I sit by the fire in my slowly warming cabin and listen to the trees blowing in the wind of changing seasons. It is 7:09 am and still dark outside. The sun won’t rise for almost another two hours. This time a month ago, near solstice, there were three hours more daylight, and in August we had seven more hours of light and not a thought of cold temperatures or the looming winter around.

Up here, summer flies by like a fast-moving train, people bustling about and sometimes not even stopping to sleep at night. Fairbanks, only one degree of latitude south of the Arctic Circle, has no darkness until late August. We forget about the stars and the moon, and know that since summer is so fleeting we must not let a moment go by wasted. We take full advantage of the availability of liquid water, of daylight, of thawed soils, of green plants and especially the flowers to identify them by. The nights start to get darker in August and sometimes we forget to appreciate them because we’re still so busy working, and in our little spare time, harvesting meat and fish for the freezer. I had to force myself to stay up late to watch the best aurora of my life in early September because I was so tired from hauling a Sitka black-tail deer off of the top of a mountain in Prince William Sound and all I wanted to do was crawl into my tent and sleep. Dragging my sleeping bag onto the tundra awarded dancing beams of red and purple across the giant Alaska sky, not a man-made light in sight.

Once the meat is put away and the gardens are harvested and the last of the kale is wilting away in the hard-freezing nights, all of Alaska takes a giant breath in and out. For us field technicians, our data is collected and starts to get entered into machines and filed away. Summer is over, and winter is here.

Now that the summer field season is officially finished, I have time for one last note of reflection. I have not had much more than a spare minute or two to think about writing for the past three months. I live in Fairbanks, and was drawn to this internship because it offered me more chances to explore this great state and gain experience doing lots of different work and make connections with various agencies and organizations. The majority of my summer was spent on soil surveys with the NRCS, but I also worked on AIM (Assessment Inventory and Monitoring) projects with the Alaska Center for Conservation Science, and mine reclamation monitoring on placer mines and forestry and weed monitoring with the BLM. I hacked through permafrost with a sharpshooter shovel in frost-wedge polygonal tundra. I identified countless new asters and brassicas on the Bering Sea-influenced alpine hills on the west coast near Unalakleet. I floated 30 miles down a Wild and Scenic River to survey soils, and measured trees in a historic Yukon River town.

One highlight of the summer was spending a hitch rafting down the remote Beaver Creek in interior Alaska accessing floodplain and terrace communities to map for the impressive undertaking of a soil survey that will cover 35 million acres (that’s the size of the state of New York, folks). We piled our sling-loaded gear onto a 14-foot raft and used small lightweight inflatable packrafts to cross sloughs and beaver ponds to get to the hard-to-access areas of the survey, and slogged through miles of willow thickets and tussock-ridden terraces. Floating serenely down the river secure on our rafts, we were playfully chased by a black bear and a surprised grizzly snorted and scuffed the ground at us, standing up on its hind legs before turning and galloping away through the willows.

My mentor, Eric Geisler, and I spent a few days in the Fortymile region of eastern interior Alaska accessing targeted AIM sites on pristine creeks by helicopter. The project is in conjunction with the University of Alaska’s Center for Conservation Science and the sites we sampled will be used as baselines for monitoring placer mining on Jack Wade Creek near the small town of Chicken.

As the fall colors on the sub-arctic tundra were peaking, I spent three days canoeing to popular campsites in the Tangle Lakes near the Denali Highway surveying for invasive weeds, which fortunately have not spread from their isolated territories around the boat ramp and road-side campgrounds.

After all of the leaves had senesced, two other CLM interns and I traveled to the historic Yukon River town of Eagle, once the gateway into Alaska’s gold rush, to inventory timber resources and fuel loads in the cold frosty forests surrounding the town.

Over the course of this five-month internship, I’ve worked with some amazing people, learned valuable skills, and traveled and gotten to know intimately some of the most incredible wild places on the planet. I have helped collect ground-breaking data in never-before-surveyed parts of the state. I have grown to understand the incredible importance of the relationship between soils and vegetation. I have assisted in an effort to establish monitoring protocols to preserve Alaska’s streams from degradation due to improper reclamation after gold mining. And I have made connections with incredible folks all over the state.

Now, as ice encroaches from the banks of the creek by my cabin and grows ever outward from the sticks and logs half-emerged from the water, my thoughts turn south towards travel, relaxation, and reflection. It is the season of pot-lucks, hotsprings, evenings at the brewery, and the last few afternoon bike rides when the sun takes off the morning’s chill. Soon I will travel to see friends and family “Outside” Alaska, and explore new mountains and rivers in South America. Time to plan spring ski trips and summer canoe trips and eventually, what to do next summer. Who knows where next spring will take me, but if it’s anything like this summer, I know I don’t have to worry.

I’m lounging—literally lounging—on the tundra, reindeer lichens crunching under my Xtratuffs, and I’m not wearing a bug net. I’m not wearing rain gear either. Or a down puffy jacket, or even a hat. And I’m lying belly down on the cushy tundra staring at the mucronate involucral bracts of a Luzula through my hand lens.

Above me, puffy cumulous clouds float through blue sky. Below, a creek rushes through
alders into a series of beaver ponds and the robotic starship song of a gray-cheeked thrush carries up on the wind. We didn’t even have to thrash through those alders to get here. We flew—at 100 knots per hour—on a Robinson 44 helicopter over rolling lichen-covered hills and frost-wedge polygon patterned tundra and streams choked so full of chum salmon you can’t even see the bottom. We sent a grizzly sow and her two cubs romping over the tundra, watched two moose calves follow their mother into an alder thicket, and, tucked in a steep drainage, caught a glimpse of a big lone muskox bull, his long shaggy coat waving in the breeze. Flying along the beach, we saw a bloated dead walrus, its tusks not yet harvested by the local natives who scan the beaches every day for treasures to collect and sell or turn into artwork.

Mind you—this is NOT normal. This is the kind of day we live for in Alaska, the day we can’t stop thinking about for weeks afterward, the day we earn through hundreds of less ideal days in trade. The day we dream of during weeks of office drudgery in December when it’s 40-below and dark at 10:00am.

This is the day I’ve earned by countless others spent soaked to the bone in cold driving rain that deems my Rite-in-the-Rain datasheets un-writable, which doesn’t really matter anyway because my fingers have lost all motor functionality for writing. The days spent tussock-hopping over ankle-twisting towers of cottongrass wearing a suffocating headnet and rain gear not because it’s raining but to guard against the pursuit of a persistent buzzing cloud of mosquitoes that find their way into my shirt sleeves and munch at the gap between my headnet and the collar of my shirt. The days of stifling heat and wildfire smoke that boil the sweat in my muck boots and give me black crusty nostrils and a splitting headache. The miles spent thrashing through alders, balancing on flexible stems and trying in vain to find the “grain” to travel with, toting a 10-foot soil auger in one hand, wondering if I’m due up yet for a surprise bear encounter after five seasons of luck.

None of this is to say that I don’t thoroughly appreciate a good ass-kicking every once in a while. Deep down, even the most timid Alaskan will admit to feeling a sense of pleasure after a day of humbling defeat in a stand of dog-hair spruce and boot-sucking muck.

***

The challenge of getting through this country is one of many reasons I am currently lounging on a hillside overlooking miles of untouched valleys and hills in western Alaska, mapping its soils and vegetation communities for the first time in history, with not a cabin or cut tree or trail in sight. Alaskans are a tough and stubborn breed, and talking to us you may be led to believe that this state is one of majestic wild terrain with megafauna and endless treasures awaiting around every corner. That we eat salmon and moose for every meal and blueberries stain every pocket. Well, it’s true. You just might find our comfort standards to be a bit skewed from the social norm.

***

As I wrap up the last touches on this post, I am watching rain sheet off the windows of our bunkhouse and roofing on the shack next door rattles with the wind blowing off the Bering Sea. It is back to the daily grind of waiting out weather and preparing for another week of wet field work. But as a co-worker and I learned in the evening calm last night, the blustery wind provides luxurious relief from the mosquitoes that frequent the tundra outside town, and we profited with two gallons of blueberries picked in the lovely afternoon light of 10:00pm. Up here, you learn to appreciate the little things. And, well, the little things are pretty freaking amazing.