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Four summers ago, Syndonia Bret-Harte stood outside at Toolik Lake, watching a wall of smoke creep toward the research station on Alaska’s North Slope. Soon after, smoke oozed over the cluster of buildings.
“It was a dense, choking fog,” Bret-Harte said.
The smoke looked, smelled and tasted like what Bret-Harte has experienced at her home in Fairbanks, but the far-north version was composed of vaporized tundra plants instead of black spruce and birch. The 2007 Anaktuvuk River fire, which burned an area the size of Cape Cod, is the largest fire ever recorded in tundra. It was the first wildfire in the area since slaves were shoving blocks in place to create the pyramids in Egypt (about 5,000 years ago). 
A few years ago, Ronald Daanen was driving north of Coldfoot on the Dalton Highway, looking for drunken trees. He pulled over when he saw some tipsy spruce on a hillside.
The University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist thought the tilted trees would be a classic sign of thawing permafrost, ground that has remained frozen through the heat of at least two summers. But these trees were part of something larger — a giant tongue of moving hillside that was oozing toward the Dalton Highway.
When covered in snow, the mass looks like a glacier covered with trees, but it’s not a glacier. Nor is it a rock glacier, a mass of rock and ice that slowly slips down mountains (there are several in the Alaska Range and the Wrangells).
Permafrost scientists have found three of them close to the road near Coldfoot and have seen several more along the highway south of Atigun Pass. Using Google imagery, they have found many more in the same area. Retired USGS geologist Tom Hamilton saw the same features as he mapped the geology of the area in the 1970s. Hamilton called them “flow slides.” Daanen and Guido Grosse of the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute are calling the features “debris flows.” In a paper they recently co-wrote, the scientists describe the phenomena as “an unusual form of mass movement.”
On a trip north a few springs ago, Daanen, Grosse and others punched through wet snowpack and climbed up on the lobes. They found huge cracks in the ground. Some of the trees were split at the base. The clues told them that the hill upon which they stood was moving, probably after a long period during which it didn’t budge (which allowed the spruce to grow tall there, at the northern edge of where spruce exist in Alaska).
Alaskans love fungi. This was evident on a recent Saturday when author and mycologist Lawrence Millman offered a mushroom walk at Creamer’s Field on one of the wettest days of the yellow-leaf season.
“Eighty people showed up in the rain, all eager to learn about fungi,” Millman said by email after returning to his home in Massachusetts. “I dare say the hunter-gatherer instinct is alive and well in Fairbanks.”
And why shouldn’t it be, since Fungus Man made life possible? During a lecture at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Millman introduced the crowd to Fungus Man, a character in a Haida myth. Millman showed a drawing depicting a wide-eyed Fungus Man paddling a canoe. Fungus Man guides Raven, who sits in the front of the canoe holding a spear.
DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE— On a late autumn day, as naked stems of dwarf birch nod away from a warm breeze, a distant flash of antler reveals the object of our search.
Beneath a sky of stars and hazy aurora, the heat of an October day shimmers upward. The next morning, leaves, moss and tundra plants are woven into a carpet of white frost; a skin of ice creeps over the surface of lakes. Alaska is freezing once again, responding to the planet’s nod away from the sun and signaling one of the biggest changes of the year.
Northern plants in these parts are standing at the ready, prepared for a long season of doing nothing. Deciduous trees have dropped their leaves, some of them gambling to retain their solar panels a few days longer than others. In a bipolar cycle of life, northern trees are shutting down the frenetic photosynthesis and growth of summer.
Most every migratory songbird has for the final time leapt from the branches here, though some wayward juncos will linger at great peril. The only migrants still passing overhead are the large-bodied swans. Those symbols of quiet grace are passing over in formations that resemble arrowheads arcing toward warm air.
As Alaska cools and hardens, many scientists are reacquainting themselves with their offices. Such is the case for Derek Sikes, the curator of insects at the University of Alaska Museum of the North. This summer, he traveled across Alaska, from Sagwon Bluffs to Sitka and many places between, including a trip to the Aleutians for good lateral coverage.
Sikes’ tales of his recent insect explorations in Alaska have a Lewis and Clark feel. Scientists have inventoried the insects of Alaska for a long time, but those men and women were very few compared to the researchers studying caribou or the aurora. Because of this dearth of people looking for bugs, Alaska’s rock crevices and tidal splash zones still hide plenty of undiscovered species. Sikes and his colleagues have added more than 1,000 to the Alaska list of insects (and have collected 20 that are new to science) since he moved northward and started work at the museum four years ago. During the short period when insects are crawling, flying and hopping, he jumps at every opportunity to find more.
In Alan Weisman’s book, “The World Without Us,” the author ponders “a world from which we all suddenly vanished. Tomorrow.”
In Alan Weisman’s book, The World Without Us, the author ponders “a world from which we all suddenly vanished. Tomorrow.”
In last week’s column, a few experts discussed the fate of Alaska structures if Alaskans were to disappear. This week, people who study Alaska’s wildlife donate some thought to the subject.
Alaska’s lack of people has benefited many species, including caribou, which still outnumber Alaskans, and salmon, which torpedo up our rivers with a staggering, wonderful density that was once seen all over the west coast of North America.
There’s a new kind of dinosaur out there, and it lived in Alaska.
Its bones, long turned to stone, are part of a cliff in northern Alaska. That’s where dinosaur-hunter Tony Fiorillo brushed dirt away from a portion of its massive skull – something that most of us would mistake for a rock.
The year was 2006. It was August and summer had fled the Colville River, if it had been there at all. Fiorillo, who visits Alaska each summer from Dallas, where he works at the Museum of Nature & Science, remembers climbing from his tent with a heavy head every morning. He later learned he was working with pneumonia.
For many Alaskans, January 1989 is a month that still numbs the mind, because of the cold snap that gripped much of the state for two weeks. In Fairbanks, fan belts under the hoods of cars snapped like pretzels; the ice fog was thick and smothering, and the city came as close as it ever comes to a halt, with many people opting to stay home after their vehicles succumbed to the monster cold.
