Chaos Leaves Town

Today it’s -50F outside. It’s 65F inside the cabin. A swing of 115F. Wow. I did get all 3 of the inside plastic storm windows I mentioned in an earlier post installed so it’s fairly comfortable in here. Not many drafts coming off the windows. But my knees & lower legs are cold. I’m going to put on my long-johns today whether I go out or not. It’s around 11:30AM and although I’d like to be outside doing something, I don’t think I’ll get out today. It takes nearly a half hour to warm up the car at these temps. The weather forecast is for warming temperatures beginning tomorrow but if I have to go out today, I’ll be bitching about it under my breath…

For Xmas, I didn’t want to stay home so I asked around at my favorite bar here in town and got permission to bring a turkey and gravy. They don’t have a working kitchen but do have things like a warming table. A couple of others volunteered to bring a salad dish or pies so we had a plan. A few days before xmas I found a natural, non-self basting turkey at the first store I tried. A nice 18 pounder. Thanks, Foster Farms and Fred Meyer, for providing a turkey that isn’t doped with salt water to make it weigh more, taste blah and be bad for you. Anyway, xmas afternoon I plop the turkey inside a baking bag and shove it in the oven. Three and a half hours later and I have a beautiful turkey all ready. A few minutes creating some yummy gravy and I’m all set.

I run down to the tav and meet the bar’s owner John just as he pulls in. The place wasn’t to be opened until 4pm and no one had bothered to tell him I was bringing food. So he wasn’t ready. Luckily it didn’t take much to get the warming trays up and running while I carved the turkey. There weren’t any mashed potatoes provided like I thought there were going to be but John had a big bag and put one of his employees to work cooking some up.

Around 5ish what little we had was ready so the 25 or so that were hanging around got a nice xmas dinner for free. Later I took a few pictures. Most of the ladies are bar tenders and work at the bar. Lot’s of beautiful women hanging out here.

It’s almost 3 weeks since we set up the webcams at the ‘Christmas In Ice’ event. I thought I’d share a few more photos of the art work and artists that created the sculptures.

The next picture is of a sculptress friend of mine. She lived at the RV park where I was the acting office manager, worked at the Ice Museum downtown and now runs the movie theater there. I thought that her work, a 1st effort at a competition ice piece, was pretty daring. Complex and difficult, with soaring branches with birds perched, ready to fly. It was as I said a first effort, so a little rough in places. She didn’t win anything this time, but I expect her to get better and better and eventually win.

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The sculptors created this kids park. The slides are always very popular.

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Then this is a shot looking back at the ice competition area, it was around 4 pm:

This ice object is a kids toy. The kid sits in it and an adult spins it around. Once the ice and snow develop a water layer, the things spin quite fast:

And here I am all bundled up in my winter clothes. It’s around -20F when this shot was taken and we had been working on webcams for around an hour. I was very comfortable. The jacket is good to -50F as are the boots. The hood I picked up at a thrift store for $1 but it works great. Really keeps the head warm. The gloves I’ve had since my back packing days back in the ’70’s but they work well so far. The pants are insulated and also work very well. So for $150 or so, I believe I’ll weather the -40F to -70F temperatures I’ve been told to be ready for here in Fairbanks.

Just a quick comment on the weather here in Fairbanks, Alaska. As you know, I stopped here for a few months so rented a cabin. It’s been getting colder and colder. Because of that, I’ve been adding plastic windows. I’m up to 3 ‘panes’ on each window now. Night before last, it dipped down to -30F. When I got up, I found that I had ice on the inside of the four plastic windows I’ve added. So yesterday, I worked on sealing up one of those plastic windows for which I had built a wooden frame. It had by far the most icing. I’ve built two like that, the others are just those ‘inside’ window kits with a plastic sheet held in place with sticky tape. Took off the framed window (it’s on the inside of the house since my measurements were off a tad and it wouldn’t fit in the wacko outside frame – the other framed plastic window is working fine on the outside), added some sealing foam, screwed it back onto the window frame and then sealed up all those little leaks still there because of the style of the window surround. For the three other windows I’ll have to go to the store and get 3 more plastic inside windows.

That did help that window. This morning I got up at 10am and it’s -45F outside. Inside it’s 54F. A difference of 99 degrees. Ice on all the inside windows except the one I worked on. At least that one is working. Today, I’ll go get three more window kits. Energy is a lot more expensive then the $9 it will cost me. I’ll be up to 4 layers after these kits go on.

Meanwhile, the ToyoTomi oil fired heater I have here in the cabin has shut off twice this morning. With an EE12 error code. That indicates: “High limit switch activated”. I suppose that means that it’s running at full blast too long because once it’s up to set temp it works fine all day. It’s more modulated then an old style ‘Off-On’ furnace, it has 3 different nozzles for ‘warm-medium-hot’. I’ve got it set to 64F and with appropriate clothes, that is comfortable, and it brings the difference inside to outside to 109F. The cabin is only two room so it doesn’t take much for it to be cozy. I did find one electrical outlet that needed sealing. Very cold air was leaking by the plastic cover. A little sealing foam and it’s good.

I didn’t get to bed until 2am and the tv was still on as I climbed into bed, one of those emergency bulletins came on about all Alaska needed to get ready for a tsunami. What? My eyes popped open while I considered having to swim for it at -40F. Then I remembered that I’m 300 miles from the coast. What they meant was all of ‘coastal’ Alaska needed to run for the hills because of a 7.5 earthquake offshore. I’ll have to go look that news report up because the radio hasn’t said a word about it so far this morning.

See ya!

After spending all that time getting ready, it was a pleasure to finally load all the Webcams up in the SUV and tote them out to the venue. This event was a big thing with the entire town of North Pole getting involved with lots of volunteers. Don and I went out on Tuesday to meet with the cable modem techs in our temporary computer room. We had been given permission to set up in the laundry room of the RV park. They are closed for the most part and only have one person staying at the park. The door has a code lock so we felt safe when we set up 3 computers, a cable modem, a router, and a hub. We met with the cable people and verified we had a signal, then on Thursday, we brought and set up the three computers with appropriate script for the cameras. Along with 26 cameras. Go to Ice Alaska You’ll be at site 27 with a view of how the cameras are installed on stands. Since they are all wifi enabled, all we had to do was set up two wifi receivers back at the RV park office laundry room where all our equipment was ready to receive the pictures, then upload the the pictures to the internet.

Thursday afternoon & Friday evening Don & I put up all the cameras. We had waited for the fences and security to be in place:

It seems that easy now, but Don, Rick and I spent from 6:30pm Friday to early Saturday morning getting everything to work.

Here’s Don & Rick working hard Friday night:

The entire system had been working at the Ice Park in Fairbanks when we moved it out to North Pole, but the change of routers and changing from DSL to a cable modem made the Linux box unhappy. It took until 4:30 AM to get it to accept the pictures from the cams and upload them to our host. Then the drive home was another 1/2 hour so I was happy to crawl into bed at 5:15am.

The Christmas In Ice event is a 38 mile round trip to my cabin so there was a definite need for remote computing. I spent a few hours reading up on it and then learned how to configure the Nexland router to allow remote desktop. The WinXP boxes at either end weren’t a big problem, but the Nexland turned out to be troublesome in an obscure way. Took me three round trips to get it working. Now I’m able to configure the webcams from home and have set up the Nexland to allow me to configure it remotely too, even if the LAN it’s connected to is down. Right now I’ve got the Camera Admin computer set to accept and allow remote computing but it won’t be that hard to get all of the boxes set up that way, even the Linux box will allow it.

On Saturday, we did some tweaking amidst the sculptors who were frantically trying to get their works done by Sunday at 3PM, ready for judging:

This star came out looking really good on the internet:

The fogginess of this set of pictures is due to the cold. It was around -5F while we were working out there and I had the camera in it’s padded case stuffed into an outside pocket of my winter coat. Turns out I need to keep it in an inside pocket to keep it warm.

This is a pretty good picture of the artist and eventual winner of the ice sculpture contest. The sculpture is of a prancing deer family and the style is retro from the 1930’s, I believe it’s called ‘rococo’:

Initially, we set up 24 cameras and got them working during the competition. Then on Monday (Dec. 10th) we shuffled some cameras around to show the winners and some shots of the park and the kids section while we left a static picture of the other works on the webserver. So when you go look at the webcams now, 11 are ‘live’ and the rest are from the archive (there are a couple cameras not transmitting just now but we’ll get that fixed soon, but it is a long drive just to unplug and replug in a camera).

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.

The day after we went to the theater, we headed up to Chena Hot Springs. This place has been frequented by Fairbanksians for over a century. Since shortly after it was discovered that there was hot water bubbling out of the ground and flowing down a small stream here. The springs are and hour and a half out of town averaging 60 MPH so it was quite the hike for people years ago and for many years. And because of that fact, there are many buildings here that are filled with rooms for rent. If you hiked, buggied, took the public carriage, or rode a horse out this far, you wanted to stay for a while and rest before you had to hoof it back. These days you drive a car on a blacktopped highway at 60 MPH so it’s not as important to stay a few days. The hot springs themselves are upstream a ways from the swimming pond, we did hike up that way for a bit but turned back since there isn’t much to see anyway. Plus there were signs about the bears in the area everywhere.

When you stroll the grounds, you find these antiques about. They were all brought up here in the early 1900’s and the placards all say these machines were here to work, used until they couldn’t be fixed anymore and left where they broke. The new owners have tried to bring them out of the woods and from behind buildings and spruce them up:

This is a very old home made snow machine, now called a snowmobile:

At the back of the property, this large heated pond where you can soak your ills away:

Here’s the improved stream that comes from the hot springs. What they did years ago was to join the hot spring and a cold stream to mix the water and lower the temperature. Now they have a pipe run up to the hot spring and can store the hot water and use it to run turbines to generate electricity. There’s still enough hot water for the pool:

This carriage is used for weddings here, and has been for nearly a century:

Out front is a runway and these planes live up here:

This is a look southwest towards Fairbanks, those clouds are pretty typical many days of the summer, but we do get sunshine as well:

This old Cat type machine was kind of interesting:

After we wandered around for a couple hours, we bought tickets for a visit to the ‘Ice Place’. This is a year round freezer kept at either 20F or -20F, (I can’t remember which). This is the first year where the sculptures didn’t thaw. Took them a couple years to figure out how to insulate and cool the building efficiently. The biggest help was to start generating their own cold using hot water from the springs instead of using the typical refrigeration machines you might be use to.

This is just after we entered the building. See the chainsaws there on the wall? That’s what they use to start carving the sculptures. This area is the work area of the staff sculptors:

Then there is this table with glasses made of ice used by the folks that pay extra for a drink at the ice bar:

The whole building is made out of ice blocks like these (except the outer shell):

The fireplace:

The place is very large so my flash disappeared into the distance. If you look carefully, you might see all those people sitting at the bar (on the right) and the other sitting at the tables scattered around. This is where you would get a nice cold drink:

An ice sculpture:

Close up of the fireplace:

Hard to see but those lights are on the sculptures:

Here’s a very large knight sculpture attacking another knight:

There are rooms you can rent here if you want to spent the night in a big igloo. they provide all the furs you can use. There is even an ice ‘loo’ if you’re brave:

This was one of the igloo ‘rooms’ where you can spend the night, they aren’t very high and they’re round so it’s hard to get a picture that explains the room. This is the table and lamp:

An Ice Queen, I know some of you are saying, ‘Looks like my wife, same warmth too’. Stop it:

Last antique, outside the door and across the lot from the Ice Palace:

That’s our visit to Chena Hot Springs. I’d like to run up there one of these days and soak in the hot pool…maybe next week. See ya on the road!

Back in August Dan and I roamed around Fairbanks checking out the sites and visiting tourist destinations. One of the places we went is presented here today. A little late in time, but not on the cosmic scale. It’s now November 15th and the temperature here is -10F. It’s nearly noon and that’s probably going to be the high today. There is around 6″ of snow on the ground and shrouding the trees so it looks nice, I’ve got the winter clothes you might imagine, and I’ve become use to the cold so although my cabin is only 64F right now, I’m very comfortable. I am a little worried about how the RV will survive the winter but I see lots of them parked around town so if other people aren’t worried, I don’t suppose I should be either.

Across the river from the RV park where I had been staying at this time, I’ve mentioned that there is a nice park named Pioneer Park. It has reconstructed many of the original cabins built by the pioneers who had moved here in the late 1800’s. Most of the cabins are now used as small stores with tourist trinkets. The park also has two theaters, an art gallery, restaurants, a large dry docked paddle wheel boat, etc.

So, we were wandering through the park and noticed a playbill for a comedy revue that evening. Bought our tickets and returned later. I asked Dan to take pictures since I’d forgotten my camera, that’s why they aren’t very good. The cast came out on stage and told us they liked people taking pictures of them so we could flash away. The revue was funny, most of the jokes were a little dated but this is Fairbanks not New York so we didn’t cause any trouble. They even did the old ‘Who’s on First’ bit. The cast worked hard to entertain and for the most part didn’t fail us.

Here’s the stage just before curtain, the piano player has begun to play a few melodies from the late 1800’s:

One of the cast played a little:

A little ‘Can-Can’ to keep our interest…the dancer in the middle is one of the guys:

The gal there in the purple was a real beauty, good actress, good voice, big expressive eyes, etc., she has it all:

And a big finish after an hour and half of fun, comedy and music:

Back when my brother visited, we drove the RV down south to Denali Park, where Mt. McKinley is. The forest service doesn’t allow cars or big rigs to drive the roads inside the park except occasionally so when we got there we signed up for a bus tour into the park. Since it was to late in the day for the trip up to the turn around to get a view of Mt. McKinley, there was only one tour we could take that would work out for us and give us some hiking time. We also signed up for a bus tour the next day.

The drive down from Fairbanks was uneventful except we missed our turn into the park and went an extra 13 miles down to some little town before we discovered the mistake.

Here’s a shot looking south toward Denali. It is around 1 & 1/2 hour drive from Fairbanks.

We spotted this old restored Model A Ford at a little cafe.

Our trip into the park on the bus passed vistas like this:

Here’s where we got off the bus and began our hike up stream:

We were joined by several folks from the bus, and ended up talking while walking to these gals since we tended to be hiking at the same rate:

The weather was fine with ample places to take pictures:

Time for a rest & a visit:

After a couple hours hike, we head on back to the bus on the opposite side of the creek:

Bunches of these birds hanging around here:

Back on the bus, heading back to the Forest Service Headquarters we spotted this elk:

We spent the night at a nearby RV park and watched a little TV, resting up after the days hike. The next day was an all day bus tour into Denali Park in order to get a picture of Mt. McKinley. The bus goes to the only place on the road in the park were you can get a good view and a good picture. We didn’t have the time to go clear over to the base of the mountain but we hoped the bus trip would be good enough. We were wrong. Mt. McKinley is shrouded in clouds for most of the year so it wasn’t unusual that the next day we woke up to very cloudy weather. It stayed that way all day and sprinkled the entire day.

Here’s a few pictures from the bus or at the stops we made along the way to the turn around:

At the turn around is a visitors center and this picture is what Denali (Mt. McKinley) would have looked like had the weather cleared up for us:

On the trip back to the FS Center, we spotted this bear, it’s hard to see but it’s there, there were other animals but they were always to far away for pictures:

We got back to the FS center early enough in the day that we just headed back home to Fairbanks.