The Stuart Creek wildfire plume as seen from Scott Rupp’s yard on a midsummer day.

Photo by Scott Rupp.

While pounding nails on a roof extension for his shed this summer, Scott Rupp heard a roar that almost scared him off the roof. Three planes with bellies full of fire retardant swooped low, then banked over the mountain behind his home.

“I looked up and saw this big smoke cloud,” said the part-time farmer and leader of an organization devoted to studying climate change. “That was my first sense that this was something that was going to personally affect me.”

A water pipeline near U.S. Creek that makes up part of the Davidson Ditch, a 90-mile aqueduct from the upper Chatanika River to near Fairbanks. Workers finished the project in the late 1920s. It lasted until the late 1960s, when a flood damaged the containment dam.

Photo by Craig McCaa, Bureau of Land Management.

Like a bright yellow contour line painted above the Steese Highway, the Davidson Ditch now reveals itself by the flagging autumn birches and poplars that clog its path.

The 90-mile system of canal, pipeline and tunnel becomes harder to see with each passing day, but the engineering triumph once helped prevent Fairbanks from ghosting out. The 1920s-era aqueduct provided the water needed to float dredges the size of apartment complexes and power hydraulic giants that firehosed water at Tanana River valley hillsides, stripping them to bedrock.

Yu Hirasawa, a PhD student at Keio University in Tokyo, sifts through dirt at the Swan Point archaeological site with Haley Huff, a student from the University of Alaska Anchorage. June 7, 2013

Photo by Loren Holmes with the Alaska Dispatch.

On a small hill surrounded by boggy muskeg in the Tanana River Valley, prehistoric skin scrapers made of schist, polished slate tools and glass beads were uncovered in the last week.

Based on the design of the tools and the way the animals were butchered, it appears to be an Athabascan campsite from the turn of the 20th century.

Dan Mann holds the skull of a steppe bison that died on Alaska’s North Slope more than 40,000 years ago. Mann and Pam Groves found the nearly complete skeleton of the bison while floating down a northern river last summer.

Photo by Pam Groves.

As she scraped cold dirt from the remains of an extinct bison, Pam Groves wrinkled her nose at a rotten-egg smell wafting from gristle that still clung to the animal’s bones. She lifted her head to scan the horizon, wary of bears that might be attracted to the flesh of a creature that gasped its last breath 40,000 years ago.
 

The Mesa Site in northwest Alaska.

Photo courtesy Mike Kunz.

Alaska was once the setting for an environmental shift so dramatic it forced people to evacuate the entire North Slope, according to Michael Kunz, an archaeologist with the Bureau of Land Management.

About 10,000 years ago, a group of hunting people lived on the North Slope, the swath of mostly treeless tundra that extends north from the Brooks Range to the sea. These people, known as Paleoindians, used a chunky ridge of rock west of the Colville River as a hunting lookout. Michael Kunz first discovered stone spear tips at the site, known as the Mesa, in 1978.

Alaska State Trooper Jack LeBlanc and forensic archaeologist Joan Dale, both on their knees, unearth part of a human skull in McGrath. Standing in the background, with the McGrath School behind them, are, from left, Brant Dallas, Lucky Egress and Betty Magnuson.

Photos by Kevin Whitworth, MTNT, Limited.

The room smelled of a smoked moosehide covering a table that held birch-bark baskets and a white box rimmed with beadwork flowers. Inside the box were the smooth bones of an adult man, a teenager and a child dug up within sight of the McGrath School.

The discovery, recently announced in the Morris Thompson Cultural and Visitors Center in Fairbanks, is unique because bones don’t often last long when buried in the acidic soil of the boreal forest, and because the Native Athabaskans of the region have traditionally cremated their dead.

A sleeping bag that allowed the user to walk around in a survival situation was one of the developments of the Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory, a Cold War research unit in Fairbanks. Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory photos.

“Cleaning and Sterilization of Bunny Boots.”

“Comparative Sweat Rates of Eskimos and Caucasians Under Controlled Conditions.”

Ned Rozell in the late 1980s on Canwell Glacier in the Alaska Range;

Photo by Ned Rozell

Not too long ago, I passed a milestone that doesn’t really mean much, but is a nice round number. Twenty-five years ago, I drove a Ford Courier pickup from upstate New York to Fairbanks, Alaska. I rolled into town in August, started college in September, and have lived here ever since.

Edward Vajda in the village of Kellog in Siberia, a place where some people older than 50 still speak the Ket language, which is related to Athabaskan and other North America language families.

Courtesy Edward Vajda.

Spoken by only a few dozen people, a language uttered in river villages 3,000 miles from Alaska is related to Tlingit, Eyak and Athabaskan. This curious link has researchers wondering how people in the middle of Siberia can be related to Alaskans and other North Americans, and what it means to the populating of the Americas.

Part of Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen’s route through the Northwest Passage in the early 1900s. This image of from a plaque in Eagle, Alaska, to where Amundsen mushed from Herschel Island in the winter of 1905.

Photo by N. Rozell.

More than a century ago, Roald Amundsen and his crew were the first to sail through the Northwest Passage, along the way leaving footprints in Eagle, Nome, and Sitka.