Well, the past few weeks have been challenging and tiring on many levels. We seemed to be lucky earlier in the summer, with not too many problems cropping up with the research equipment. But alas, the problems were just waiting until now! But rather than complain about that, I'll give a bit of a description of my living situation. This is probably something I should have done earlier this summer, oops!
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| the cabin - our side of the cabin is entered from the porch on the right |
Our research team rents a cabin in Healy from some really nice people named Mike and Corinne. There are actually two cabins, attached to each other but not connected. We live on one side and they live on the other. Mike and Corinne have 26 sled dogs and the dog yard is about 20 feet from the cabin. The cabin, like most in northern Alaska, is dry - no running water because putting a well in permafrost is very tricky. We go to a community well down the road and fill up 8 x 5-gallon jugs about once a week to use for drinking, cooking, and dishes. We have a bucket with a spigot set up in the kitchen (next to a sink - the faucet just doesn't work) so we get our water from that. There is an outhouse down a path outside and an outdoor shower that I haven't tried yet (we shower when we go to Fairbanks).
Both the cabin and our field sites are located off of Stampede Rd in Healy. This road is pretty interesting for a number of reasons. First, it is surrounded on 3 sides by Denali National Park. You can look on a map of the park and see that in the northeast corner, there is a chunk taken out - that is the Stampede. A lot of activity that can't been done on park land happens on Stampede. There are houses along the road, but it is also used for atv and jeep tours as well as berry picking and hunting. The Stampede is a big tourist destination because it is free to drive down the road (unlike the Park Rd in Denali where you have to pay after a certain point). You can see Denali (aka Mt. Mckinley) from the end of our road on a clear day! The other reason why Stampede is an interesting road is because of it's connection to the story of Christopher McCandless, which was made famous by the John Krakauer book "Into the Wild". McCandless set out from the end of the Stampede Rd and lived in an abandoned bus about 20 miles from the road until he passed away. Some people try to hike out to the bus but there are some river crossings that make that difficult.
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| the dog yard |
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| Sky - look at that face! |
