Trip Journal: Martin visits Healy/Denali National Park

10-11 November 2005

Kristen takes a picture of the ALISON group at Healy.
Kristen Friesen stands on a chair to photograph the parents and children who met for an ALISON evening at Tri-Valley School, Healy, on 10 November 2005. Dorothy DeBlauw, teacher, is the first person on the left.

After spending the morning in a meeting of the advisory board for the MapTEACH project (URL/link), and finalizing the budget for a northern river science education proposal in the early afternoon, I was glad to escape to Healy shortly before 4 pm. That gave me plenty of time to get there without rushing to participate in an ALISON evening for parents of Tri-Valley School students who participate in the project.

Dorothy DeBlauw (teacher) and Kristen Friesen (Denali National Park education specialist) organized the evening to coincide with my visit to help set up the study site on Horseshoe Lake. The event was a great success, with a good turn out by the parents, a wonderful presentation by the students, who demonstrated how they make measurements at Horseshoe Lake, and home-made ice cream to conclude the evening. We made the ice cream ourselves in a practical demonstration of freezing-point depression by the addition of salt to ice. I must brush up on just how that works!


Kristen at the Horseshow Lake ALISON site.
Kristen Friesen poses by stake zero moments before we left Horseshoe Lake after setting up the study site for a third winter of ALISON measurements.

Thanks to Kristen, I spent the night in a very comfortable visitors’ residence in the HQ area at Denali National Park. My wake-up call was a front-end loader clearing snow at 7 am. Not needing to meet Kristen until 10 am at the Murie Science and Learning Center, I enjoyed a leisurely start to the day.

We were on the Horseshoe Lake ice by 10:45 am. The air temperature was about -16°C and there was not a breathe of wind – it was delightful. With assistance from Kristen and Jared (just arrived from Fresno, CA, to stay with Kristen and her husband [his uncle]), the study site was set up quickly and we left with a full set of measurements. The average snow depth was 0.055 m, the ice thickness was 0.22 m and the conductive heat flow was -9.5 W m-2.

After lunch chatting in front of the fire (it was too much for Jared – he fell asleep) at the Murie Science and Learning Center, I left to conclude my Healy/Denali National Park trip with a return visit to Tri-Valley School. I spent the last hour of the school day with Dorothy’s class talking about snow and ice. They’re very energetic and enthusiastic, and really know their ALISON measurements and procedures. I’m sure they will obtain another good data set to add to the two already in the archive. Later in the winter we will be writing about the Tri-Valley students and their Horseshoe Lake results for Alaska Park Science, a scientific journal published by the National Park Service-Alaska Region.