spray, and knew how and when to use the CB radio.  I’m pretty sure our dinner was burgers at Carl’s Jr., which Joe confirmed is exactly the same thing as Hardee’s.

                

Next post:  the Dalton Highway.  There will be pictures.

                

Thanks for reading!

                

-Rob

Day 1: Hello, Fairbanks

Okay.  A lot has happened since I arrived in Fairbanks, and I will probably miss several details from the first few days of this trip, but it can't be helped.

So where am I now?  What's going on?  Well, yesterday I arrived in Coldfoot, Alaska.  10 of us, in a 7 vehicle caravan, made the drive ~200 miles north from Fairbanks along the Dalton Highway, also known as the Haul Road.  The Dalton continues an additional 300 miles or so north, to Prudhoe Bay, on the Arctic Ocean.

Forgive my sketchiness on these details, but I only get a bit of Internet allotment per day, and I already spent half of it chatting with someone on Facebook.  Lesson learned, in the future I'll be communicating primarily by email.

Okay, so let's rewind a bit to this past Sunday, May 10th.  I woke up at about 4:30 AM to catch a 7:30 flight from Buffalo to Chicago O'Hare.  From there, I had a 6.5 hour flight to Anchorage, and a final short flight in a turboprop 80-passenger plane to Fairbanks.  I arrived in Fairbanks at 5:30 PM Alaska time, which is 4 hours behind Buffalo.  So it felt like 9:30 PM to me.

I took a taxi and told the driver that I had to get to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) barracks at Fort Wainwright.  These were the instructions I'd been given, and I had an address, just in case, but I didn't really know what to expect.  Turns out, Fort Wainwright is a U.S. military base (an Army "post," to use proper terminology), which I really should have seen coming.  I had to register at the front office, and the driver had to come in with me.  They took our licenses, and the driver's insurance and registration, and within about 5 or 10 minutes we each had little stamped pieces of paper that told the assault rifle-wielding guards that it was okay for us to enter.  I'm pretty sure the wait involved a mini-background check on each of us.

So I arrived at the barracks at about 6:15, and my new coworker and roommate, Joe, greeted me out front, and helped me bring my bags to our room.  Joe told me that a lot of the other people staying the barracks were "hotshots," the wilderness firefighters who risk their lives to bring wildfires under control.  The first hotshots I'd ever heard of were a crew who all died fighting a fire that suddenly changed direction and surrounded them.  I was immediately humbled by every man and woman I saw there wearing a hotshot or smokejumper t-shirt.  The smokejumpers are also wilderness firefighters, but they get dropped in by plane or helicopter and parachute into the site.  The extra equipment they bring weighs them down, which often causes leg injuries from the heavy landing.  Needless to say, around these people I felt like a serious dweeb.

At around 9 PM, Joe and I met Kelly, a higher-up at BLM who would be making sure we'd be well-prepared for our summer ahead.  Kelly took us to a place where we could buy dinner, since we'd been stuck on base without transportation, or a good idea of where to go even if we had a car.  Joe had actually arrived in the middle of the night and had been there all day.  After dinner, Kelly showed us around Fairbanks, and we saw the University of Alaska at Fairbanks (UAF), a botanical garden, and a pond where migratory waterfowl congregate, including sandhill cranes, although we only saw a couple ducks as we drove by.

Fairbanks still looks like a frontier town.  The overall architectural style is dominated by log cabin aesthetics or simple prefabricated structures.  National fast food and big box store chains generally stick to their usual look, but Kelly pointed out one store that was forced to shut down because the building was constructed without Fairbanks winters in mind.

Fairbanks is in the interior of Alaska, and the interior is shaped by extremes in temperature.  Summers can be 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and winters can get to 40 or 50 below zero, depending on where exactly you are.  The record is somewhere below -80 degrees at Prospect Creek, and no one knows for sure because the thermometer broke.

This also explains a curious thing Joe pointed out:  without exception, every car in Fairbanks has an extension cord poking out from under the hood.  And many parking lots, including the one at the BLM barracks, has an outlet in front of every parking space.  Kelly explained that cars in Fairbanks are equipped with electric heaters that get left on during the winter nights, since -40 degree temperatures cause motor oil and other fluids to freeze, and attempting to start the engine in that state would essentially destroy it.

Kelly returned Joe and I to our barracks after the tour, and I think I ended up finally getting to bed at about 11:30 PM, which felt like 3:30 AM to me, making it a 23-hour day.  Since it still looked like twilight out, it was difficult to feel sleepy, even though I was exhausted.  But we shut the blackout curtain over the window, and I finally got a few hours of sleep.

More later, and pictures will come soon.  Thanks for reading!

-Rob

Reincarnation

The Alaska Adventure.  The Coldfoot Chronicles.  The Rumble in the Tundra.

I could go on, but I'll spare you.  Instead, I'll tell you what this is all about.  In 17 days, I will be flying to Fairbanks, Alaska.  I'll spend a few days there training and preparing before driving north along the Dalton Highway to Coldfoot, a "census-designated place" boasting the world's northernmost truck stop, according to Wikipedia.

Coldfoot is also home to the Arctic Interagency Visitor Center (AIVC), where I'll be working as a volunteer from mid-May through early September.  The AIVC is jointly operated by the Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Parks Service.  I'm very excited to begin working with people from each of these agencies, and make every visitor's experience as pleasant and informative as possible.

However, for the purposes of Handsome Science, I plan on chronicling my off-the-clock experiences.  I'll be hiking and camping whenever I can, and taking photos along the way.  I'll try to pay close attention to anything outside of my usual experiences, and dig as deep as I can to understand the life and landscape around me.

I don't have much else to report today, but if you think you'll be interested in future updates, subscribe or become a member to the blog for email notifications.  (It's been a long time, and I'm not really sure where to click.  Email me at handsomescienceblog@gmail.com if you're not sure either, and I can figure it out.)

Thanks for reading!

How We Know: GJ 1214 b, a Planet 40 Lightyears from Earth, Has Water

In December 2009, astronomers noticed a star they had been observing, known as GJ 1214 (there are billions of stars in our galaxy; they can't all have imaginative names) gave off a little less light about once every 38 hours.  This was a telltale sign that a planet was orbiting, and it was exactly what these astronomers were looking for.

Artist's impression of GJ 1214 b passing its star, by ESO/L. Calçada.

These astronomers were working on the MEarth Project, looking at thousands of red dwarf stars, named for their color and size. (Yes, astronomers call a star many times larger than Jupiter a "dwarf."  You should see what they call "giants.")  GJ 1214 is one of these red dwarfs, and its only known planet earned the name GJ 1214 b (the star itself would be considered GJ 1214 a, if you were wondering).

By 2009, planet-hunting had become a science (ha ha).  Get a powerful telescope (the more, the merrier), aim at a patch of sky, feed the data into a computer program, and wait.  The computer will scan the images, looking for changes in brightness in all the stars in view.  When a planet gets in between its star and us, it blocks some of the light, and the stars brightness dips.  Since a planet has a regular orbit, it will cause these dips on a regular schedule.  Anyone out in space looking at our star from the right angle will see it dip a bit once every year as we pass by.  They'd see a much bigger dip every 12 years as Jupiter passes by, since it blocks much more light.

But even though we're getting the process down, the number of planets we know of is still only about 760, much fewer than the 160 billion we estimate are out there orbiting other stars, not to mention the trillions we think are free-floating throughout the galaxy.

Cartoonish view of planets in the galaxy, by ESO/M. Kornmesser.

With only 760 confirmations (so far), we can take a closer look at each, and really try to find out as much as possible about them.

But what can we learn from a dip of starlight?  You might be surprised.

On Evolution, one species "evolving from" another, and "living fossils"

Humans did not evolve from chimpanzees.

Humans did evolve from apes.

Both sentences are true, and there's an important distinction here.  While it's also true that chimpanzees are humanity's closest living relative on the tree of life, the creatures we evolved from were not chimpanzees, but rather a separate, extinct species that gave rise to us both.  Yes, these ancient apes were perhaps closer to chimps than to us by most standards of measurement, but that doesn't make them chimps.

These apes gave rise not just to chimps and ourselves, but also to a host of other species in the Homo genus:  homo habilus, homo erectus, and homo neanderthalensis.  And they were preceded by other species in the Australopithecus genus, of which Lucy is the most famous example.

None of these ancestors of ours were simply replaced by the next in line.  Life is not like that.  Species fight to stay alive and produce a new generation, but all of these species in our close family tree failed to do so, once.  And once is all it takes.

It sounds odd that none of our close relatives survived to the present day.  After all, many were more intelligent than the other apes alive today.  Some made tools, Neanderthals even had the beginnings of symbolic and spiritual culture.  So what happened?

Well, some of these species possibly all changed very gradually over time, as new genes developed from random mutations, and the beneficial ones spread through the population.  Some species probably split off into several populations, some staying in the trees, and others spending more time on the ground.  Selective pressures altered the populations in different ways, and then at some point one population or the other died out.  Perhaps driven to starvation when the other group became more successful at acquiring food.

Actually, it shouldn't seem too surprising that we are the only surviving members of our genus.  The vast, vast majority of all species that have existed on earth are extinct.  Long ago, even the human species was nearly wiped out.  When you compare the gene pool of everyone in the world, it's clear we came from a very small population far back in our past, perhaps a few thousand individuals.

Let's go back to the chimps.  Because chimpanzees are probably more similar to our shared relatives than we are, it isn't fair to call them "less evolved."  They've survived just as well as we have in these past few million years, with completely different adaptations than our hairless bodies and bulbous brains.

As another example, think of the coelacanth, that fossil fish with four lobed fins that might one day have evolved into legs.  Fossils of this fish were known before a living one was discovered by Western science in the 20th century (apparently locals had been eating them for generations), and so the fish was dubbed the "living fossil."  But let's give the fish some credit.  The oceans have not stayed exactly the same for the millions of years from when its fossilized ancestor swam with the ichthyosaurs to today.  To say the coelacanth is unevolved would be unfair and untrue.  Adaptations to body chemistry, foraging habits, breeding habits, and possible migration patterns could all have taken place (the continents have been steadily shifting position during this species' time on Earth, for instance) without major changes to the shape of its body.

So this is a toast to all those "under-evolved" species:  to the chimpanzees who do not need huge brains to find good food to eat, to the coelacanths who do not need legs to find a mate, to all the amphibians who will reproduce just fine as long as there is freshwater to be found, I say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.