Anchorage Folk Festival

Wendy Wallace Auditorium, University of Anchorage, Alaska




I got back to Anchorage in time to play a 15 minute set with Belugarass at Anchorage's annual folk fest. I work with Jon, the guitarist, and he works with the other guys in the band at the huge Anchorage outdoor equiptment store, REI. We played five bluegrass standards. Our set was sandwiched between a group of cloggers in red shiny shirts doing "YMCA" with lots of audience participation, and a local singer songwriter. The festival goes for two weekends and one week. The highlight for me will be the band, The Improbabillies, playing for two contra dances and a gig this Friday night.

Car Mullet

G Street, Anchorage

It snowed a lot while I was in Australia. I uncovered the car to find it had developed a new style.

Licenced

Anchorage, Alaska

As the pace of new things slows down, work routine sets in, and the light diminishes, it seems I have less laughter and less to say.

Today the temperature is a high of 25 and a low of 17 farenheight. That is a high of -4 and a low of -8 degrees celcius. The sun came up at 10:09am and set at 3:40pm, giving us 5 hours and 31 minutes of daylight. In summary, it is cold and dark, and I don't think it becomes me. It's the tail end of a work week and in 15 minutes Brendan will pick me up and we will drive up the hillside, about 20 minutes away, and go skiing. There are some lights on the trail but we will also have head-torches. The snow this winter has been slim, to the frustration of all skiiers. We are doing what we can with the icy older white stuff, and trying not to talk about the naughty naughty 'R word' that happens when it gets warmer than it should be.

In general, I'm finding it difficult keeping ahead of the cost of starting up living here, expensive rent and car insurance. But the biggest challenge each day is getting out of bed by 7am, still 3 hours away from dawn. I suppose I must be on a steep learning curve of living in a freezing climate, and I hope some day to stop having to learn how to go about basic things, like starting a car (you have to plug it into a heater that warms the engine for 3 hours before you start it), driving a car (you have to run the engine for about 10 minutes to warm it up before you go anywhere), walking down the street (you have to wear soft soled shoes to stick better on the ice so you don't slip and break your neck), going outside(you have to wear layers - down is good, and put on a hat and gloves), leaving the house (you have to leave the heater on, with the thermostat at at least 60 degrees so that the pipes in the house don't freeze and break), and the list goes on.

I must have learnt something because I got my Alaskan drivers licence yesterday. I took my test at 9:30am as the sun was thinking about coming up, the roads were icy, and I was having trouble demisting my rear window (the instructor showed me the trick of how to fix this). I stopped suddenly on snow (pumping the breaks), I resisted road-rage and an accident when someone pulled out in front of me, I was the most anal driver on the road, and I PASSED!

I am looking forward to going home to Australia for Christmas. I will be there for almost a month. In fact, I am dying to get home and see friends and family and plunge into the comfort zone of things I know and love. See you soon Australia.

Thanksgiving in -35 degrees celcius

Fairbanks, Alaksa
Walking to the new Fairbanks Museum and Gallery

The Feast
The boys gigging under the name "The Pilot Cracker Playboys"

Exercising my democratic right

A highschool on E street, Anchorage

Today I voted for the first time in the United States. It felt really really good. It looks like not many people choose to do it here, but more should. I was amongst the political freaks, the retired who weren't busy today, and the consciencious. Even though I voted against them, this is Alaska, and I think the rednecks will win.

Footloose and Freeheeling

Flat Top Mountain, the Hillside above Anchorage

On top of Flat Top I lost my cross-country skiing virginity. I was out there, all wobbly and thrown by the wierd balancing act of having loose heels, being Alaskan in the wintertime. I worked up a sweat on flat ground, had a few stacks, and grew some icicles up my nose. Then a big full moon rose up over the hills and it got dark at 5pm. It was fun, thank god, because it will probably be my sanity this winter.

Brendan and Lucabelle (who got more excited than I have ever before seen her when we got to the hillside. I worried. I thought she was going to have a hysteria-induced stroke).

The biggest pot of gold in the world

Pebble Mine Proposed Site, North of Iliamna

The Site: Winter wilderness




















The Transport: little red helicopters

















The Task: trapping
















The Task: counting, measuring, taking notes (and trying to keep warm)














The Target - Salmon fingerlings. Here's some of this year's Coho salmon(above) and King salmon (below).

Electrofishing

Somewhere near Iliamna, SW Alaska

Who thought that getting a real job in Anchorage meant no more Alaskan adventures? I dreaded that. Next week I will get a chance to see and do wild things once more in this now-snowy northern land. I even get a chance to do a type of fishing not even my dad has ever done, and he’s done a lot of fishing. But not electrofishing.

Picture this. It’s snowing. You’re in one of Alaska’s huge wilderness areas, situated in the Southwest of the State. The ecosystem you’re standing on is the nursery to the most important wild fishing industry around – headwaters to Bristol Bay, the salmon fishing mecca of Alaska. This site, rich in natural bounty, may soon be the Northern Hemisphere’s largest mine. For the sake of gold. My company is doing the baseline studies for this mining company. We’re putting numerical figures to the natural wealth out there so then the mining company can put their case to the government about how they will do no damage to this wealth during their mining processes. It is currently the most controversial project in Alaska, along with the gas pipeline project.

My job is to stand in streams for a week and stun fish with an electric-shock thingamy, pick ‘em up, count ‘em, measure ‘em, and put ‘em back. The fish are just the wee little fingerlings that hatched this spring. They will mostly be salmon but there will also be rainbow trout. Although it will be cold I have been through thick educating in warm layers today, we went and bought some mean neoprene waders with boots on the ends, and I will beg buy and borrow everything I need to survive the week. Although, as you know, I am an intrepid explorer, I am glad that we are staying in a lodge with all the creature comforts of beds and hot meals and goodness. During the day we will be zipping around in little helicopters from site to site, and we take a small plane from Anchorage to Iliamna where there is a tiny town with an airstrip.

I can’t wait.

First real snow and Girdwood

Girdwood, One hour south of Anchorage

It's snowing like a blizzard and I can't believe people can still drive on the roads and freeways when they're covered in this white fluff that turns icy and you can't see the lines on the road. I haven't done it yet, but intend to approach snow-driving with extreme caution and will avoid it if I can (at least until the roads are groomed - I think it might be snowing for the next 4 months). It's quieter now, and I don't recognise where I am in the city with the white cloak on. The heater in my little apartment is superb, and along with the little home improvements I've been achieving with the help of Brendan the Carpenter, I'm feeling snug enough at home.

On the weekend we drove to Girdwood, a town one hour south of Anchorage that becomes the local Anchorage downhill ski area in wintertime. The lure was a big pot of gumbo and a jam with the band-in-progress-as-yet-unnamed. I am not technically 'in' the band, but struggling with my status as tag-along-girlfriend, and still-student of the Oldtime style. The in-band fiddler sets a good example, and I play along in jams, and will step to the sidelines for gigs. I'm learning.

Meg (mando), Mike (banjo), Karen (bass), Jeff (fids), Nate (guitar)


The freeze is on

My New Life

Anchorage, Alaska

New desk and cube.

New car.

New house

Pouring Slab

Brendan's House, Talkeetna

More glamorous photos of my Alaskan life - "what I did on the weekend". This is the foundation for Brendan's workshop/garage/office. It's late in the season (cold) to be laying slab, and it was pretty much the last day this was possible, with snowflakes falling last night.


Somehow after 2 trucks of concrete poured into the framework, there just wasn't enough to finish the job, so we set about making our own in the wheelbarrow. Back-breaking work.

People have to work on this side of the world too

Midtown, Anchorage

My new job is shaping up well. I am really enjoying the private sector, with people striving to get work done and move projects forward, with deadlines, and a foreseeable end to projects, and goals achieved. These important things were so intangible in my government job last year. Everyone here appears to really enjoy working for HDR, which is really important too (and I thought impossible). People work hard at the office, but on the whole are pretty outdorsy healthy people who are playing hard outside the office too, which suits me. HDR works on some really interesting and controversial projects in Alaska - for big oil companies that are taking oil resources from the far North of the country, for mining companies that pose enormous threats to wilderness areas and the wild salmon fishing industry, for a big bridge out of Anchorage that will mean widescale development of a whole new urban area that is now wild. HDR does a lot of environmental impact assessment with scientists and biologists, as well as engineers. At this stage I am retaining a belief that an impact assessment will determine a true level for what environmental damage is posed by a developer, and that the public will then be able to have a say, and the project will be veto-ed if there's too much at stake. Much of the Alaskan community is passionate about the wild places here, and that is why they chose to live here, so people are interested in protecting it. I am interested to see how the most controversial projects that are currently in public debate will go, and to see how I feel about working for a company that is involved in this way. I don't work in the environmental section, but the water section. I'm happy about this because at this point I'm interested in staying in the water field, and coming back to Australia in this field. The projects I am working on at the moment are about poo - this makes me happy enough. I feel like I've got much more support and resources to work with than I did at Power and Water. I have direct audience with a number of more senior engineers here in Anchorage, as well as on the email in *** offices all over the USA if I needed them. So at this stage it looks good, and I will certainly learn a lot here.

Being in this field of work in Alaska is very interesting. I went an saw Al Gore's doco 'An Inconvenient Truth' yesterday. Global warming is so visible here in this cold climate where a few things are going awry - the spruce trees dying from the spruce beetle that no longer gets killed off sufficiently in the winter, and of course the receeding glaciers.

My Birthday - too many mojitos and Superman's Devil's Food Cake

Mike and Karen's House, Anchorage

Termination Dust

On the two hour drive from Talkeetna to Anchorage

The first snowfalls at the end of summer. The yellow Aspen.