Winter in Fairbanks…

I’ve been really busy the last 4 weeks or so getting ready for the big ice carving competition in North Pole. This is the last time I’m going to mention this…North Pole is a little town around 12 miles southeast of Fairbanks, Alaska. The national news media usually shows up near Xmas, does a few news pieces from around town (fluff pieces really) and packs up and leaves so the crews can have Xmas with their families. This year is different because the town has worked their butts off getting Ice Alaska and volunteer crews to stage a Christmas in Ice competition at Santaland RV park right next to the world famous Santaland retail store.

Most of my job so far has been prepare the web cameras (webcams or wcams) for the event. We will have 22-26 wcams ready by this coming weekend – Dec. 8th and 9th. I had to upgrade the firmware, swap old cameras with new, set the configurations, set the wcams to upload pictures to the FTP, get the WiFi gear all talking together, etc. It’s been a big push the last two weeks getting all the gear talking together like they’re suppose to, while having to go back and change stuff all the time as new decisions are made about machine & directory names. I only have a couple days to pull all my parts together for the event so I’m trying to work harder then I normally do.

The weather here has been nice and cold, running around 20F during the days, and dropping to the -5’s or so at night. Today it hit a new low, -20F when I got up, and hasn’t changed much since then except to drift upwards. It’s now -13F @ 9:34pm local time. Tomorrow should be the same. Since I had to head out to Santaland park today, I got to wear all my cold gear. I have some new LaCrosse 1600gram winter boots designed for -60F. Everything else I have I found at the local thrift shop. My coat is good to -50F, then I have insulated pants, thick gloves, a couple insulated hoods, ear muffs, a few sweaters, etc. It hasn’t gotten cold enough to require thermal underwear yet, but I do have some. Anyway, today Don and I went out to the Park and delivered some pipes to make camera stands with. At the same time, we waited for the cable company people to arrive and install cable internet services for us in the parks office where we’ll set up our servers. We should be testing wcams by Thursday, Dec. 6th and have the whole system running with 26 wcams by Saturday morning at 9am. If we’ve done our jobs well, after spending a few hours at the park making sure everything is working, we will be able to come home and adjust the cameras from our desktops. We’ll only need to go out to the park if a camera’s pictures stop updating. Cool, huh?

You’ll find the pictures, updated every 5 minutes if everything goes as planned, at this address: Ice Carving at North Pole!

There aren’t any wcam pictures up yet but should be by Saturday. Meanwhile, go check out the shots of last years Ice Park sculptures.

Here’s the trip I take from my cabin to the Ice Park:

Just a couple miles later I arrive at the Ice Park:

This is the driveway…really:

Here’s the building where I do all the computer and webcam work:

And down one of the park roads, it’s actually around 11 AM in the morning and most days it’s a little brighter:

The building is quite big, I’d hate to have to pay to heat it:

I think the Chinese sculptors carved this dragon in one day. I didn’t notice it until late in the day, I’ll go back and get a better picture soon:

Today, we drove over to Santaland RV Park to get set up:

Over there is the building where we’ll set up the web server and wcam server, I’m standing where the ice sculptures will be:

Those wooden stands will hold all the web cams:

One of several carvings already here, this one was provided by the city of North Pole. Most of the carvings are being done by a team of Chinese ice sculptors. These guys are good. One of them is China’s best carver:

The raindeer look much better then they did during the summer when they were shedding:

Here’s Dick Brickley on the left, the Chairman of the Board of Ice Alaska, Inc., and Andy, long time member, the ice logistics expert:

Connie, long time member, also author and scientist, I’m reading her book, “The Mesa Site: Paleoindians above the Arctic Circle” at this time:

That’s all for tonight. I’ll try to stay current over the next few weeks, time permitting.