A therizinosaur track in Denali National Park discovered by David Tomeo.

Photo by David Tomeo.

A couple of summers ago, David Tomeo was exploring a creekbed in Denali National Park, preparing for a field seminar on the park’s dinosaurs he would help lead a few weeks later. With a trained eye for the impressions dinosaurs pressed into mud millions of years ago, Tomeo walked to a large boulder in the middle of a landslide.

“Right in the middle of it, a four-toed track stood out,” said Tomeo, program director for Alaska Geographic at the Murie Science and Learning Center in Denali Park.

Dennis Griffin with a walrus tusk that people used on St. Matthew Island about 400 years ago.

Photo by Ned Rozell

ST. MATTHEW ISLAND — “Oh look, another tooth,” says Dennis Griffin, dressed in rain gear and caked with wet soil.

Griffin, the state archaeologist with Oregon’s State Historic Preservation Office, has traveled to one of the least-walked hillsides on the planet to search for evidence of his species. On a tundra rise with a gorgeous view of Hall Island and a nice panorama of St. Matthew Island, he has today found a fox tooth in a decaying jaw, chips of rock where someone made tools, pottery, a plate-size anvil stone and a yellowed walrus tusk cut with deep grooves.

St. Matthew’s Bull Seal Point.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

ST. MATTHEW ISLAND —I’m resting on a mattress of tundra plants that are growing more than 200 miles from the nearest Alaska village. While I have snuck away here to my own private ridge top, eight other people, all scientists, are somewhere on this 30-mile-long wedge of tundra, rocky beaches, lakes and bird cliffs in the central Bering Sea. We nine make up the entire human population of the island.

The most remote spots in Alaska.

By Dorte Dissing.

“Out of the million square miles of basin, range, peaks and prairies that compose the interior West, the farthest it’s possible to be from a road is a trifling 28 miles.”

Richard Forman, a Harvard professor of landscape ecology, once visited a mangrove swamp in the Florida Everglades that he described as the most remote place in the eastern U.S. The swamp was 17 miles from any road.

Matthew Sturm points out the horn of a steppe bison.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

FOX, ALASKA — Bison have not thundered through this neighborhood for thousands of years. But there’s one now, Matthew Sturm said, as he pointed to a horn cemented in a cold, dark wall 30 feet beneath the boreal forest.

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.

Guido Grosse and Benjamin Jones drill a hole through the ice of Teshekpuk Lake on a recent mission to learn more about lakes in the Arctic.

Photo by Chris Arp.

Minnesota is the Land of 10,000 Lakes, but Alaska has more than that in the great expanse of flatlands north of the Brooks Range. These ubiquitous far-north bodies of water — most of them formed by the disappearance of ancient, buried ice that dimples the landscape as it thaws — make the maps of Alaska’s coastal plain look like Swiss cheese.

Sunshine is returning to the north with the spring equinox.

Ned Rozell photo.

My thermometer here in Fairbanks is stuck on single digits today, but the height of the sun and a quick online check informs me that this is indeed the spring equinox. We will experience daylight for half the day, which was beyond imagining when the sun was two fingers above the Alaska Range in December.

Men in the village of Venetie listen to NASA officials describe a program that will reward them for coordinates of rocket parts that have landed on their tribal lands over the years.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

VENETIE — The cozy log structure smells of coffee, gasoline, and spruce logs burning in a stove made from a 55-gallon drum. Inside the building that serves as the Village Council headquarters for Venetie, Josh Bundick explains a new policy that rewards villagers who find spent rocket parts launched from north of Fairbanks.

Kasatochi Island, pictured here one year after its 2008 eruption, is experiencing some of the fastest erosion on the planet, with about 3 feet of its muddy shoreline eaten away each day.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

The latest meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco in December 2011 featured hundreds of talks about Earth science, some of those relating to Alaska (and some of those comprehensible to a non-scientist). Here are a few items from the notebook I carried around the Moscone Center: