This morning I scraped frost off the windshield of our vehicle. Last night I stoked up the woodstove. Today I looked up at the peaks around our winter office and noted how low the snowline was creeping towards us. 3000 feet now, perhaps?
Locals call the first snows at the tops of the mountains “termination dust”; harbingers of the end of summer. We had been anticipating the arrival of winter for over a month now in Denali. Hard frosts killed many of our flowers at Camp Denali and North Face Lodge in mid August. How is it that flowers are still blooming in Anchorage? Here in the interior portion of the state, our climates are extreme. Like Siberia or Colorado, we are great distances from the ocean, which absorbs heat during the summer and releases it during the winter, making greater temperature swings for us non-coasties.
Clever ‘ol Jack Frost seems to be sneaking towards us.
The last signs of autumn are disappearing…leaves are falling off our deciduous trees (willows, alders, aspens, and poplars) and all the birds we’re seeing are winter residents lately. Trumpeter swans flying above our office about a week ago seemed to be a final salutation to our migratory avifauna friends.
Today, September 21st, is the fall equinox. The date is special to us in many regards. Today we experience exactly 12 hours of both daylight and nighttime. Beginning tomorrow, we continue to lose 5-8 minutes of our daylight daily, until we hit the winter solstice on December 21st.
I recently moved into my new cabin for the winter, a beautiful log house, sans indoor plumbing. Before I did, I spent a night curled up on our office porch in my sleeping bag, watching the green twists of a faint aurora borealis to the north. I’m waiting almost breathlessly for the first snowflake to fall, almost as I await the first pussywillow in the spring. Transitions, both in life and in the seasons, can be exhilarating. The lingonberries (Vaccinium vitis-idaea) are in abundance here, about 10 miles south of the park entrance, nestled along a bluff of the Nenana River. Perhaps our summer season is over, but we’re looking forward to a cold winter filled with wood fires, knitting, skiing, and general warmth.
