February in the Interior

While still colder than other places, February in the Interior is a magical thing. As the Earth tilts on its axis the sun starts to come back. Longer hours of daylight result and the sun finally has some warmth to it. Those days of December with 20 hours of darkness and a questionable 4 hours of low angle daylight are becoming a memory. Winter storms dissipate and the sky turns a blue only possible in the North. These are some of my favorite days in Alaska. Blue sky, green spruce, gray mountains and white snow all illuminated by sunshine that seems undiluted by the atmosphere or humidity.

While breakup is still months away; winter is tolerable once again. Cabin fever has taken its toll and its time to get outside again. Ice fishing, snow machining, running the remains of the trap line, and trying to polish off that last caribou tag are some of the activities that beckon.

Evan and I are out enjoying a run through the birch forest looking for lynx tracks. Found several sets of lynx tracks as well as many fox, ermine, and martin. The unusually high snowshoe hare population of the last three years have enabled the larger predators to get more plentiful than in recent memory. The winter has given us a snow base of a couple of feet and the temperatures in the 20Fs have settled it into perfect snowmachine and snowshoe terrain.