The warm air moved in last night. When this happens, the wind picks up. It was so strong that it woke me up last night. Around here it’s like a dull roar. Sometimes it lets up fairly quickly, and other times goes on for days.

When, finally, I got up (before daylight), I stepped outside and saw that it was raining. I dressed and went to tend to the animals. By the time that I returned to the house it was a snow/rain mix. It was also blustery but not as bad as last night.

I figured that I would not ride today. No sense going out in fairly inclement weather. So I instead worked on my Bright Lights Book Project grant until noon; then after eating, ventured outside. Lo and behold, the precipitation had stopped. It was also 30 F plus degrees out.

Went for a ride with Pete, rode Hrimmi. And for the duration of our outing I thought about climate change. A few summers ago, when we were in Wyoming, a woman who worked for BLM said that there was no such thing. I was aghast. How could she say this? It was, she said, simply periodic weather patterns.

Fran at the receding Matanuska Glacier

I didn’t say anything because she had her mind made up about this. I also am not as articulate as the talking heads at Fox News. Quite obviously, climate change is not a mere abstraction. Ice melt, fires, drought, flood, plagues, and pestilence are here to stay. And the warming we are experiencing now, this my friends, is an example of climate change.

The other day my friend Fran Bundtzen, who lives in Fairbanks, emailed me. Fran is pretty amazing – she is a trained field botanist and a wood carver. She’s equally home in the worlds of arts and sciences. She said her area was experiencing ice lenses. I asked her what this was, and she provided me with the following information:
An ice lens is a permafrost feature common in the Interior of Alaska. It is essentially a mass of ice, often in the shape of a lens or lozenge buried in the ground. The ground around it is usually permanently frozen as well, but lacks the moisture content. With climate warming, we are having a lot of melting of the permafrost layer, which will cause major problems for buildings, roads, and other manmade objects that happen to be on top of them. One day, your house is setting on top of a frozen rock, and the next, you are in a swamp. When an ice lens melts, it creates a pit or hole or canyon which is filled with the melted ice water.

Our trails around here are suffering greatly from this phenomenon. The trail that goes along the back of our property suddenly developed a 15 ft deep canyon a couple of years ago, which slashes across it. The canyon is quite long, making it difficult for someone to get around it without leaving the trail right of way and venturing onto private property. This particular canyon runs through a wooded area, so there are trees lying like pickup sticks all which ways. Very nasty. Most of the trails around here are developing sinkholes along them in spots where the ice lenses are melting out. So traveling along them is like a trip on a roller coaster. Bad news for horses, and even dog sleds, because you go down this steep little hole and the brushbow crashes into the other side before you head back up.

Out at Skip's, my horse trails and the dog sled trails are becoming long lakes with similar canyons either running across them or along them. I remember when I first came to Fairbanks 50 years ago, there was a researcher who was keeping track of the temperature of the permafrost. He said the temperature of the frozen ground was gradually going up, and at some point, most of the local permanently frozen ground was going to thaw. We are at that point.

Not to be one of those people who harped on about the "good old days", but I remember with longing my years as a skier, dog musher, and then horseback rider when trails were intact and dry and not beaded streams with bottomless mucky holes. When I first moved onto our property, I often walked up the O'Connor Creek Trail which crosses our driveway and runs clear up to the ridgeline to the north. In the summer, even in wet weather, you could walk up there in tennis shoes. Now you need hip waders in many spots to get through. Very sad. This situation is happening first on disturbed ground like trails, but it is also now happening all over in the woods around here with new ponds forming in places where no one ever goes. Eventually, things will stabilize… maybe in another century or so. So that's the happy story on ice lenses and permafrost.

There you have it. Further proof that there is such a thing as climate change, this from a long-time Fairbanks, Alaska resident/outdoors person.

And here many of us sit, watching our own demise. This makes no sense at all.

Next: 19. 1/19/21: A Conversation with Raudhetta fra Alaskastadir