HOME |
RSS | 
Clifton Vial of Nome, Alaska, set out in his Toyota Tacoma to see where a road went, but ended up stuck in a snowdrift on a deserted road that doubles as a snowmobile track. He was 40 miles from town, out of cell phone range, without provisions or much in the way of emergency equipment. Vial wrapped himself in a sleeping bag liner and waited, turning on the car occasionally for warmth. After three days, he was almost out of gasoline. On the second day he didn’t show up for work, his boss called emergency services.
The Nome Volunteer Fire Department was alerted and Vial’s co-workers and volunteer rescuers drove surrounding roads in search of the Toyota.
One searcher drove 41 miles along Kougarok Road — just a few miles from where Vial sat shivering and stranded in his pickup — but saw no tracks. The searcher turned back as daylight disappeared and the road conditions worsened, Handeland said.
Troopers joined the search. Rescuers looked for Vial on the ground and from the air, in planes and from a helicopter.
“When we get called on situations like this, it’s a needle in a haystack,” said Jim West Jr., a Nome fire department captain and search and rescue coordinator.
For Vial, the cold was worse than the hunger, he said. Still he scoured the pickup in vain for food.
His only provisions: Snow, and a few cans of Coors Light that had frozen solid in the cab.
Vial ate the beers like cans of beans. “I cut the lids off and dug it out with a knife,” he said.
Vial lost 16 pounds, but showed no signs of frostbite. Link -via Breakfast Links
Diane McEachern has something to teach all those people at Occupy Wall Street protest: you have to come in with overwhelming force that's no match for the local opposition. Like how she did it at Bethel, Alaska, with a one-woman army that is now the de facto occupier of the Tundra!
For a century, Russia and the United States have considered building a tunnel or a bridge across the 64-mile Bering Strait — the body of water that separates Siberia and Alaska. Now the Russian government is making serious plans to build a transcontinental railway and tunnel system at the cost of $65 billion:
Russian officials insist that the tunnel is an economic idea whose time has now come and that it could be ready within ten years. They argue that it would repay construction costs by stimulating up to 100 million tons of freight traffic each year, as well as supplying oil, gas and electricity from Siberia to the US and Canada.[...]
The tunnel across the international date-line would be built in three sections through two islands in the Bering Strait and would link 6,000km (3,728 miles) of new railway lines. The tunnel alone would cost an estimated $10-12 billion to construct.
Link -via Gizmodo | Image: St. John Fisher College
The salmon are returning to spawn in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, so it’s time for eagles to descend upon the town. Lots of them, many of them bald eagles. They’re quite fearless, so YouTube user Honanooligans was able to get close. There’s a particularly good scene at 5:15. A fox arrives on the scene at 7:50.
via Super Punch
You’ve probably heard of bacon vodka, but salmon vodka? Would you try this flavor if you had the chance?
A 23-year-old Alaskan was in his workshop when a heater unexpectedly ignited some chemicals, and the building suddenly burst into flames. For help, he turned to his dog Buddy:
“I just told him, ‘We need to get help,’ and then that’s the last time I seen him,” Heinrichs told the News-Tribune. “I didn’t train him or nothing. He just took off and went and did what he did. … He was just being a good dog.”
It’s a good thing Buddy sprung into action because trooper Terrence Shanigan, who was responding to the call about a fire, was having trouble with his vehicle’s global positioning system, which wasn’t working properly, reports the News-Tribune. “Shanigan, who almost took the long way around the neighborhood, came across Buddy on Caswell Loop Road,” reports the News-Tribune. “The dog took off, and acting on a hunch, Shanigan followed the dog down a side road.”
The budding young chemist received minor flash burns. Buddy will be receiving a silver-plated dog bowl.
In 1867, the United States bought Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million. At the time, the acquisition was popularly dismissed as “Seward’s Folly” (Seward was Secretary of State at the time), as the frozen land was considered worthless. Since that time, the conventional wisdom has been that, given Alaska’s natural resources, the Alaska Purchase was a great deal (example). Economist David Barker, however, argues that the US experienced a net loss as a result of the purchase and would be better off economically if Alaska had been absorbed into Canada:
Cash flow from Alaska to the federal government since 1867 has certainly exceeded the initial purchase price, but this fact is not sufficient to demonstrate that the purchase was a sound financial investment. Using a variety of assumptions and techniques for valuing the net cash flows from Alaska, it is clear that the financial returns have not been positive. The economic benefits that have been received from Alaska over the years could have been obtained without purchasing the territory. In financial terms, Alaska has clearly been a negative net present value project for the United States.
Barker also ran similar calculations for the profitability of the US acquisition of Hawaii, the Virgin Islands, and the Gadsden Purchase.
Link via Marginal Revolution | Image: US Department of the Interior
Did a bear tear your airplane to bits in a remote part of Alaska? No problem – we can fix that with a little duct tape. Army Paratrooper forum user Iz_NorthPole explains:
During a private "fly-in" fishing excursion in the Alaskan wilderness, the chartered pilot and fishermen left a cooler and bait in the plane. And a bear smelled it. This is what he did to the plane.
The pilot used his radio and had another pilot bring him 2 new tires, 3 cases of duct tape, and a supply of sheet plastic. He patched the plane together, and FLEW IT HOME!
The 2,100 citizens of North Pole, Alaska take Christmas very seriously. Since 1954, they’ve volunteered for Operation Santa, a program of the US Postal Service which answers letters to Santa Claus. The program has volunteers all over the country, and many letters are routed through Alaska to get the special North Pole postmark. However, the USPS is discontinuing the practice of sending letters to the town of North Pole.
Anchorage-based agency spokeswoman Pamela Moody said dealing with the tighter restrictions is not feasible in Alaska.
“It’s always been a good program, but we’re in different times and concerned for the privacy of the information,” she said.
Moody stressed that kids around the world can still send letters to Santa Claus. The Postal Service still runs the giant Operation Santa Program in which children around the world can have their letters to Santa answered, and the restrictions do not affect private organizations running their own letter efforts.
But what will change are the generically addressed letters to “Santa Claus, North Pole” that for years have been forwarded to volunteers in the Alaska town. That program will stop, unless changes are made before Christmas.
North Pole residents are upset over the changes, and also unhappy that North Pole cancellations will now be stamped in Anchorage instead of Fairbanks, which is only 15 miles from North Pole. Link -via Consumerist
(image credit: AP/Sam Harrel)
An unnamed Alaskan bush pilot went on a fishing trip and neglected to wash down his plane afterward. The 1958 Piper Cub was just too much temptation for a bear to bear.
The fishy aroma attracted a passing grizzly bear who, clearly frustrated at not being able to see the lovely “noms” it could smell, took the plane apart in an effort to find it. Aircraft fabric is no match for bear claws. The bear also chomped both tyres for good measure, then departed the scene.
Alaskans are a hardy bunch, however – as tough as the aircraft they fly. The pilot radioed for two new tyres, three cases of duct tape and a couple of rolls of cellophane to be flown in so he could repair his craft and get home.
Duct tape: is there anything it can’t do? The story includes a picture of the plane after repair. Link -via Fark
Max Hirschberg missed the last dogsled out of Dawson, Yukon because he was recovering from tetanus. So he rode a bicycle for two months to get to Nome, Alaska in order to join the Klondike gold rush in 1900. Hirschberg was 19 years old when he started the trip.
The day I left Dawson, March 2, 1900 was clear and crisp, 30° below zero. I was dressed in a flannel shirt, heavy fleece-lined overalls, a heavy mackinaw coat, a drill parka, two pairs of heavy woolen socks and felt high-top shoes, a fur cap that I pulled down over my ears, a fur nosepiece, plus fur gauntlet gloves.
Along the way, Hirschberg suffered from exposure, snowblindness, and a broken bicycle chain. He came close to drowning. His money was gone. Still, he made it to Nome. Link -via Metafilter
(image found at Center Scene)
At the 50-acre Glacier Gardens in Alaska, designers added an unusual flair by uprooting more than twenty hemlock and spruce trees, flipping them over, and using the trunks as natural flower pots:
During the rehabilitation process, Steve was developing the lower landscaped gardens using a large piece of rented equipment to arrange the masses of soil, roots, plants, trees, and rock dragged down the mountain during the landslide. During the last few hours of equipment rental, the equipment was damaged while moving a large boulder. This boulder has become known as “Steve’s Rock” and is the centerpiece of one of the many waterfalls flowing through Glacier Gardens. Full of frustration about the large repair bill he was sure to see, he used the equipment to pick up a large tree stump and slammed the inverted stump into the ground trunk first. The tree stuck into the soft mud upside down and as the roots hung like the vines of a petunia basket, it only took moments before he had a vision of how to recycle the trees cleared from the development of the property: The Upside Down “Flower Towers.” Each flower tower is made by inverting spruce or hemlock trees with the root ball pointing towards the sky. The stock of the trunk buried 5-7 ft, netting on top, mosses laid down, and nearly 75 – 100 plants planted every year for guest enjoyment.
Official Website via Urlesque (where there are many marvelous pictures)
Image by flickr user John & Peggy Bromley used under creative commons license
Bill and Amarins Harrison and their three children are on a lengthy family vacation. They plan on riding their custom-made bicycle to Florida, and thence to Alaska and back again:
They departed Renfro Valley on Saturday. Their immediate destination is Oak Ridge, and then on to the Atlantic Coast by way of the Carolinas. From there, they’ll travel to Florida, head to the Southwest by way of the Southeast (hoping to spend the winter months peddling through warmer environs) and will eventually travel up the Pacific Coast to Alaska.
They figure on arriving in Alaska in August 2010. They’ll stay there for one year, then head back to Renfro Valley, arriving back home sometime in late 2012….
“Risk-taking is what made this country great,” he says. “It wasn’t politics or religion. It was about risking to go around the next bend in the river or over the next mountain. If we still took those risks today, this would be a better world.”
Link via Instapundit
A mysterious mass of black goo has been observed oozing through the Chucki sea off the coast of Alaska. It was first observed neat Wainwright and moved toward Barrow, where samples were collected for testing.
Nobody knows for sure what the gunk is, but Petty Officer 1st Class Terry Hasenauer says the Coast Guard is sure what it is not.
“It’s certainly biological,” Hasenauer said. “It’s definitely not an oil product of any kind. It has no characteristics of an oil, or a hazardous substance, for that matter.
“It’s definitely, by the smell and the makeup of it, it’s some sort of naturally occurring organic or otherwise marine organism.”
No one in the area remembers ever seeing anything like the sea blob before. Link -via reddit
Update: The tests are back. The blob has been identified as algae.
Auroras or the Northern Lights are in my bucket list – I know that they are caused by the collision of solar wind with the Earth’s magnetic field but I can’t help to feel that these phenomenons are but a small display of how majestic Mother Nature can be.
Anyway, until I can haul my lazy butt to the (very far and very cold) polar region, these fantastic photos of auroras by Dennis C. Anderson of Night Trax Photography have got to suffice. They’re some of the most beautiful photos I’ve ever seen.
This one to the left, titled A Colorful Dawn, was taken back in 2003 in Homer, Alaska. Check out the entire gallery here (not to be missed!): Link (you can buy prints there, too)
