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. 

Bookworms, Pagans, Hypathia, and the Loss of Knowledge

"Virtually the entire output of many other writers, famous in antiquity, has disappeared without a trace.  Scientists, historians, mathematicians, philosophers, and statesmen have left behind some of their achievements - the invention of trigonometry for example, or the calculation of position by reference to latitude and longitude, or the rational analysis of political power - but their books are gone.  .  .(p. 80)

"In this general vanishing, all of the works of the brilliant founders of atomism, Leucippus and Democritus, and most of the works of their intellectual heir Epicurus, disappeared.  Epicurus had been extraordinarily prolific.  he and his principal philosophical opponent, the Stoic Chrysippus, wrote between them, it was said, more than a thousand books.  Even if this figure is exaggerated or if it counts as books what we would regard as essays and letters, the written record was clearly massive.  That record no longer exists."  (p. 81)

In "The Teeth of Time" - chapter 4 of The Swerve -  Stephen Greenblatt accounts for the loss of this collected wisdom.  The teeth in the chapter title belonged to bookworms that devoured the papyrus on which much of this knowledge was recorded.  Climate was the other big culprit.

But intentional human destruction was another.

"The fate of the books in all their vast numbers is epitomized in the fate of the greatest library in the ancient world, a library located not in Italy, but in Alexandria, the capital of Egypt and the commercial hub of the eastern Mediterranean.  The city had many tourist attractions, including an impressive theater and red-light district, but visitors always took note of something quite exceptional:  in the center of the city, at a lavish site known as the Museum, most of the intellectual inheritance of Greek, Latin, Babylonian, Egyptian, and Jewish cultures had been assembled at enormous cost and carefully archived for research.  Starting as early as 300 BCE, the Ptolomaic kings who ruled Alexandria had the inspired idea of luring leading scholars, scientists, and poets to their city by offering them life appointments at the Museum, with handsome salaries, tax exemptions, free food and lodging, and the almost limitless resources of the library." (pp. 86-7)

This wasn't just a beneficent whim of the rulers.  They knew what the people of Boston and the Silicon Valley know: that having brilliant minds around is good for the economy.

"The recipients of this largesse established remarkably high intellectual standards.  Euclid developed his geometry in Alexandria;  Archimedes discovered pi and laid the foundation for calculus;  Eratosthenes posited that the earth was round  and calculated its circumference to within 1 percent;  Galen revolutionized medicine.  Alexandrian astronomers postulated a heliocentric universe;  geometers deduced that the length of a year was 365 1/4 days and proposed adding a 'leap year' every fourth years;  geographers speculated that it would be possible to reach India by sailing west from Spain;  engineers developed hydraulics and pneumatics;  anatomists first understood clearly that the brain and the nervous system were a unit, studied the function of the heart and the digestive system, and conducted experiments in nutrition.  The level of achievement was staggering."  (p. 87)

All this was done by people who would eventually be known as 'pagans.'  That sort of changes one's modern sense of that word which, beyond referring to polytheistic peoples also has  a sense of uncivilized, as in 'heathen.'

The Swerve is about the rediscovery in 1417 of a manuscript by Lucretius called On the Nature of Things that had been lost for 1000 years. It's a book outlines the Epicurean philosophy and world view, starting with the idea we now accept as atoms.

"The invisible particles from which the entire universe is made, from the stars to the lowliest insect, are indestructible and immortal, though any particular object in the universe is transitory." (p. 186)

 Yes, the most remarkable thing about this book for me is recognizing my own ignorance that these ideas are over two thousand years old.   They were thought out by pagans.  And I'm inserting this here so that when you see the word pagan in the next quote - on the destruction of the library in Alexandria - you understand it in context.

"The first blow [to the library] came as a consequence of war.  A part of the library's collection - possibly only scrolls kept in warehouses near the harbor - was accidentally burned in 48 BCE when Julius Caesar struggled to maintain control of the city.  .  . "(p.89)

"The Museum was, as its name implies, a shrine dedicated to the Muses, the nine goddesses who embodied human creative achievement.  The Seraperon, where the secondary collection was located, housed a colossal statue of the god Serapis - a masterpiece fashioned in ivory and gold by the famous Greek sculptor Bryaxis - combining the cult of the Roman deity Jupiter with the cult of the Egyptian deities Osiris and Apis.

The Jews and Christians who lived in large numbers in Alexandria were intensely uneasy with this polytheism.  They did not doubt that other gods existed, but those gods were without exception demons, fiendishly bent on luring gullible humanity away from the sole and universal truth.  All other revelations and prayers recorded in those mountains of papyrus rolls were lies. . .

Centuries of religious pluralism under paganism - three faiths living side by side in a  spirit of mingled rivalry and absorptive tolerance - were coming to an end.  In the early fourth century the emperor Constantine began the process whereby Rome's official religion became Christianity.  It was only a matter of time before a zealous successor - Theodosius the Great, beginning in 391 CE - issued edicts forbidding public sacrifices and closing major cultic sites.  The state had embarked on the destruction of paganism."  (pp. 89-90)

In Alexandria, the spiritual leader of the Christian community, the patriarch Theophilus, heeded the edicts with a vengeance.  At once contentious and ruthless, Theophilus, unleashed mobs of Christian zealots who roamed through the streets insulting pagans."  The pagans responded with predictable shock and anxiety, and tensions between the two communities rose.  

Christians found pagan sacred items buried beneath a Christian basilica and paraded them mockingly through the streets.  Pagans responded, but ended up baricading themselves in Serapeon [where, as mentioned above, the magnificent statue of Serapis was housed].

The Serapeon was then sacked and the statue destroyed.

A few years later, Jews were the victims.  Then the chapter describes the murder of Hypatia

"the daughter of a mathematician, one of the Museum's famous scholars-in-residence.  Legendarily beautiful as a young woman, she had become famous for her attainments in astronoy, music mathematics, and philosophy.  Students came from great distances to study the works of Plat and Aristotle under her tutelage." (p. 91)

She opposed the expulsion of the Jews from Alexandria and for her efforts had her skin flayed off and her body burned outside the city walls.  Greenblatt reports that the mob's hero was later made a saint.  

"The murder of Hypatia signified more than the end of one remarkable person;  it effectively marked the downfall of Alexandrian intellectual life and was the death knell for the whole intellectual tradition .  .  .  The Museum, with its dream of assembling all texts, all schools, all ideas, was no longer at the protected center of civil society.  In the years that followed the library vitually ceased to be mentioned, as if its great collections virtually the sum of classical culture, had vanished without a trace.  They had almost certainly not disappeared all at once - such a momentous act of destruction would have been recorded.  But if one asks, Where did all the books go? the answer lies not only in the quick work of the soldiers' flames and the long, slow, secret labor of the bookwork.  It lies, symbolically at least, in the fate of Hypatia." (p. 93)

Greenblatt quotes a Roman historian of that period, Ammianus Marcellinus,

"In place of the philospher the singer is called in, and in place of the orator the teacher of stagecraft, and while the libraries are shut up forever like tombs, water-organs are manufactured and lyres as large as carriages."  Moreover, he noted sourly, people were driving their chariots at lunatic speeds through the crowded streets." (p.93)

They say that people who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.  This book covers history I don't know well at all.  So I can't judge how accurate the book is.  As I pointed out in a previous post, part of the book has been strongly criticized as inaccurate.

But I do know that Americans tend to think that all great ideas - particularly in science - happened in the last few centuries and that our wisdom and knowledge exceeds by far what the ancients knew.  That's a conceit I don't accept and this book does document that a level of sophistication and intellectual power that we tend to forget ever existed before us.

And the fragility of intellectual infrastructure is important to note.  Stirring up religious fervor against gay rights, abortion, evolution, and climate change is alive and well in modern America.  Universities and schools are under attack.  The Swerve at the very least, reminds us that great knowledge can be lost easily. With today's rapidly changing digital technology, can we be sure that future civilization will be able to read what's on the chips they find, even if they can decipher English or Chinese?  

Now I have to finish the book for the book club meeting tomorrow night. 

Snow From North To South

Here's what it looked like in Denali Friday.  Lots of white, including the sky.  Still a beautiful landscape. 

As we drove back to the Park entrance it was snowing even harder.  OK, Denali is 200 miles north of Anchorage and the elevation is a couple thousand feet higher.  And the weather in one part of the state is different from other parts.  Let's head home for a little more seasonable weather.

screen shot from NOAA

Here's the Alaska weather map for today, but it couldn't have been much different yesterday.  That turquoise strip from North to South - that's what we drove.  It snowed from the Park to mile 142.  Then it seemed to change to rain, which was clearer when I realized that the snow wasn't lining the highway any more, trees weren't snowy, and just patches in the woods.  But at mile 67 it changed back to snow.  And then we got to Anchorage.

And this morning the deck had covering of light snow.

 

When we got to Anchorage in 1977, the gardening rule of thumb was not to plant anything outside until June 1.  You never knew when there would be a frost.  But over the years it got warmer and warmer and planting some hardier plants could be done May 1.  

This doesn't negate climate change.  The planet is, overall, warming.  But climate 'change' means just that.  Lots of weird weather as oceans warm, currents change, and there's lots of volatility.  

"America's First Climate Refugees"

"Like many if not most native Alaskan villages, Newtok owes its location to a distant bureaucrat. The Yup'iks, who had lived in these parts of Alaska for hundreds of years, had traditionally used the area around present-day Newtok as a seasonal stopping-off place, convenient for late summer berry picking.

"Even then, their preferred encampment, when they passed through the area, was a cluster of sod houses called Kayalavik, some miles further up river. But over the years, the authorities began pushing native Alaskans to settle in fixed locations and to send their children to school.

"It was difficult for supply barges to manoeuvre as far up river as Kayalavik. After 1959, when Alaska became a state, the new authorities ordered villagers to move to a more convenient docking point."

From a three part series published in the Guardian on Newtok, Alaska, including video. 


 NPR reported Friday that

A new study confirms that the vast majority of scientists who research the climate accept that the planet is warming and human beings are largely responsible. Yet a large slice of the American public believes that scientists are deeply split about global warming.

Meanwhile the Koch brothers and others do their best to convince federal and state legislators that climate change is a hoax.   History will record them among the evil doers of our generation for their willful ignorance and misinformation which has contributed to delaying humankind's efforts to ward off the worst effects of climate change.  But history's judgment offers little solace to the tens, more likely hundreds, of millions who will be most severely impacted by climate change.  Newtok is only one of the more obvious direct effects of climate change already disrupting people's lives.  

Where will, for example, the people of Miami and Manhattan flee when the water rises more?  Sandy, I'm afraid, was just the beginning. 

It's Snowing Right Now In Denali National Park

Here's our campsite this morning. 

There was snow when we arrived Wednesday evening and yesterday there were lazy snowflakes all day yesterday, but nothing serious and the sun was making itself seen and felt through the clouds all day too.  Enough to see shadows most of the time. 

Here's the visitors center - about 20 minutes ago, snow falling seriously.

The biggest mammals we saw yesterday as we drove out to Teklanika and back were two ground squirrels.  This bear sculpture is on the visitors' center deck this morning. 

Looking out from the visitors' center. 

This was just before Cantwell on Wednesday.  It had been cloudy in Anchorage but there was lots of blue sky on the drive up, but clearly much more snow than normal - the viewpoint at Mile 135 was open, but full of snow. 

We did a lot of walking yesterday along the road.  I'd drop J off and then drive on and stop and then she'd drop me off.  Here's a moose print I saw, but basically it was a few birds - gulls, ravens, gray jays.   The trail along Savage River was completely snowed in.  Usually it's clear by now with a few patches of snow here and there.  Yesterday my leg kept going through the snow to my knee.  I needed snow shoes. 

Here's the Teklanika River.  The road is closed at the Teklanika bus stop/viewpoint and we walked on down the road to the bridge and a little ways beyond.  We didn't hear any birds in that area that has been teaming with bird sounds in the past around this time. 

But it's beautiful and nice to see things in this different perspective.  Not sure how far the road is open today.  The ranger here thought it might be closed at Savage River because of the snow.  We'll see.  So far, the snow isn't sticking on the roads. 

Why does race mean black and gender mean female?

That's one of the questions Jackson Katz asks in this Ted Talk video, in which he also argues

• Violence against women is NOT a women's issue - it's a men's issue.  Men play the central role in gender violence, yet the focus of all the discussion is on what women do or don't do.  He shows how the sentence "John beat Mary" too often is grammatically altered to "Mary is a battered woman" and John is left  totally out of the conversation.
• It's not just about men. It's about the institutions that create so many male abusers.  It's about the sports culture, the religious belief systems, the pornography culture, the economic and family structures and how all these interface. 
• Perpetrators are not evil monsters that come out of the swamp to attack their victims, they are much more ordinary, much more a part of all our daily lives.  
• The key is to focus on men, not the women, and the socialization of boys and our definitions of manhood.
• Women who stand up against abuse get shouted down with demeaning names because men don't want the issues raised, their power and privilege challenged, including the power and privilege to ignore this issue.
• Men have to stand up because they can be heard saying things that women often can't be heard saying. 
• It's not a sensitivity issue, it's a leadership issue.  Men in leadership positions don't take appropriate action to stop violence against women in the organizations they head and men in general don't take on leadership roles by objecting to racist and sexist comments in men only settings.
• That men in power, by laughing at sexist jokes, by giving consent with their silence give status to men who talk about and use violence. They have to stop doing this.

He makes one good point after another.  In light of the Penn State scandal, the Catholic church, the Boy Scouts, and on and on, this is a massive and important issue and I'd urge people to just start the video.  Give him a minute.




Thanks to M for pointing this one out.

We Should Be In Denali By Now

If all goes as scheduled, when this post goes up, we'll be in Denali taking advantage of the last few days before the buses start and you can drive the first 30 miles into the park as far as Teklanika. 

This is often a great time to be in the park.  The weather is good, animals are out, people are scarce, and you can just hang out on the road, stop anywhere and go walk across the landscape. 

But it's unseasonably chilly as I write this in Anchorage and I understand that's true up north too.  We'll see.  It should still be some good head clearing time.  If I can find wifi I'll put up some pictures.  And I've got this and one more post pre-scheduled for Thursday. 

Benghazi - Testing 2016 Swift Boats

When war hero Kerry ran against draft dodger Bush, the Republican truth-transformers attacked Kerry's strength with pure fiction and created enough doubt by those who wanted to believe in Bush and those who couldn't believe that anyone would so blatantly lie. 

Now they're back, looking for ways to tarnish Hillary Clinton's State Department experience.  To what extent have Americans learned how to see through these illusionist tricks?  To what extent will the people who helped Obama turn Romney's business career into a liability  be able to do that with the next Republican candidate?

• Is there actually some real meat to the Benghazi attacks?  Depends on what you mean by real meat.  
• Was their a difference of opinion inside the administration?  Lots of them. There always is.  It's only natural.  It's not a crime or even bad.  (Well for Republicans it is.)
• Did they leave out information that might have been damaging to the President just before an election?  Seems like it.  Would the Republicans have done the same?  They know perfectly well they would have.
• Was Libya dangerous and was the Benghazi consulate under protected?  No question about it.  There are dangerous places all around the world that are under protected and right now and the Republicans were a major force for cutting the State Department budget.  

Was the White House at its best in this situation?  Definitely not.  And I have issues with a lot of things this White House is doing.  But I also know the job of President isn't easy and there will be mistakes.

It's never easy, in the middle of things, to know whether the opposition is raising important points that should be asked or whether they are trying to turn Benghazi into a liability for the likeliest Democratic presidential candidate.

A good way for me to test this is by looking at how they treated similar situations in their own party.  It's pretty clear now, for instance, that George W. Bush had plenty of warnings about potential Al Qaeda attacks before 9/11.   But Democrats as well as Republicans pretty much united after 9/11.

Few Republicans voiced any serious problems as the Bush administration's deceptions when it became clear their claims of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were much weaker than the told us.  Some Democrats did, but that was a situation far more serious.  Here we have some spinning - making a story look as good as they could - after the fact.  With the WMD we had them leaving out very crucial information about a decision to lead the country into a huge and costly war.

Should we go back to events like Iran-Contra?  St. Ronald (clearly Reagan holds that status among most Republicans) team broke the law and lied to get weapons to Iran to free hostages and to use some of the revenue to help right wing rebels in Nicaragua in clear violation of the Boland Amendment that expressly prohibited any assistance to the Contras rebels.  These were serious, intentional violations of American policy and law.

Could Ambassador Stevens' life have been spared?  Quite possibly.  But we don't know because there is a lot of information that hasn't come out.  We also know that Stevens was one of the savviest Americans in Libya.  He made the decision to go to Benghazi.  And if one report is to be believed, he turned down offers for more security from the Department of Defense.

We also know that Sen. McConnell made defeating Obama his number one priority.  That is consistent with what many believe is unwavering obstruction of everything Obama proposes from health care to appointments to making every issue they can into a political scandal that distracts attention from the business of running the country well. 

Now that Obama can't run again, Republicans are aiming at other candidates. 

How Long Does It Take To Fly From Anchorage To Reykjavik?

The Alaska Department of Transportation sent out press releases today announcing that the first Icelandair flight arrives Wednesday in Anchorage.

". . . Flight time between Reykjavik and Anchorage on the 189-seat Boeing 757-200 is approximately seven hours. Travelers will connect in Reykjavik with more than 20 destinations in Scandinavia, the United Kingdom and Continental Europe.  

 Lt. Governor Mead Treadwell will lead the inaugural welcome for Wednesday’s arrival of the Icelandair flight in the airport’s North Terminal lobby. Media should arrive by 3:30 p.m. for a photo opportunity on the airfield and press conference. A second event celebrating the first Icelandair departure from Anchorage will be held Thursday, May 16, beginning at 2 p.m. in the South Terminal."

Now we have two summer options to get to Europe relatively quickly.  Condor Air - a Lufthansa subsidiary - also flies from Anchorage to Europe.  And with jetBlue and Virgin here for the summer we can get to San Francisco and other West Coast destinations a little cheaper than in the winter. 

There's an Anchorage Inaugural tour package for six nights at the cabin hotel plus the flight for 1,482 USD.


There are a bunch of tours available, including this Black and Blue tour:

From $191  per person
   Daily  departures s at 09:00 (pickup at 08:30) - min of 2 pax required to operate the tour
Not available Dec 24, 25, 31, Jan 1
 6 hours
No hotel pick up from hotels outside of Reykjavik
Important : If you are arriving in Iceland on an evening flight from North America, this tour is NOT recommended for your arrival day.  Passengers usually arrive at their hotel around 8am.  Any delays could cause you to miss the tour departure.  Icelandair cannot reimburse passengers for unused portions of a package or land only travel once travel starts.
AH172

Start with the "black" part as you explore the hidden world of the lava field under the Þingvellir national park. Walking in a cave and discovering the marvels that volcanic activity has created in the past is an amazing experience.  The Gjabakkahellir cave is a perfect example of an Icelandic lava tube and is situated in one of the most active volcano areas in the world. After the cave, take a break for a picnic  lunch (included)  before moving on into the blue...

Snorkeling in the Silfra fissure is our second adventure. Silfra fissure is world famous for its heavenly shades of blue. The crystal clear water in the deep fissure gives you a feeling of being weightless as you float down with the lazy current. The snorkeling is a relaxing but exotic trip in an environment most will only encounter in their dreams.

The Black & Blue is an amazing trip, a true journey to the borders of reality and dreams.

Hiking boots required
Bring change of clothes

The videos I could find were scuba, not snorkeling.  And I didn't see any fish.   But it looked nice.  Just wondering how cold the water is.  Wikipedia says it's 100 year old water because it comes from glaciers. 

There's more here.   But I had trouble getting it to recognize Anchorage when trying to find other flights. 

How Easy Is Biking Near You? Here's A Bikeability Checklist

Here's a checklist to help evaluate the ease and safety of biking in your community.  Perhaps your own route to work or the library or your kids' route to school.  It even has suggestions for how to improve things.  One might be to send this to your local city council members - but fill it out first so they can see how your route scored.

Bikeability Checklist

There's also a Walkability Checklist.  And both checklists are also available in Spanish here.

How did I find this? I got an Alaska Department of Transportation press release. I tried to paraphrase it, but I'm not completely sure what it means so I'll just quote the paragraph for you:

"The Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities (ADOT&PF) Safe Routes to School Program is pleased to announce that 69 schools participated statewide in the event, which ranks sixth in the nation for the total number of participating schools per state; besting several states with much larger populations and much fairer weather, such as Texas and Arizona."

 I don't think this means the most kids biking to school in a state, but rather the most participating schools.  I called the number for more info and left a message, so I can clarify this later.  And maybe even get a link to the rankings which I couldn't find. 

Poking around their links I did find that Alaska has been getting about $1 million a year for this program.  I can't find details on what they did with the money, but presumably it goes to making walking and biking routes to school safer.  There was a program about getting reflective tape onto kids' coats so they can be better seen during the dark months. 

Here's a list of all the states' federal funding on this.