Growing up in NE Iowa I experienced several -35F mornings - but only for hours, not days like Bruce and Chuck experienced. After getting out of the Navy in the Spring of 1975 I started graduate school at Rutgers (NJ) that fall. However, that summer I went to Alaska with a group of graduate students and professors from Rutgers that were doing research on the salt marshes near Valdez and Homer, Alaska. We were locating permanent sampling plots and identifying/counting the marsh plants within them with the goal of being able to return and resample them following an oil spill. The group in Homer had great weather as Homer is known as the “banana belt” of Alaska. Unfortunately I was in Valdez.
Being graduate students, we were running around Valdez bay in a 14 foot ski boat and camping in tents since we couldn’t afford the inflated hotel prices in Valdez at the time the Alaskan pipeline was being constructed. Camping in Alaska may sound great but Shoup glacier was on the mountain side above us and it definitely got colder at night. Our goal one day was to go out the mouth of the bay, around a spit of land, to a marsh on the other side. There were 4 of us in the boat and as we started out of the bay we realized there was a rip tide (tide coming in, wind blowing out). We took a wave over the bow of the boat which instantly filled it half full of water. The chairman of the botany department was driving the boat and had the heaviest one of us lay on the bow to keep it down, two of us bailed water for all we were worth, and he somehow kept the motor going. In the excitement he took a 6 gallon gas can and tossed it over the side like a feather to lighten the load. Somehow we made it to land to assess our situation. Had we sunk, our life expectancy was less than 2 minutes and we definitely wouldn’t have been able to swim to shore with multiple layers of clothes, parkas, and hip boots on! We got the boat bailed out the rest of the way and started back - realizing we had tossed out our spare can of gas. We never did see it on the way back but since I am here to write this - obviously we made it. Definitely gives you a new perspective really fast on working in cold climates and needing to taking extra precautions to stay safe.
Of course there was the night when a black bear came into our campsite. But that’s another story.
One August in the early 70s, I came from Adak where the temperatures had been no higher than 55-60 and I had been running seven miles a day from the base to the FAC and back via the road that skirted Mt Moffet to COSP where I nearly died trying to run three miles on a golf course with temps close to 90, and then to San Francisco where it was 54 when I arrived.
Given a choice of Oahu or Andpya year round, I think I'd take Andoya. The older I get, the more I like winter and the less I like summer. My perspective from living most of my life in Virginia and Kentucky: go north in the winter; go further north in the summer.
Bruce,
I lived in Norway from 1990 to 1994. I remember getting up one morning in December just before Christmas and looking outside to see the air sparkling with ice crystals and all the trees frosted over. It seems we had a inversion overnight and the temperature had dropped some 20 degrees in the night hours from just above freezing to well below. Any moisture in the air became frost and stuck to any surface it could find. It was on that morning that I truly came to understand what the expression 'it's a dry cold' really meant. It also brought a whole new meaning to a white Christmas.
Regards from the desert of Nevada,
Bob Ainsworth OTMCS (Ret.)
