7:27 p.m. - 2003-01-06
North Pole
On New Year's Eve we had about 1 ft/30 cm of fresh snow. Just before THE hour, a number of young people from several of the house parties lining it, appeared in the park armed with snow shovels and cleared their own dance floor. It was fun to watch.
Today, there is no sign of it. A chinook, a warm southwesterly wind, blew through starting a couple of days ago. Chinook means "snow eater" in Blackfoot and it is one of the greatest blessings/curses of this city. We have had rain at night which makes the roads treacherous, but in the daytime it means the temperatures go up to about 60 F/16 C. The evening news showed people out golfing, fishing, and tanning in shorts and t-shirts on their normal daytime runs along our park pathway system which runs through the entire city. Lots of ice on uncleared, paved sufaces, but no snow anywhere else. Even the ice rink in the park hasn't survived.
Part of the challenge of living in a northern climate is the length of daylight one gets. At 4:30 pm, I was walking home just as the sun was setting. The light is at such an angle that drivers moving westerly can't see at street level. Means you take your life into your hands at rush hour, if you happen to be a pedestrian. Right now we are getting 8 hours of daylight, up from the 7.5 that we experience at the winter solstice. It's hard on biorhythms for a lot of people, since we also get nearly 20 hours of sunlight at the summer solstice.
One of the boy's friends dropped in tonight. His family moved up to Great Slave Lake (named for one of the local tribes) in the Northwest Territories a few years ago. The lake is 11,000 sq miles/28,000 sq km and about 2,000 ft/614 m deep. It is one of the best fishing lakes, chock full of Arctic char and whitefish. Commercially about 2 million short tons are harvested each year from this one body of water. The Territories is a jigsaw puzzle of lakes and rivers up to about 67 degrees N latitude - a nature lover's paradise. Several cities including the capital of the Territories, Yellowknife, ring Great Slave Lake's shores. My son's buddy loves the life up there.
The Northwest Territories/Nunavut is massive, crossing the entire continent east to west and being about 700 miles north to south - 1,305,000 sq miles that is. At the northern border, it is 500 miles from the geographic north pole. It forms a land ring around the Beaufort Sea/Arctic Ocean - which is set like a huge, abyssal bowl in the cusp of the north - with Alaska, the Soviet Republics, Greenland, Norway, and North Korea. The currents and tides that move through that sea are so powerful, that many of the artificial islands - built for the purpose of drilling into the oil and gas fields under the seabed - have been moved miles from their original positions. One of the other problems with drilling in that area is that, oftentimes, the oil and the gas have to be thawed before they can be harvested. Also with salt water, a little leak, say from a fitting in a washroom, can find an entire settlement flooded out within a few hours because the sea ice melts so fast. It is a very delicate environment that is absolutely unforgiving if one errs even slightly. Environmental regulations are very strict and rigidly enforced.
About right now, at the northern boundary, the population will be seeing their first sunrise since the end of October. The festive season, for them, may start with Christmas, but it extends until that first ray of daylight. The party that occurs has some of the most entertaining activities I 've seen. My Dad said that when he worked in the southern part of the Territories, during the 1950's, they had to ensure that the surveyors for the oil companies could do their measurements (shots) by the stars because so much of the work hours were "after dark".
Longitudinal studies of the formation of that part of North America are fascinating, involving tectonic plates movement in a big way, a still very active volcanic alley on the west side of the MacKenzie Mountains, glacial carving that basically scooped out many layers of earth down to the bedrock, and the dramatic evidence of many meteor hits that aren't masked by growth or till. James Michener's "Alaska" addresses some of the story quite well, but it is only the tip of the iceberg - if you will. Yet, in geological studies, the northern shores are often compared in construction and characteristics with the Gulf of Mexico along the US coast and the northern shores of Egypt - all deltas on a majestic scale.
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