04 Tuesday Jan 2022
Tags
#enespañol, #nosol, Alaska, Barrow, North, Oscar Alajandro, Utqiagvik, Visitor, Vlog
Someone (Oscar Alajandro) one from Venezuela recently put together a video on our little town in the edge of nowhere. My fiance assures me that it’s worth watching. I can see a few errors (For example, there are definitely more communities north of us than he suggests), but overall, it’s certainly an interesting view.
18 Saturday Sep 2021
Posted in Alaska, Bad Photography
Tags
Alaska, Arctic, Bear, Nature, North, Photography, Photos, Polar Bear, Wildlife
Way back when I first saw the ad for a social science professor at Iḷisaġvik College, I remember pulling up the college website to fight a polar bear alert on the front page. Now some might have found this a bug, but I can assure you that for me this was a definite feature. I really wanted to see this place. As it happens, polar bears don’t show up that often, and when they do, it seems that I’m always busy. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to get up close and personal with one of these guys; I just enjoy seeing them from time to time, and especially when I have a camera handy.
So, I’m sitting in the cafeteria during the orientation for this semester when a notice goes out telling us there is a polar bear on the beach, just across from our buildings. The point of the alert is of course to let us know that we shouldn’t wander out that way (at least not on foot), but they do sometimes have an ironic effect. I desperately wanted to take a really long bathroom break right then and then, but I managed to hold myself together long enough to take advantage of a legitimate lunch break.
…and then the bear stuck around for a couple of days. Apparently, a walrus carcass had washed ashore nearby and he was munching on that in between naps on the beach and out on the ice. Eventually the local Wildlife department moved the carcass, but not before I and half the town got plenty of pictures.
So, yeah! Polar bears do happen!
Click to embiggen!
Of course Moni got the best pics!
30 Sunday May 2021
Posted in Alaska, Bad Photography
Tags
Alaska, Arctic, Aurora Borealis, Lights, Night, North, Northern Lights, Sky, Winter
It’s been awhile since I have posted anything, and we are now in 24-hour sunlight here in Barrow, so I am missing the light displays we had this winter. The northern lights don’t always make a substantial showing up this way, but this year, they put on a show that wasn’t half bad.
Of course, being a grumpy old bastard, I’m not always keen to drive out of the light pollution here in town to take pics in the freezing cold, and it doesn’t help that my camera these days isn’t great for night pics, but my gal, Moni, is still blessed with joy when she sees them, and she is always happy to drag me out onto ‘cake-eater road’ where we can take these pictures and I can grumble about the whole thing here in this gigantic run-on sentence.
Yeah, that’s just how I roll!
Often as not, I am glad that Moni makes me go out and take pictures with her, but I’ll be damned if my fingers don’t stay mad sometimes for hours. Hot chocolate helps.
In any event, we gots pics!
I took mine with my phone, so they aren’t the greatest, but some of these are kinda cool.
(Click to embiggen)
02 Tuesday Feb 2021
01 Friday Jan 2021
Posted in Alaska
Tags
2021, Alaska, Arctic, Celebration, Fireworks, Happy New Year, New year, North, Winter
Moni and I spent the last couple hours before midnight, waffling as to whether or not we were going to head out and watch the fireworks show. See, fireworks don’t mean much up this way around early July. The big fireworks display in Barrow occurs on January First. And with most people in their cars (because it’s cold out there!), social distancing is a big can-do for this kind of thing. We heard different things about the prospects for fireworks this year, but in the end, the celebration was on. …not-so-much the gatherings that normally occur in the school afterwards, but fireworks? That part was definitely on! Only thing is Moni and I were both tired and feeling rather wimpy about the cold. In the last hour, we had decided we were definitely not going. Then decided to go in the last 15 minutes before midnight.
Hopefully, our inability to make a decision last night has more to do with the lingering effects of 2020 than the coming patterns of 2021. Either way, it was beautiful. I missed the chance to record the grand finale, and if my hand could talk, it would have been calling me names the entire time, but I recorded a decent chunk of the celebration. Moni got the finale.
Anyway, 2020 is finally behind us. Happy New Year!
Stay negative people!!!
02 Friday Feb 2018
Posted in Alaska
As I walked to work this morning, it suddenly dawned on me that the fog had given us a rather pretty day. So, yeah, this is basically a random video taken a few steps outside our home.
P.S.: NARL stands for the old Naval Arctic Research Laboratories.
northierthanthou 