Through the Lens: Winter

Cemetery

Boat frozen into the harbor

Frosty

More of the cemetery

Nome sweet home

Color in a white land

More frostiness

Ups and Downs

This has been a week of ups and downs in more ways than one. The day after my birthday was the worst. It started out quite well -- we spent the snowy day snowshoeing up King Mountain and sledding back down.  

I got the most epic GoPro shots yet, but alas, I will never see those shots. 

GoPro: Hiking to a Dredge

It's finally here: My GoPro HD Hero2! Took it out for a practice run yesterday to snowshoe to one of the gold dredges just outside of town. Took some getting used to, and I still need to work on stabilization and composing my shots better, but it's not too bad, all things considered. 

It was about -8 degrees when we left, but got increasingly windier as we got closer to the dredge and dropped to about -20 with windchill. I was feeling pretty close to mild hypothermia in the dredge so I stopped filming once I couldn't press the buttons on the camera anymore (we did make it to the top of the dredge though!). Managed to get a couple more shots on the way back through a ground blizzard, which looked pretty spectacular in the sunlight!

January on the Tundra

January has been an interesting month so far. Work has been moderately busy with various publication-related projects, but otherwise relatively uneventful. The last couple weekends have been warm enough to bring on winter storms and thus great snowshoeing opportunities. 

Battling the blowing snow

Hello (2013), Goodbye (2012)!

2012, what a year. A week before the 2012 New Year, I had only JUST seen snow on the ground for the first time in my life, and now I live in the arctic and trudge through it every day to work. A year ago this month, I was in Honduras, exploring Mayan ruins and snorkeling through the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef system for school. Just 2 months later I found myself in Iceland, doing volunteer work, hiking across lava fields, waterfalls, and glaciers. Two months after that, I graduated with two Bachelors of Arts degrees, high honors, and a bunch of awards. And after turning down 5 job offers, a month later I landed in bush Alaska where I now sit tooting my own horn because, hell, that was quite a year and it deserves a little shout-out! 

December photos

So much for coming up with some deep, thought-provoking, reflective Christmas post like I'd planned to do last week. But I have no complaints -- I've been having too much fun and staying too busy to philosophize lately. And besides, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, so I'll let the photos do most of the talking. :)

S'no place like Nome for the Holidays...

Despite the mild melancholy of not being home for the holidays, so far December has been bit more exciting than November, which I will get to momentarily. 

To begin, there is still almost no snow; today the newspaper reported an all-time record low snowfall last month, as we received only 0.2 inches instead of the average 12.1 inches! Climate change in action, I tell you! In addition, the air temps averaged about 14 degrees F last month, as opposed to the usual 16 degrees.