Five Hours - Two Worlds

Five hours from Anchorage, non-stop, to LA.  Actually, it was about four hours and forty five minutes.  After getting the house-sitter settled, we took off a little before midnight Anchorage time.  And we landed just before six am LA time.   The LA picture is actually about seven hours later - after we got the bus, had breakfast, and then were walking the last mile to my mom's.

I hadn't planned on this order of the pictures, but when I looked at them, these two seemed so similar (long flat foreground, looking into the light) that they seemed a perfect pairing.  And a perfect contrast between the two worlds we've been bouncing back and forth between, as we visit my mom each month.

I've always been fascinated by how easy it is today to walk through a door in an airport in one part of the world and walk out another door into another part of the world.  I remember walking through the Brussels airport and seeing (to me) exotic African cities listed at the gates.  And the contrast between Anchorage and LA in January is pretty stark.

I contrast this with the ten days (in my memory anyway) it took to sail from New York to Le Havre in   1964 on the way to spending a college year in Germany.  Or to driving from Anchorage to Boston and back.  Overland (or oversea) one has time to feel the distance.  One's body has time to adjust to waking up closer or further from the sunrise.  One's brain has time to process the land or sea scape.  But planes abruptly fling one from one point on earth to another.  That's one reason I like window seats - so I can, when it's clear and light - get some sense of the topography I'm traveling through.

OK, enough musing.  Here are some shots as we got to enjoy the dawn.  (A positive side of the shorter days in Anchorage is that even people who sleep late get to see the dawn.)

Just off the plane in LAX terminal 6

Still dark waiting for the shuttle to the bus station

Just starting to get light as we get to the bus station

We then slept for half the day.

[Photo notes:I didn't bring the bigger camera on this trip.  Our flights are both in the dark, so no landscape shots, and I'm trying to travel as light as I can.  It would have been nice to have the polaroid filter Joe Blow suggested in comments to an early post, so the Good Bus Karma didn't have all the reflection.  I could have just cropped the picture to that sign, but I wanted the sense of being on the bus as well.  So I stretched the crop to keep the word bus and I included the driver and steering wheel.  The palm trees outside were pretty washed out, so I did play with brightness in photoshop for that part.]

For Anchorage Folks Waiting For Snow

I offer this picture I posted on January 12, 2012 to remind you what winter used to look like.

For those of you reading this from afar, this year there is a thin, raggedy carpet of hard, old snow with dead grass and fallen leaves poking through.

March Snow and Sun

People have been talking about an early breakup.  That happens every year.  But given that we've had breakup all winter, one starts to think, maybe . . .  Yesterday when I walked to the library, there was lots of exposed bike path, lots of melting ice, mini lakes in the potholes.  You could even see bare earth being exposed.

You can see a little bit around the tree trunk and the edges of the creek.   But later, coming home from dinner, the snow flakes seemed to be racing to the ground.

 

This road had been bare a little earlier.

And then this morning, we had seven or eight new inches.  Again, I'd cleared the deck completely before this latest reminder that it's still winter.   

 

But the sunshine is heating up the house and you can tell the equinox is just days away.  And this afternoon we head south again to look in on my mom, and it's supposed to be 85˚ in LA.  It's better here, really.  

 

Taking a Break on a Snowy Day

Wet snow.  Fog.

Ravens gather in cottonwood.

Short break.  Change of scenery.

Russian Jack greenhouse.

Add a little color to gray white day. 

Warm, Sunny January Day Ends At Folk Festival

A quick post.  Got up early and had class from 9am-1pm.  Good students, interesting sounding projects.

When I got out after class the sun brightened everything and it felt like spring. A balmy mid-forties made me want to find an outdoor table to have lunch.

But all these warm days have turned the streets to water and ice.

We were able to catch the headliner act at the second week of the Anchorage Folk Festival - appropriately, Mr. Sun.  The Wendy Williamson was packed.  The festival goes on Saturday and Sunday and admission is free - but leave some money to help pay for things if you can.

Beets + (Less) Salt = Better Deiced Roads - True or False?

A friend sent me a link to this video, dated Jan. 7 (presumably 2014) on why adding beet juice (from the left-over pulp from making sugar that used to be thrown away) can be used at colder temperatures and drastically reduces the chloride necessary to deice roads, thus doing less environmental damage.






Of course, I checked to see what others have said and it turns out this isn't really new news. This is from a 2008 USA Today piece

By Terry Kinney, Associated Press Writer

CINCINNATI — A concoction of beet juice and salt that is kinder to concrete and metal is getting mostly favorable reviews from a growing number of states and cities looking for more effective ways to treat ice- and snow-covered roads.

It works by lowering the freezing temperature of the brine that's used to pretreat roads, experts say. And it's made from a waste product that was dumped down the drain before this new use was discovered.

Road crews learned long ago that pretreating highways with brine before a storm helps prevent the accumulation of snow and ice. Then they learned that adding beet juice to the brine could make the treatment effective at lower temperatures.

A commercial product called Geomelt uses the beet juice that's left after sugar has been extracted from sugar beets. The Ohio Department of Transportation is testing it in 11 counties, spokesman Scott Varner said Wednesday.

"Rock salt alone stops melting snow at about 18 degrees; Geomelt goes to 20 below," Varner said.  .   .   .

They use it in North Dakota where they grow sugar beets.  In Wisconsin they use cheese.  A report out of Chicago  the other day:

Many places around the country are mixing up strange de-icing concoctions, adding things like cheese brine, molasses, and potatoes.
Here in North Dakota beet juice is the not-so-secret ingredient. .  .

Of course, beet juice is abundant locally, with North Dakota's robust sugar beet industry.

Other places use the same concept, for example, in Milwaukee they use cheese brine leftover from cheese making. [cheese link added]

Potatoes?  We grow potatoes well in Alaska.  Does it make more sense to use them to clear the roads or to eat them?  And will beet or potato residue attract moose to the roads?
The Daily Iowan reported in Dec. 2011:

Effectiveness is without a doubt the most important, because human lives are the primary beneficiary. Cost is also to be considered — many municipalities, especially Iowa City, continually face crippling budget restraints. The third principal factor is the environmental impact of a given substance. For instance, road salt often makes its way into urban and other waterways, compromising drinking water and wildlife — not even to mention the detrimental effects of salt-mining.

One natural substance can make the substances we use more powerful, more cost-effective, and more sustainable: sugar beet juice. Both the University of Iowa and Iowa City recognized the advantages of beet-juice formula — often marketed as either ProMelt (pre-mixed) or GeoMelt (unmixed) — and use it to secure our streets.

"We're on our third season using GeoMelt," said John Sobaski, Iowa City's assistant superintendent for streets and traffic engineering. "We receive 1,500 of the 3,000 tons, and we treated that 1,500 tons right here on site. It doesn't take much to coat it, and we have a two- to three-day residual effect on the pavement. It does reduce corrosion, as well, and keeps the stockpile flowing nicely.

"At a cost of $10 per ton, it's been very cost-effective and beneficial."

Hold on though.   Is this just manufacturer hype that the media have eaten up uncritically?  Have the states who use this stuff  done scientific tests or are they using just anecdotal evidence to justify their expenditures on these products? 

A report by the Western Transportation Institute at the University of Montana for the State of Minnesota  is not as effusive about the  benefits of agricultural by-products (ABPs).

Additives such as agricultural by-products (ABP s) or organic by-product enhancers are also blended with these primary chemicals to improve their performances in snow and ice control. Known additives are corn syrup, corn steeps, and other corn derivatives; beet juice-sugared or de-sugared; lignin/lignosulfonate ; molasses (usually from sugar cane); brewers/distillers by- product; and glycerin. A variety of agro-based chemicals are being used either alone or as additives for other winter maintenance chemicals (73). Agro-based additives increase cost but may provide enhanced ice-melting capacity, reduce the deicer corrosiveness, and/or last longer than standard chemicals when applied on roads ( 74). Furthermore, agro-based additives utilize renewable resources and have low environmental impact. Alkoka and Kandil examined a deicing product named Magic, which was a blend of ABPs and liquid MgCl 2 ( 75 ). The working temperature of the product was found to be down to -20ºF. Pesti and Liu evaluated the use of salt brine and liquid corn salt on Nebraska highways and found liquid corn salt to be more cost- effective because it achieved bare pavement conditions quicker than salt brine and contributed to more significant road user savings (76). Fu conducted field testing in the City of Burlington, Canada of two different beet molasses based mate rials (30% beet juice + 70% salt brine) and regular salt brine (23% NaCl) us ed as pre-wetting and anti-icing agents over nine snow events. The results indicated organic materials for pre-wetting under low temperatures did not perform significantly better. With a higher cost than regular brine, organic materials can reduce the amount of chlorides released into the environment. However, the results from this study are limited to the application rates and the observe d winter conditions (77) . The Swedish National Road and Transport Institute evaluated the fricti on characteristics of three types of mixtures. A brine made with 30% sugar beet flour used to pre-wet salt resulted in no significant friction improvement. Longer term performance was observed with sand mixed with hot water (78).  Fay and Shi (19) developed a systematic approach to assist maintenance agencies in selecting or formulating their deicers, which integrates the information available pertinent to various aspects of deicers and incorporates agency priorities.

This post deserves a lot more research.  But I don't think I need to research everything.  I see one of my jobs as finding interesting possibilities and also asking questions and this issue seems relevant to Alaska.

Tale of Two Cities - Divided Between Anchorage And LA

Ice Wall Seward Highway south of Anchorage

It was several degrees below zero (Fahrenheit) when we left Anchorage just after midnight Christmas morning.  It was ridiculously warm (on the way to mid 80s) and clear as we arrived into LA almost 40 minutes early around 8 am.  (There'd been a stopover in Seattle)

So this post is going to mix some leftover Anchorage photos from a great sightseeing day with New York based film maker Thanachart Siripatrachai mid December with photos of flying into LA today.  That jumble of hot and cold, wilderness and urban has been the last year as we try to spend as much time with my mom in LA as possible, yet maintain our Anchorage activities.  So why shouldn't you go back and forth between the two too?

Anchorage sunset Dec. 12, about 3:45 pm returning from Glen Alps.









Flying into LA Christmas Day, looking south toward Palos Verdes with Catalina Island very clear in the background.  LAX in the foreground.  We were early and spent some time flightseeing over LA.









Benz (Thanachart) checking out mostly frozen Turnagain Arm.  It was about 10˚F (-7˚C) that day and while it was mostly clear when we left the house, twenty minutes later it was mostly cloudy in the Arm and soon began to snow lightly.

And there was a brisk wind.  We walked around Beluga Point checking the ice formation on the water.  It was getting really cold with the wind.  So it was a little surprising when we saw three people get out of a car.  She was wearing lots of white. They climbed over the barricade and over the railroad tracks.  She pulled off her shawl and they started taking wedding pictures.  He had on an overcoat and scarf.

We came into LA, just north of the airport headed east (earlier photo above) came back a bit, and then looped around north with this view of downtown and all the mountain backdrops clearly displayed.  When we completed the circle we were headed west right over the Coliseum.

It was the 1984 Summer Olympics that made me realize what a huge part of my life the LA Coliseum had been.  From Boy Scout jamborees to rodeos,  early Dodger games and UCLA football games - I'd been to the Coliseum for various events all my early life.

Click to see map better

And at the LA Sports arena (the white oval)  I saw Lyndon Johnson nominated to be the vice presidential candidate with John Kennedy in 1960.  Someone had given my mom tickets and we were way up near the rafters, but we were there.  And I watched the UCLA basketball team in 1963 beat number one Michigan there - getting 16 points in a row at the beginning of the game - to go on for their first undefeated season and the beginning of their dynasty.  I also spent a lot of time in the museums and rose garden there at Exposition Park as a kid.  Followed by my graduate studies next door at USC.  Lots of my formative years spent in these few square blocks below us in the airplane yesterday morning.

 After we stopped at Bells Nursery (previous post on Christmas trees) Benz and I drove up to Glen Alps and walked to the Powerline Pass trail.





























We're closing in on the airport here.  I'm looking north as LA stretches to the hills.  It stretches even further over the hills in the valley.  And south out the other side of the plane.  And east.  But you can't see it quite this clear most days. 

This part of Chugach State Park is about 20 minutes from downtown Anchorage.  Nothing out there but nature- trees and bushes, a few trails, moose, bear, and other smaller critters. 

Here's Benz, tanning, Anchorage winter style. 









To put the top ice picture into perspective, I thought I better add this one Benz sent me.  All these are sharper if you click them.

Beautiful On A Gray Day, Spectacular On A Sunny One

It's gray today, but so beautiful out.

And when it was sunny the other day, it was amazing.

Moonlight In The Woods

The film festival awards ceremony was over, I took Benz to the airport, and then took the long way home to check out Campbell Airstrip in the post snow storm moonlight. 

AIFF2013: Surfing From Sitka To Homer - Video Intro with Fred Dickerson on Alaska Sessions

A month long winter surf trip from Sitka to Homer.  Why haven't I seen the Alaska Visitors' Bureau hyping this vacation package instead of cruises?

The director of Alaska Sessions:  Surfing The Last Frontier gives a brief intro in the video below.

The movie plays Sunday, Dec. 8 at 1pm at the Alaska Experience Theater.

Why I Live Here: Cold Beauty

It's good that people Outside (Alaska) believe it's cold and dark here most of the year.  It keeps them from moving up here.  But I'm constantly awed and delighted by the magnificence of Nature and the show it puts on in Alaska is never ending.  Even after 36 years here, I'm awed daily.  Fortunately, most Outsiders think such talk is just Alaskans rationalizing why they live in the cold and dark.   That's right.  Seattle's a nice place if you have to move north.  And there's Calgary and Edmonton if Seattle's too far south.   All much nicer than Anchorage.  Really.

We got home from LA just in time for the temperature to plunge to about -5˚F (-20˚C).  But I shoveled the driveway in the cold sunshine yesterday.  Today when I got back in from finishing the job (well there's a bit more I could do tomorrow) the outside thermometer said +9˚F (-12˚C) and tomorrow it's predicted to be in the 20s.

As I shoveled I kept looking up at these birch trees, dressed in hoarfrost, and I thought about how the new camera can take much better pictures of this than the little one.

Shots of Snowy Denali National Park

Is this a Denali post or a photography post?  These are the first out-of-the-house experiments with my new Canon EOS Rebel T3i.  Without a doubt, these are pictures I would not have gotten with my Powershot.

As pristine and natural as the top raven scene looks, the bird was headed for the muddy red truck that you see in the lower shot, which sure looks like a Yupik dancer in a kuspuk.  It was snowing at the time.  And while ravens are very cool birds, the fact that I'm shooting ravens in Denali should be the first hint of how few animals of any sort we saw.  Just like the moose, these are common Anchorage sights, and when we go to Denali we generally are hoping to see critters we don't see in our back yards at home.

 

Nevertheless, given that the first day the biggest mammal we saw were two ground squirrels, and this was the only one we saw the second day, we stopped and spent some time.  We had given up on seeing any animals when this one showed up on the side of the road above us coming toward us.  And no matter how many times you see moose, they are magnificent animals.  And this one was not an urban moose.  

The landscapes were magnificent, even with the clouds cutting off the larger mountains.  I'm not sure what the bluish/greenish tinge in the forefront is.

 

Another critter I might overlook on a more active day, the mew gull is a bird one is sure to see in Denali.  White head, and the white dots in the wing tips.  And not shy around people.

I couldn't help noticing the stark black and white contrast between the fresh snow and the stubble of last year's shrubbery.

Here's one my Birds of Alaska book says I saw in Denali before - the American Tree Sparrow.  Trying to identify it was hard in my book, but once I found the picture on the  Cornell Lab of Ornithology,  it matched perfectly.  The two colored beak (orange on the bottom and black on top, which was clearer in the originals), the buff shoulder, the white bar on the wing.  The picture is actually the same bird photoshopped onto one picture.  From the Cornell link, where you can also hear its call:

Come snowmelt, these small rusty-capped and smooth-breasted sparrows begin their long migrations to breeding grounds in the tundra of the far North.

 And they had every right to believe it would be tundra and not more snow this time of year.  

[UPDATE 1:30pm:  Wickersham's Conscience has a more detailed post on hungry songbirds arriving in Alaska. Better photos too.]

This is a break in the ice on the Teklanika River.  We were walking from the Teklanika River bus stop - the end of the road open to the public until today - looking down.  When I got this picture up on the computer, I noticed there are tracks going from left to right (well, I'm not sure which way the animal was going).  They stop at the water and then pick up again on the other side.  (They are clearer if you double click.)  So, I thought, the ice must have broken since the animal went by.  But where would the ice go?  I assumed that open water like this just never froze, but the tracks made me think about it.  Ice floats, so it shouldn't just sink down and under the ice that didn't break.  I may have lived here a long time, but I don't live along a river.  Here's a bigger view of this hole in the ice.

So, when I ask a question like that, I know I should try google, though I wasn't quite sure what to ask.  There are a number of scientific studies of river ice break up online and ice chunks can go under sheets of ice.  But that seems to be when there is more water flowing than here.  The jagged edges of the ice would suggest to me it broke and not that this was open all winter.  Perhaps someone will leave an answer in the comments. 

Studs On Bikes

Studded bike tires, along with LED lights, have transformed winter biking in Anchorage in the last ten years.  But while we think of ourselves as state of the art in these things, I discovered this studded tire in Michael Embacher's Cyclepedia that is listed as 1966! 























UPDATE 4:25pm:  Sorry, I was in a hurry and didn't get this part up. 

Another part of winter biking is being in a community where bike trails are cleared of snow.  Some Anchorage bike trails are cleared fairly quickly by small snow plows, though there is the problem of street plows then throwing street snow back into the bike paths. 

For another view on this, here's a post from BicyleDutch  about bike trail clearing in Holland:

When I mentioned the city of ’s-Hertogenbosch had forgotten to clear one new cycle route of snow in my post two weeks ago, the city quickly responded and the route was gritted right away. For the future the route is now included in the ‘to be cleared main cycle routes’. That was possible because the ‘city’ is of course a number of people working hard. One person read my post and contacted another person who is in charge of planning the actual gritting. A few days later I was contacted, and asked if I’d like to have a look at how ’s-Hertogenbosch works to keep its city streets safe, by clearing the main routes for motorised traffic and those for cyclists of snow and ice. Well, yes of course I was interested!

 There's pictures and more of the story if you go to the site.

Puffin Ice

When I got out of the Kulluk news briefing last Thursday, there was an ice carver working on two huge ice puffins.  I didn't take notes, but I think his name was Mike.

I think he said his name was Mike

Ice carving tools