Wednesday 15 December was Willow Day, or more precisely Willow Elementary School Day. At 9 am we were at the school as scheduled to meet Pam Horton, who is beginning her first winter as an ALISON participant. Joined a little later by Jim and Dave of the National Weather Service (NWS) in Anchorage, we drove a short distance to Willow Lake to set up the study site. It is located near Willow Air Service, which has welcomed Pam and her students to park at the business and gain easy access to the ice a stone’s throw away.

The NWS River Forecasting Office is interested in perhaps adopting the gauges for river ice thickness monitoring. Consequently, Jim and Dave were there to watch us install the ice thickness gauge and see how it works. That didn’t take long and they were soon gone, probably spending less time in Willow than it took to drive from Anchorage.

At about 12:30 pm we were joined by Pam, four students and one parent for a lesson in making measurements and taking snow samples. The students were Hannah and Jamison (6th grade), Ben (5th grade) and Oliver (2nd grade). Oliver is probably our youngest ALISON student. The students did a very good job and we learned that the ice was 0.28 m thick, the snow was 0.12 m deep with a mean density of 0.139 kg m-3, and the air temperature was ­5.1°C.

Pam Horton looks on as Ben reads the snow depth.	Jamison holds a snow probe.

Finished on the ice, we returned to school to conclude the lesson with a demonstration of measuring ice mass followed by entering the data in the computer. Jamison is pretty computer-savvy and has already copied the ALISON spreadsheet files to his computer at home. It looks like he will be creating duplicate files at home, back-ups of the files created at school on Pam’s computer.

A successful visit to Willow and Wasilla concluded shortly after 2 pm, 40 minutes before sunset, on Thursday 16 December when we drove into Fairbanks after a brisk, almost uneventful drive up the Parks Highway. One event is worth reporting – a mile or two short of Cantwell we saw a small group of about 30 caribou grazing only 100 m from the highway. Add the caribou to a few moose and spruce grouse, plus one fox, and we did well for wildlife.