biking in denali



last weekend Blaine, Katie, Jason and I headed down to go biking in Denali NP before the park road opens up to the busses. during the off-season you can drive your own vehicle in to Teklaneka, which is about mile 30 on the road. from there we were hoping to maybe make it out to Polychrome Pass, which looked like a pretty good possibility until we got closer and closer to Sable Pass.....

needless to say, it was a bit snowy! there was some hail, some snow, some wind, lots of mud. we had a great time despite making a short distance. good company, good scenery, and good exercise, heading up the pass! i think i may have hit my pedals twice on the entire way down...we ate a good amount of mud
katie and blaine biking across the Teklaneka River
Jason checking out the sow grizzly and cub on the banks of the river. Note that he is covered in mud. i {heart} being covered in mud!

the bears on the river for all the tourists to see...Jason drove home and we talked while Katie and Blaine passed out hard. We had just stopped at Rosa's Cafe on the Parks Hwy for dinner (which is usually quite good, but rather disappointing this time around. i don't recommend the halibut dinner... four fishsticks will not sufficiently feed two people, come to find out.)

some serious northern exposure.


this last week i headed up north. really north - to toolik field station north of the brooks range.
here, of course, is my picture next to the sign declaring that we were at the arctic circle. come to find out some friends have GPS'd this sign, and it isn't really spot on. but i'm not going to split hairs here - there's no doubt that around this point at some time we crossed the line. and i now have joined the hoards with the same picture, different person, to prove it.



to get up to Toolik I drove with some guys heading up from Fairbanks to do various GIS/sampling tasks for a week. the road is several hundred miles long, largely dirt. not being authorized i couldn't help on the driving. honestly that was really quite nice- jason and andrew were fabulous in getting us up and back safely, and i was happy to not have to dodge huge trucks barreling down in the other direction.

andrew acted as a great tour guide up and back, having himself done the trip approximately a billion times. not only has he driven back and forth, but has spent a great deal of time off exploring and was a wealth of knowledge.


alright- this is a terrible picture of toolik. but really it is a bunch of outbuildings in a compound up just north of the brooks range. it was one of the coolest science facilities that i have spent time at. the staff was great, the food was *incredible*, and all in all i was disappointed to not have more work to do up there. one week was fabulous, but it would be well worth more time.

science certainly was done while i was there, but additionally ken and i got out to have some fun.
we took a half day and got a ride to adigun gorge where we hiked in to a really great waterfall. indeed, this was hiking within the arctic national wildlife refuge. i can now say, i've been to anwr, but this can't even begin to scratch the surface. it was incredible, and well deserving of a great deal of time....i'll definitely be back.


it had snowed the day before, and the sheep trails were super highlighted along the sides of the mountains


this giant frozen waterfall came out of a hole! there's no scale here, but it was at least 40 ft high (i'm terrible at this kind of estimating...i could be way off, but it was big. really really big)

ken scrambled up to try to capture the sheep trails. and i captured him trying to do this. note the rubber boots...maybe this is common up north, but it's the first time i've spent so much time in rain boots without any rain.

a view from our lunch spot.

the necessary self-portrait.

another day we skiied out to check out some overflow. caribou = everywhere


please note that camping opportunities abound.




willows trapped in the overflow.


many many thanks to ken for such a great week!!!
music was played. buds were counted, buds were lost, science happened.
i greatly appreciated the ideas and thoughts throughout the week that went back and forth
please stay tuned for a ground-breaking paper on ptarmigan and willows...so much counting must count for something.

my backyard.

the weekend i got back from juneau, jen, rob, justine, aerin and i headed down to delta to float the clearwater river. we were a little early on the bird-front, but it was a wonderful welcome-back to the boreal forest and home after being gone to southeast for over a week.

justine, checking on the bird-situation.

it was kind of like being a small child, sitting in between jen and rob and just basking in the sun...

here's an ice shot. we figured we'd try to get some hardcore picture of us with icebergs, but this is as best as we got. looks intense, huh??

mama and her calf, munching on the aquatic veg. yeah for the end of winter!!!
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** the next weekend (just this past saturday) cory, lauren, morgan, zoe and i headed up and hiked from angel rocks to chena hotsprings. it was a beautiful day, with good views, good people, finishing with a good soak in the springs.



stopping to have some food at the top of the ridge, looking southeast

cory demonstrating something or another that was, apparently, quite funny...


zoe had a great time and was one fast dog along the trail!!

lauren, morgan and zoe hiking up to the ridge

who knew returning an ipod could be so much fun..



after chris' ipod stopped working i realized that i had become hopelessly addicted after just a few short months. so yes, i caved and on monday went to the tech center to buy a new ipod.
so then i'm all happy and listening to 'this american life' on my run yesterday. after two episodes i still had a few miles to go, and was all excited to listen to the 'run run run' playlist i had made myself (which begins with the first part of the 'hippity hop' hiphop cd megan made me!!)

right.
except that the middle 'select' button had ceased to function. ack! i had to run down sheep creek road, the longest most boring road in my head, without music.


today i decided that the 'select' button was never going to come back on, and so went back to the tech center to return it. this, as i should have figured, took forever.
but in the meantime, justine and i got to play with the apple computer for sale with a built-in camera!

pray that we don't have to return to the tech center soon....who knows what other options may be available with that computer. i can't imagine how much LESS work i would get done if i had one of those camera things. lordy


well, springtime is so very much here and i love it.
a few days ago i busted out my bike, an example of which is pictured above (thanks to the gary fisher website) and rode up chena ridge to play scrabble with em and melissa. i lost horribly (i'm not usually quite that bad....) but melissa and tom have a great new house - though i had definitely forgotten how very steep it is getting up to the top of chena ridge!

the ride home was *amazing* and beautiful, with the alaska range in the distance and the sun setting lower in the sky at 930 and the temps still high enough to not be cold flying down the road.

i forget how much i enjoy biking.



here's nola and i, me with my old bike, last april in denali.
the park road should be opening soon - gotta get back down there again before that happens!!

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in other fitness news, i ran my 16 miles yesterday.
http://www.mapmyrun.com/user_profile?username=rachelerrin
this is a great website (there seems to be quite a few of similar ones out there) to map out run routes and view them on satellite images. the elevation feature doesn't seem to work here, but it's still nice to map some things out from my desk before having to drive it all.

so after the 16 miles i feel pretty good, remarkably! shins are okay. achilles is well, not as good as it was before i ran, but not terrible.
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trapped at a bar in fairbanks

i'm not sure if anyone reads this any longer... i don't update it all that often. however, since i'm trapped at the bar currently, i thought what the hell.
so yeah. i'm trapped at the red fox in fairbanks. after a failed attempt at the post office, i went to the coffee shop to do some work before meeting a friend just down the way at the bar at six. so six came and i went to the bar, we ateand had some beer and generally fabulous conversation. so then nine rolls around and it's time to go warm up the cars and head on home. right. except come to find out it's hovering around at least -30F and my car, after 5+ hours of sitting there, is entirely uninterested in starting. awsome. so adrian gave me one of her extension cords, and that combined with mine reached to the building to plug in my car. so now i'm sitting here in the red fox, waiting for my car's battery, oil pan, and engine block to warm up enough to allow oil and all that other good stuff to flow around properly. let's cross our fingers that it starts.....the music was terrible terrible on the jukebox, so i put in $1, but my songs haven't come up yet. someone loaded it up with generally horrible music, but i have yet to resort to my headphones. that seems like it would just be weird.
to my rescue, emily has come to hang out and drink a beer with me while i wait. ahhh, winter in fairbanks. indeed it was +20F just a week ago. how quickly things change...
in the words of manu chao:
hay dos cosas ciertas - el muerte y el cambio.

Santaland Diaries


So i'm heading out tonight to see the Santaland Diaries, a play adapted from David Sedaris' semi-tragic story of being a holiday elf.

Listen to it HERE
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an excerpt that, for various reasons, particularly speaks to me:

"...they asked us why we wanted to be elves.

which when you think about it is a fairly tough question.

i told the interviews that i wanted to be an elf because...because it was
the most ridiculous thing i'd ever heard of. i figured that for once in my life
i thought i'd be completely honest and see how far it got me."
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I can't even begin to describe how funny it is. I love David Sedaris and have to say that I am floored and excited that he is coming to Fairbanks on May 1st.


Happy Birthday, Chris!!
i figured, with you being down in Nicaragua and all, I could most effectively send you virtual birthday wishes. in addition, I have all of these old (and some not so old) pictures that were worth putting up. All of my love to you, little brother.

always sleeping in the sailboat....it's amazing that you stayed awake for Sea Semester given your history.

i love this picture of dad. it's from 1978 and it's classic.

i have no doubt that you remember my 18th birthday and our trip up tuckerman's ravine. you had amazing patience that day with your sister and i thank ya for it...what song did we listen to on your weather radio up in the bowl? that was a great day...and you're so cute and little looking!

just a reminder of what your sister looks like. okay. looked like.

haha. you were so sick when dad took you lobstering. man he was worried about you out in the carribbean


again, your sister. lookin' good on the AT back in the day


and finally, here we are with Body back in the day.

time moves in a linear direction

so i'm at lulu's bread & bagels - a great coffeeshop in fairbanks. free coffee refils as long as you want, good music, free internet. in addition, at least on saturdays and on several other days of the week as well, you're more than likely going to see a solid percentage of people you know and enjoy in fairbanks.

alright. but i'm here to do work (ack. on my plant physiology lecture tomorrow on 'Mycorrizal Associations' don't you wish you could be there?) however i just went to get some water and felt inspired to throw something down in words. maybe not too eloquently, but i'll put it down anyways.

so why did getting water in my nalgene prompt this inspiration? it was the water bubbler. one of those like in an office, blue 5-gal bubbler. the very same as i had all of last year for drinking, brushing my teeth, washing my dishes, cooking my food. and now how easily water just flows out of a tap!
so i'm getting water out of the bubbler, thinking about last year in my wee cabin. and there's folky music on (maybe kris delmhorst?) and i'm flashing back to new england. to the various concerts, folk festivals, beautiful people i know and love. and it feels like a lifetime ago.

daily i've been feeling incredibly thankful for such a rich and ever-changing life. time, indeed, moves in a linear direction. (but, as john put it during a strange game during thanksgiving, light does not) each day in this world is everything - it can be all you have. but at the same time, it's just another piece of life, of the adventure that is day-to-day which becomes month-to-month, year-to-year and so on and so forth.

and as i head to school, sun still not up at 8am, full pot of coffee drank & granola eaten, singing and dancing, i am forever grateful for all of this time and my everyday piece of the world.

turkey day

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!


This year I celebrated turkey day with my friend Katie and her wonderful family. They adopted a number of us to join them for the day! Such good company and good food!

left to right: John, me, Amy, Katie V, Justine, Blaine



This is Blaine in our kitchen, working on his super yummy stuffed mushrooms... please notice the fabulous Tom Brady poster on the fridge. Indeed, this is the same poster I got from the Wells Dunkin Donuts and sent to Maura many years ago. hm. She gave it back to me...I think Blaine likes it as much as she did. Too bad!

This is my roommate.
There are no words to describe.

Blaine passing Justine some of John's amazing bread

Katie, sitting next to her sister Lisa, talking with John
We all went around the table and said what we were thankful for...
my personal favorite - Justine is thankful for the cultivation and distribution of coffee.

A view down the other end of the table. Family friends shared in the feast...folks that Katie and her sisters all grew up with.

All in all it was a great day. We went skiing for a bit on the slough
(Blaine stating that, "I don't think I like cross-country skiing...if I'm going to fall I may as well be going fast" .. he loves it.)
made and ate great food
and spent time with great people.

Then we went to see Borat. Wicked disturbing.
And now I'm procrastinating in a serious way from working on my lecture on mycorrhizae for my plant physiology course. Eek. I really don't want to work on it. So instead I'm updating this, sitting in my office on a Saturday, with the sun streaming in. Which, in fact, is beautiful!! The sun sets in about an hour (around 3:30pm) and it's about -25F outside. So I'm not in a bad place right now.

Back to work!

25 below zero

it's tuesday morning around 720am. justine gave me a ride to the auto shop this morning, and then off to school. so here i am, rather sleepy, sitting and listening to NPR and thinking about starting to do some work (goal today = get *something* done. anything, really, would be good). hoping hoping hoping that the car doesn't have something terrible wrong with it! and thinking about updating this here blog-thing more often. this is sparked mostly from reading Tash's blog (see links!) and Nola's blog on myspace. so good to read words from these wonderful wonderful women.

so indeed it is around -25F out today. something about the pollution in the air (gotta love fairbanks, but lordy the air quality is bad in the winter) made the light from the street lamps shoot straight up in these light spikes. sunrise at 940 am. sunset, probably around 430...alright. gonna put out some pictures from our trip to kanuti in october!


i'm unable to find MSPaint on my computer. hm. So i can't highlight on this wee map where we were. but i can describe. Fairbanks, here, is right above the 'K' in ALASKA. We drove ~170 miles up the Haul Rd. (Dalton "highway"), to appx. 30 miles south of Coldfoot, AK and about 10 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Then it was a ~9mile hike almost due west from the road to the hotsprings, following south of the Kanuti River.


Ken and Freya along the Haul Rd, gearing up to go
Ken and Laura, up on the ridge. Lordy it was windy. Yet another buffeting in life.

Drinking one of the PBRs that Danny threw in his backpack on the way out. Mmmm...essentially water


Chrissy, Jon and Freya working their way up the hill. Fraya enjoyed herself, trying to catch ptarmigan the whole way along the ridge

socked in on the backside of caribou mtn, wicked happy to have a compass in my pocket! also glad that i took a bearing on the way out near the car. it hadn't fully occured to me that when you are so close to the pole the magnetic pull is crazy. my bearing was probably 30 degrees off! so to get back to the car, which was nearly due east, i would have needed to work back nearly due NE

me, walking through the tussocks, after the clouds lifted

ken and laura, at the final push down to the hotsprings. the kanuti river is in the top right, and you can somewhat see a small meadow just to the left of the river. that's where we were headed..getting through that burned slope just below these guys in the picture, and then through the veritable swamp at the bottom, was a pain.in.the.ass.!! but so very well worth it.

freya sleeping in front of the hotsprings pool...

Colorado in September

these pictures are from the flight back from CO, but since this is where they uploaded to, this is where they'll stay! I took them from the plane on the way home to Fairbanks. The mountain shots are of Denali and the Alaska Range around her! Then there's a shot of the Tanana River as we passed through the cloud layer coming into Fairbanks...ahh, the beautiful colors of fall in interior AK!




During September a bunch of us from UAF headed down to Estes Park, CO for the Long Term Ecological Research group's All Scientists Meeting (LTER ASM!)
Up here, most of us work for the Bonanza Creek LTER
Check out the nationwide network!
I got to go, paid for by said network, as I am one of the graduate student site representatives, along with Kelly, for BNZ!
It was beautiful, as well as being an interesting conference with scientists working all over the country and the world present.


We skipped out one morning to go hiking in Rocky Mtn National Park...what a different ecosystem than interior AK!!


From left to right, Katie, Blaine, Evan, me, Dana!

equinox marathon



here's the top of ester dome, cory coming up on the far right, leg #2 of the marathon!


team F.T.J.!
we came in 16th out of 60 relay teams



Justine waiting for Lorien to finish up leg #2



Lorien, after 9 grueling miles, handing off the bib to Justine!
He rocked it, coming in 6th out of all of the 2nd leg runners!!!

Salmon fishin' in Chitina, AK!

So I've gone twice now, dip net fishing for sockeye salmon on the Copper River, outside of Chitina, AK. It's about 90 miles north of Valdez, appx. 350 miles south of Fairbanks. It's beautiful!!!
the view from our fishing spot...the river is STRONG! and the mountains, amazing
Amy on this last trip with her first fish. Check it out - the sun is actually setting!!
yeehaw! a sow grizzly and her cub, kicking it on the other side of the river. so cool.


Blaine with a fish from just this past weekend

Me, over the fourth of July, with a fish!

Alright. So Knut, my advisor, told me that this was hokey and silly. And never to do it again. But I think I look cute! So what if I'm rod and reel fishing in a glacial river for spawning salmon who aren't actually eating anything....
Blaine's super amazing and huge king salmon. It bent the pole of the dipnet!

Katie, Blaine and my booty from the first trip. We filleted and vacuum sealed it, then doled it out on my porch.

and finally, Katie dip netting on our first trip, with the amazing mountains in the background.

ooooh I love Alaska.

Our Trip to Anchorage & Prince William Sound!!





the truck, the dog, and evan's boat - ready to go!




So last week, as it was snowing in Squarebanks, Evan and I set out to Anchorage (and beyond!)
Evan attended NABS - the North American Benthological Society national meeting (wicked fun....) while I hung out in Anchorage with the dog and the amazing density of moose in Anchorage! Just while walking down the sidewalk you end up sharing the road with a mama moose and her calf. It's insane. I saw 14 moose in about four days, all but four of them were within the city limits.

Murie (the dog) and I also took a day trip down to Seward. While rainy, it was a lot of fun. Beate and Mary showed me around, and I got to see Shiway working hard in the lab (thanks, guys!!). We ate at a *great* lounge, which really was probably Vegas, circa 1965. We had a stellar 'bowl of buts' (apparently the best fried halibut in town)

After Seward, Murie and I headed back up to Anchorage to the greeting of wonderful hospitality and a b.b.q. at Brian and Shannon's beautiful house.

Come Thursday, Evan and I scrambled to get our stuff together, got my rented kayak from R.E.I., and headed off to Whittier with Carolyn and Mike - friends of Evan's and former UAF students. On the drive to Whittier I saw a grizzly bear, outside of Girdwood!!

The weather forcast was crummy, so we changed our plans from HoboBay and we took a water taxi (Lazy Otter, they were great and highly recommended) to Culhroch Passage (spelling is wrong, I know), checking out numerous seabirds, sea otters, and a black bear along the way.


Thursday night was great, and we paddled a few hours down Long Bay, saw another black bear, then back to camp. Friday we got a wee two hours in before the wind really picked up. From there we were pretty much camp-bound, with winds in the big passage hitting 40knots, and plenty of white caps and driving rain where we were to keep me snug (and damp) under the rain tarp.




(yep - it's true! i bought a "sou'wester" rain hat, and man did i love it)

Saturday we left camp with decent weather, but the wind picked up as we neared Passage Canal. Near the point of this bay, we decided that the water was too big for the group experience level. Happily (you might say) there was a really narrow and low point over land, so yes. We portaged. It took awhile, and there was plenty of bushwacking, falling in the mud, trying to avoid the Devil's Club, as well as trying to avoid putting our stuff down in a pile of bear scat.



We paddled many more hours that day, making it a nearly 14 hour day in the end. It's hard to find a place to camp down there!! It's really wet and spongy on the banks, if it's above high tide. Lots of harbor seals, common and red neck mergansers, murrelets, murres, kittiwakes, and sea otters were seen, as well as yet another black bear!!!









Sunday we made our long trek back to Whittier, and got to shore around 130/2 pm. Evan and I packed up the truck, loaded the kayaks, grabbed some coffee and halibut and went to triumphently leave Whittier. I'm sure most of you aren't aware of the "situation" in Whittier. Apparently developed for safety and miliatry purposes, Whittier was created in Prince William Sound in a place only accessible by boat and train. Well, now you can drive there but I kid you not- it's a single-lane, 2.7mile long tunnel through a mountain, that you take turns going through between both directions of traffic and a train. if this isn't bad enough, Evan and I happened to be unaware of the annual "Walk to Whittier!" event. We missed the last tunnel crossing by 30 minutes, and the boy nicely informed us that every year they close the tunnel from 230 to 430 so people can walk through it. Sooooo sad! So we sat in the truck, in the rain, and watched people walk through.





Eventually we made it, cruised to Anchorage, picked up the REALLY clean dog (Shannon's the best for washing her and fixin' her up with meds and good food!), dropped off the kayak, showered and headed off to Fairbanks at the hour of 730pm. We got home, eventually, around 2am and collapsed into bed - home, dry, safe and happy.


evan's home

my home,

murie, asleep and happy in my front yard


well, for the past month and a half, i have been busy busy with my field work. this has entailed mainly snowmachining, learning about plants (of which i knew precious little prior to now) and measuring lots and lots of moose browse.

my MS thesis that I'm working on is something
along the lines of spatial heterogeneity of post-fire vegetation regeneration and its implications for moose winter foraging habitat.

this winter, my work is out in the Rosie Creek Burn measuring measuring measuring twigs to get at an estimate of browse production and removal by moose over the course of this past winter.

It's been a nearly solitary endeavor, but Evan has come out and helped once a week...here he is getting some much needed rest on the snow machine!


Amy also came out and was a trooper, measuring twigs with me! Her snowshoes are strapped to the back of my snowmachine.








And here I am, hard at work!

The winter is waning here in Fairbanks. We've moved from just over three hours of sunlight to over 14 in an incredibly short span of time. The mid-day temperatures are hitting around +40 and the snow is melting fast.

By Thursday I'll be done with my field work - for this year at least!

Also on Thursday (goodness, that's tomorrow. time flies when you're having fun) Sara Scott is flying up from NYC to spend the week! More updates to come later...I'm a slacker on this thing but at least I keep up with it every once in awhile!

Down to the "Big City"


on sunday night i got back from a weekend trip to anchorage...the "big city"
yeehaw!

drove down on friday morning, and did a little bit of skiing along the Parks Hwy, outside of Denali National Park. it was super beautiful, though the snow was deep, and at one point i was stuck up to my waist :)

once in anchorage, we stayed at a lil' bed and breakfast - susitna inn. it was sooo nice! my first experience with the b&b thing...i dig it. if you've travelled with me, you may understand my penchant for a free breakfast. indeed, there was no hottub, but let it be known that lodging in anchorage is waaaay overpriced. go for a b&b, they're great and most affordable!

on saturday we went skiing in anchorage for a bit (great xcountry ski trails) and then headed down to girdwood, alaska (about 45 minutes south) to see some friends from seattle at the pacific seabird group meeting. it was pretty fun, though it was really kind of like crashing a scientific meeting, as i wasn't registered and showed up for the last few hours of a three day thing. i saw some interesting talks and got to see a bunch of people i hadn't in awhile, so that's that. we took the "tram" up to the top of the mountain (it was at alyeska resort) and had some drinks at the bar/resteraunt thing. all in all, it was a great time.


the drive back on sunday sucked (to put it eloquently...) there was lots of snow and wind, and near whiteout conditions for most of it. evan was great and drove the entire way. hurray!

and now, on tuesday, the winds are howling (which is quite odd for here...) and i'm back in fairbanks. i'm working on my thesis stuff, and i have master's comprehensive exams on saturday. hurumph.

that's all for now, but be in touch! oh! and i "discovered" myspace.com. it's addicting, so be careful, but if you're into "those kinds of things", you might like it.

and an update from alaska

so i'm back in fairbanks, and all is really going quite well here. it's warmed up considerably from the -40 degree weather we were having. it's in the 10s and 20s (above!) and it's really seriously warm-feeling. though i agree. it's not warm. here's a picture from the weekend - i headed out into the field and went snow-machining, checking out the area. this is a part of my study site, with the alaska range in the background. sweeet!


then on sunday, evan, myself, steffen, and sumi went x-country skiing up in the white mountains of alaska...it was beautiful!!!

here are a few pictures from that lil' excursion...

Finally a new update!



A lil' picture from New Years Day, back in Maine! Chris, Dad and Donna (sorry, guys, hope ya don't mind me throwing up a picture of you!) with the first salmon of the season! And my first salmon consumed out of East Grand Lake!
I had a great time back, visiting with family on both sides as well as friends (see below). Sadly, I didn't get to see everyone, but that is pretty much always the case.





Here are a bunch of pictures from NYC! Lucky me got to visit with Emily, Bridget, and Nola! And hang out in the city. I would love to go back and spend a solid amount of time. It was fabulous. Thanks, guys, for all of yer hospitality! And, Nola is coming to Alaska!!!


Woohoo!