Let the sun shine in

What the heck is that?

Look what peeked over the ridge and through the trees today. Mark it. January 7, the first time sunlight has hit the East Pole since mid November. Always a special day in this country. That's the highest it rose today, right about local noon or what I have learned recently is called solar noon which is around 2 p.m. daylight savings time because of some government manipulation of time zones and daylight savings as well. This stuck with me ever since I read it years ago. Something said by a wise Native American: "Only the white man would cut one end off a blanket, sew the piece to the other end and think he had a longer blanket."

From my perspective, the sun rose around 2:15 p.m. and set around 2:25. Of course officially we had 5 hours and 30 minutes of daylight with the rise at 10:22 a.a. and setting at 3:52 p.m.but here a high hill to the south blocks it for much of the day.

Given the present climate conditions I would rather have seen obscuring clouds. That would have warmed us up considerably. Yesterday with some cloud cover the temperature ruse to minus 6 — heat wave. After much complaining about winter coming late this year, for most of the last two weeks the daily high has been well below zero. The coldest I saw was minus 18, but that is because of my elevation. Just 12 miles away the town of Talkeetna lived through several days in the minus 20s and flirted with minus 30 a couple of times. This cold is predicted to last at least a couple more days. 

Farther north I have friends wrestling with the minus 40s and occasionally minus 50.

Philosophically this is the Alaska a lot of us came for, the harsh climate that tests us and challenges us and toughens us and sends a lot of people hightailing it back where they came from.

I am running out of some things and planned to go out this week to do a little shopping, but maybe I am getting older, I have no taste for riding around on a snowmachine at minus 20 though that never stopped me in the past. The tragedy of it all? I only have about two more days worth of Oreo cookies. Hoping to go day after tomorrow when the forecast is for temperature slightly above zero. We shall see.

And then there's this: