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.

Alfred Brooks in Alaska around 1899.

Photo courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey archives.

Alfred Brooks was a geologist who traveled thousands of miles in Alaska and left his name on the state’s northernmost mountain range. Twenty years before his death in 1924, he also left behind a summary of what Alaska was like over a century ago, when “large areas (were) still practically
unexplored.”

To see what Brooks had to say about the Alaska of 1906, I pulled a copy of his Geography and Geology of Alaska: A Summary of Existing Knowledge from a shelf of rare books in a Fairbanks library.

Ice fog envelops the control tower at Fairbanks International Airport during a cold snap in November 2011.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

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.

Mycologist and author Lawrence Millman gives a presentation at Creamer’s Field in Fairbanks.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

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.”