Tag Archives: Alaska
Balto in snowy Central Park
The Iditarod has its ceremonial start in Anchorage tomorrow, followed by the official start in Willow on Sunday. The Last Great Race commemorates the Nome Serum Run of 1925.
The end of “Salmon-Thirty-Salmon”
Alaska Airlines has announced the end of an era. Their 737 with the king salmon painted on its fuselage will be repainted. Dubbed the Salmon-thirty-Salmon by an admiring public (mainly Alaskans), the repaint is facing a recall effort on change.org, but it seems the lure has been cast.
The paint job made its debut in 2005, and the plane has been a favorite up here ever since. That first painting of the 129 foot long king salmon was paid for by the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute, but subsequent repaints have been done by Alaska Air itself, as it continued to help promote wild, Alaskan seafood.
A spokesman for the airline stated that “a wonderful new design will be introduced in the coming months”. Alaskans seem skeptical however, thus the change.org petition.
Salmon-thirty-Salmon’s final flight will be April 17, when it flies the Southeast Alaska “milk-run”: Seattle to Anchorage, with stops in Ketchikan, Petersburg, Wrangell and Juneau.
Downtown Wolf
There was a somewhat unexpected traveler through downtown Fairbanks on Wednesday. A wolf was spotted alongside a major road in town. Wolves tend to not seek the social media limelight, so they are not often spotted in town. I have seen them outside of town on several occasions over the years, but never anywhere near town.
That said, the wolf was the talk of the town all day, although I was late to the party with my limited social media presence. Fish & Game officials believe the wolf came down the Chena River and took a sight seeing tour of the town. They were keeping tabs on the wolf’s whereabouts, but remaining mum.
Elizabeth Peratrovich Day
Today Alaska celebrates the life and dedication of Elizabeth Peratrovich.
In 1945, the Anti-Discrimination Act came before the Alaska Territorial Senate. The bill had already passed the House, and Peratrovich was slated to testify on the bill’s behalf. The State Legislative Building was packed to the rafters, and the doors were left open so that those in the hallways could hear the proceedings.
A Juneau senator cemented his place in Alaska history with this question: “Who are these people, barely out of savagery, who want to associate with us whites, with 5,000 years of recorded civilization behind us?”
When Elizabeth Peratrovich testified, she responded with, “I would not have expected that I, who am barely out of savagery, would have to remind gentlemen with five thousand years of recorded civilization behind them, of our Bill of Rights.” She went on a passionate plea calling for equal treatment for Indigenous peoples in the state.
The bill passed the Senate 11-5 and was signed by Governor Gruening on February 16, 1945. Alaska was still a territory, and its Anti-Discrimination Act passed almost 20 years before the United States passed the Civil Rights Act.
Launching balloons
I’ve been out at Poker Flats, which is outside Fairbanks, on several occasions when they were launching weather balloons. These days, most weather balloons are filled and launched by robotic launchers called autosondes, which takes some of the romance out of weather balloons, but that’s not the purpose of this post.
In the United States alone, there are 92 sites that launch two balloons every day of the year. There are over 800 locations worldwide doing the exact same thing. Here in Alaska, we have 13 sites that launch weather balloons twice a day, every day, and always at the same time: Midnight and noon Greenwich Mean Time.
A small collection of weather instruments, called a radiosonde is attached to the balloon which collects data and transmits that data back to the NWS as it rises. A weather balloon makes it to roughly 100,000 feet before it pops and falls back to earth. These days, radio balloons are highly biodegradable.
The first weather balloon with a radiosonde launched from Fairbanks in 1933. They started launching two balloons a day in 1941. I’ll let you do the math, but no matter how you figure it, that’s a lot of balloons.
“A Dreamer’s Search”
In the summer of 1918, Rockwell Kent arrived in Seward, Alaska with his nine year old son. They spent the rest of that summer, and the following winter in a small log cabin on Fox Island out in Resurrection Bay. They rebuilt the cabin, cut firewood, explored the island, but most of all Kent worked on his art. The work that followed, including his memoir Wilderness, inspired countless numbers of artists and adventurers alike.
A Dreamer’s Search is a short film by Alaskan filmmaker Eric Downs. The film explores the Kents adventure out on Fox Island, and asks one big question:
Would you risk everything to find your true calling?
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