Language to Match Our Landscape
Secretly, most Alaskans are grateful when the tourists arrive. I'm not talking here about the busloads of folks on packaged tours, though we can be thankful for their support of the economy. I mean everyone's personal visitors, the aunts and uncles, cousins and school chums who arrive on doorsteps all across the state around this time of year.
Without them, we'd be missing an important excuse to jaunt off touring our own state. (Like birdsong, the summer apologies flow: "Honest, I'd love to stay and help with inventory, but Maude and George came all the way from Dubuque..." We all have variants of this useful speech.)
That's the good part. But once you set off with Maude and George to see the sights, they expect you to answer their questions about Alaska. All of them. And that's impossible, unless you bring along a staff of specialists.
I suggest instead a useful distraction: learn a few geological terms, memorize the location of a handful of significant features on your planned route, and you'll seem impressively knowledgeable. Geology is the safest science for your purpose, obviously. The moose that was hanging around the neighbor's garden will be twenty miles into the back country the minute visitors step off the plane, but a mountain will stay right where it is.
Not that you need a mountain to entertain tourists. Alaska has plenty of exotic but more subtle features. Consider drumlins, for example. These elongate, roughly egg-shaped mounds are glacial till--a mix of everything from clay to boulders apparently deposited by one glacier and later overridden and shaped by another. South of Cantwell, the Parks Highway traverses a set of long, narrow hills with skinny lakes between them. The road follows the crest of one of these hills for more than two miles. Tell George and Maude you're traveling atop an uncommonly large drumlin, and encourage them to think of the giant flowing river of ice that once sculpted the roadbed.
Pingos are also great for the purpose. If your travels include the Richardson Highway, you can point out a fine one in the glacial outwash plain (another impressive term) just north of Summit Lake, on the east side of the road. It looks like a giant beaver lodge made of stone and gravel. It's really a special kind of frost heave. In the Arctic, pingos form as the thawed silt once underlying a drained pond refreezes and expands, bulging upward into a domed shape. In the Interior, pingos usually mark a source of underground water under pressure. The water pushed up the ground, cracking it; water in the cracks freezes, leading to more bulging. As the process repeats, the pingo grows.
Farther along the Richardson, at Rainbow Mountain, is another geologic oddity: a rock glacier. In these, ice is the glue holding the blocky rock rubble together, and the grease that keeps it flowing steadily and slowly downslope. It's seasonal ice, caused by water percolating through the broken rock and then freezing, not the permanent ice of other glaciers.
The tourists are bound to ask about the odd colors of Rainbow Mountain. Tell them it's a geological picture book. The reds and greens are old volcanic rocks; while still hot, they were squeezed in between yellow and various pastel-colored sedimentary rock layers, siltstone and sandstone.
What if you're in Nome with the visitors and you've run out of things to say about gold? Tell them some of the cobbles in Anvil Creek, where the Three Lucky Swedes made their discovery and their fortune, are close to a billion years old. They are the last of a chain of ancient rocks that run along the spine of the Rocky Mountains and into Alaska, but no one's certain of their origin.
In Southeastern, the geology tends to be dramatic and obvious. But if your visitors are in Juneau on a heavily overcast day so they aren't overcome by the raw scenery, take them out the Glacier Highway to watch natural construction processes at work. Along the northeastern side of Gastineau Channel, Lemon Creek and the Mendenhall River are building deltas. Their unceasing deposits will eventually fill the northwestern end of the channel to link Douglas Island permanently to the mainland.
The foregoing is only a start. Much of it came from Roadside Geology of Alaska, by Cathy Connor and Daniel O'Haire, but there are other good books. Scan one soon--before Maude and George come up with questions of their own.
