A fogbow, just past Tetlin Junction.

Mountains in the fog. Not that far north of Glennallen along highway 1.

On the way to Valdez, along the Copper River.

Worthington Glacier, as seen from the top of Thompson Pass. This panorama takes up about 130 degrees, and thus, the original image is really quite large (5850×3900 pixels, 13 megabytes). I stitched it together from four wide-angle shots.

Mountains to the south of highway 1, between Glennallen and Anchorage.

Sunset over the mountains.

Morning, somewhere around Tetlin Junction.

Distant mountains. They are about 100 miles away in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.

Another view of the fogbow at dawn.

Why is there a goat drinking from a municipal puddle in front of a gas station in Tok Junction? Your guess is as good as mine.

Highway 1 now, just after Tok Junction, heading south to Glennallen.

Note how the highway seems to take a strange angle before disappearing over the hill. That’s not an illusion: thanks to frost heaves, more often than not the road is going in some direction its designers hadn’t quite intended.

Alaska has the coolest truss bridges in the nation. Most were built – and built well – in the 1940s, and, thus they do this job to this day.

Specialization at work.

A lake. South of Glennallenn, now, along highway 4 on the way to Chitina and Valdez.

Why look at that, another lake. Lots of ‘em in Alaska, especially in September when there aren’t quite as many ice patches.

Up, then down, then up again. Highway 10 to Chitina.

This is where the road starts to curve.

Another lake, along highway 10.

A little red plant by the shore of a lake. Getting close to Chitina.

Now that is a rock cut. It’s about ten feet wide. Yep, this is one of Alaska’s numbered, primary highways. Just past the town of Chitina on route 10, heading into Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.

Distant mountains, visible as we make it through that rock cut.

Back westward through the rock cut. It’s time to turn around, because the road beyond to the east gets progressively muddier and muddier. At some point, it’s probably some stepping stones across the water, and after that it’s Jesus time.

That sign looks like it’s been there a while.

Remember that long, straight section coming in?

Another cute little bright-leaved plant. Alaska has plenty of these.

Oh dear, it be raining. This happened, off and on, throughout the day.

An airplane, decisively cutting the sun in half. Worthington Glacier in the foreground.

This is how we get back to the airport on time.

About here is when I gave up trying to decide if clouds were ominous, or just strange. These pitch-black ones didn’t yield a single drop of rain.

Distant glaciers. Prince William Sound, with the peaks about eighty miles away, as seen from Highway 1 between Glennallen and Anchorage. Starting to inch towards sunset.

Now these clouds certainly are providing rain.

Why is this road even more demented and frost-hoven than average? Because it’s an old alignment! Pretty recently abandoned – about ten years ago, at most – but an old alignment just the same.

The road to sunset.

Dark road back to Anchorage. One hour to get back to the airport!

Getting back to civilization. Nice high beams, champ.

Get gas, pack, drop off rental car, and back down south we go.

Next up? Maybe some Oklahoma photos from last week. Whatever I decide, they’ll be posted after I return from my upcoming South Dakota trip.

Now 35% less bear feces.

Double rainbow! Actually, we can see at least four rainbows (and maybe a fifth if one jacks up the contrast a bunch). Look inside the inner rainbow – note the repeating red bands; I count two in addition to the primary.

16×16 shield that dates to 1962… Alaska is ripe for the old signs!

Well, that about establishes the absolute lower bound, doesn’t it? Along state highway 2 is this … veritable metropolis, teeming with life. Note the 1970s white signage; for all we know, the population may have, since that time, taken the final decrement towards the ultimate goal of occupancy.

Alaska Highway at sunset.

Tok. One of my favorite sign photos I’ve ever taken – just because the setting sun illuminated this sign perfectly!

Sunset. I took this one across the waters of the most majestic lake I could find: a mud puddle next to Tok’s main drag. Note the light posts. I think my camera was at most five inches above the water.

The northern lights, over the town of Chicken. Most notable in this photo is the purple jet on the left side. Green aurora are the most common, and purple is far more rare.

One more northern lights – my absolute favorite of the bunch. There is the one aspect of the northern lights that no photos can capture: their motion – they really do dance across the sky, and seeing them in person is something else. September 3rd and March 15th are the aurora peaks, due to the Earth’s position in its orbit, relative to the solar wind, which releases the particles that (upon impact with the upper atmosphere) cause the lights. These photos are from September 2nd, 2007 – so just about the fall peak, and I certainly got an impressive display.

Our first photo of the dawn. This is what the bears drink to mitigate their existential crises. It’s about 3.30 in the morning, after having gone to sleep at 1 the night before. Sleep, what is sleep? I can do that at home – while I’m on vacation I will explore!

Someday I’ll take the airplane tour of Mt. McKinley. But not this time, when I pass by it at 4 in the morning.

The early dawn alternates between overcast fog, and these scattered high clouds.

Everpresent low clouds, as the sun barely starts to break over the horizon and illuminate the peaks.

Tall mountains. Wispy fog.

Aaaaaand one more from the same general space and time. Crazy light – Alaska, everybody!

Just a little rainbow… a harbinger of things to come.

A rainbow spoke! The same brief glimmer of sunlight that causes an arc-minute or six of rainbow to appear results in the ray of light extending from it to the point exactly opposite the sun.

The road to the mountains.

A rainbow… or two! Note the subtle second rainbow inside the primary band. That is caused by interference of waves, that was not explicable by the Newtonian physics that correctly described the primary band (a refraction of the light wave within the individual raindrops)… for many centuries people wondered how the extra inner rainbows happened, until a new understanding of light as a wave explained in the 1810s.

Highway 3 and the trees of Central Alaska, and the rainbow of course.

This has to be the brightest rainbow ever seen.

Yes, rainbows show up in infrared. The main IR band is where you’d expect to be: just within the red. Note the multiples of this rainbow … quick, let’s blow up the contrast to see how many there are.

Why, here are five of them! Infrared again, so we get single white bands, which makes the diffraction easier to see… and of course I blew up the contrast in Photoshop by a whole lot, just so we can see all five bands.

Now for some high ninja rocket science. There are two different phenomena at work to generate a sequence of rainbows. The first is the number of reflections within an individual droplet of water, which is called n=1, n=2, etc. One reflection? n=1. Two? n=2. And so on. So when you see a double rainbow (as in the photo I led off with), you see the n=1 and n=2 bands – and they are the easiest to see, because as the number of reflections increases, the brightness fades away…

The third rainbow, n=3, is – thanks to various mathematics that I desire to omit – in a place that you’d never dream to look: on the same side of the sky as the sun, only 43 degrees away, as opposed to the 139 and 153 of our customary first two rainbows. It takes until n=6 (five iterations fainter than the primary!) to get back to the same general area of sky, which is why one never, ever, ever witnesses a true triple rainbow, unless they are in a laboratory… or snacking casually on the radical fungus, as the case may be.

However! – and this is stuff that was so mystical that Newton and Cassini and the rest could never explain it – each band of the rainbow, the #1 and the #2 and the rest, generated multiple prismatic arcs. What was the explanation behind the fact that the #1 arc broke into multiples, each subsequent iteration appearing inside of the previous, three degrees in and half as faint?

No one could understand until Thomas Young, in 1801, applied the newfangled wave theory and realized that the light was interfering with itself. Thus, these new rainbow bands were declared to be a new phenomenon and labelled 1a, 1b, 1c… 1a is the primary one, then 1b is the first inner band as a result of in-band interference, and then 1c and 1d and so forth, all the way down the geometric sequence.

The photo I show above features the 1a, 1b, 1c, 1d, and (barely) 1e bands… how about that!

Another view over highway three. And now we know the science, and can identify the two primary bands as 1a and 2a (and can see the interference-based bands within 1: 1b and maybe 1c if you squint real close.)

What’s at the end of the rainbow? Well, here it is a green guide sign!

To this day (two years after I took these photos!) I have no idea what this sign means. But it is bright green, so it must be important.

A reflective lake in the town of Nenana.

The bridge to Nenana. From Fairbanks, along highway 3…

What’s the ancient Eskimo of saying that there is no way through? Nooutlet. Place the space where you feel necessary. An old alignment of Alaska 3, where a bridge has been knocked down. Nooutlet indeed.

An old alignment of state route 3. Dirt, of course… the roads weren’t fully paved until the 1980s, and in some cases the 1990s, and in some cases, not yet, even.

Flowers. In front of the Museum of History, at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. The Museum of History was a disappointment… the reason I went there was to find an Alaska US 97 shield, but it had been long removed. Note: you may have to massage that link to get it to work: copy and paste the URL into your browser and then hit GO, and the second time around it’ll miraculously work. Alas, the old embossed Alaska US 97 shield was gone by the time I got there, retired to the archives… may I have permission to see it? No, no I may not. Archives and research material is closed on Labor Day Weekend. Well, fudge! I arrived at precisely the wrong time. Oops.

More flowers in front of the museum.

Button copy! In Alaska! The only examples I found were here, around the Chena Hot Springs exit off of highway 2. Must be a contractor getting all crazy with the Cheez Whiz. We are on the way to the Daltonlands now, for sure… the Dalton Highway branches off highway 2 a few tens of miles off in the future, and heads near-due north, along a frightfully decrepit dirt road, four hundred miles to the town of Dead Horse. It is my ambition to, some day, get a vehicle of sufficient capability and drive the Dalton Highway. For now we’re just going to approach the foot of it, acknowledge that its beginnings exist, and then turn around and run away bravely.

The Dalton Highway, the symbol of all that is barren, forsaken, forbidden, and necessary to take steps before inevitably exploring. 430 miles to Dead Horse (what a name!) along the northern shore of Alaska. Alas, it is nearly all dirt and my rental contract forbids me to attempt it at this time. So let’s just go only a half-mile or so.

416 miles. An impressively long distance to be delineated by a single sign.

Livengood Maintenance Station. Probably not the absolute most remote maintenance station in the history of all highway departments (I’m quite sure that the one at Dead Horse, which surely must exist, is far less accessible), but definitely the most obscure I’ve seen with my own two eyes. Four miles up the Dalton, then two miles down a dirt road with no name, no face, no government, no style… an anonymous town, a population rivalling legendary Olnes in obscurity… just a guy with a satellite dish and a plow truck. Maintenance station yeah!

The Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Yeap, the main reason that the Dalton Highway was built was to service this gas pipeline, as it comes in from the reserves of Prudhoe Bay and other northern farparts. Here it is, streaking its way down to Valdez, where ships named Exxon screw up the process and run aground and fudge the environment. Damn pipeline!

We’re back on the main triangle, after going far to snag a few Dalton signs. Anchorage, 440? Yes, there are two officially recognized ways to get to Anchorage from Fairbanks… the shortest one is the occasionally closed highway 3 that we took this morning, built around 1962; the other is the newer, highway 2 to highway 4 to highway 1 route, that is more likely to be plowed and free of humongousbears of doom. Thus, the sign. It’s really 280 to Anchorage, but that road may be closed. Keep on going forward like it’s 1959.

Pretty flowers. Just outside of Fairbanks along highway 2.

Fun with cumulus clouds.

Seriously, fun with cumulus clouds… who says you can’t shoot nearly straight into the sun?

Expansive megacumulus.

Now this is a random rainbow. Where’s the rain? Directly overhead, and that’s it. Just a patch of it about to fall on my head… and the resulting rainbow against the generally unthreatening cumulus clouds.

These are some mighty clouds – for all I know, they developed into a thunderstorm… but I was blazing eastward, and passed them by.

Danger: High Pressure Pipeline Crossing. Remember that pipeline? Going from Dead Horse to Valdez? Well, it goes through this point; crossing under the road at Delta Junction somewhere around there. And yes, that sign has gotta date to the 50s.

One Hell of a rain cloud. Somewhere around Delta Junction. Just a few miles to the south of me – but nearly nowhere else! – it was raining up a flood!

The Alaska Highway ends here, at Delta Junction. It starts in Dawson Creek, British Columbia (home of some random TV show from the late 90s), and past here one can take either highway 4 to Anchorage, or highway 2 to Fairbanks, but neither of those routes are officially The Alaska Highway.

We’re only going a little past Tok Junction – not nearly as far as the Canada border. Yep, that leaves one very significant portion of Alaskan paved road unexplored: the Alaska Highway. Well, folks, that is why there’s a thing called next time.

Old sign? Not so much. Photoshop to the rescue. The image of the old, dusty road is real… and it is even an old alignment of the Alaska Highway… but the US-97 shield is not present these days. Around 1956 or so, they really did sign the Alaska Highway as US-97, and I’ve seen a photo of a bullet-ridden US-97 shield, in somebody’s collection, as evidence… but, alas, as far as I can tell, no more of those signs remain in the wild, so I had to make do with my own creation.

Faraway mountains. Visible from the northern road – if the weather cooperates and the distance isn’t too much – is Mount Blackburn, at over 16,000 feet tall. It’s the leftmost peak of these three.

Old bridge on the Alaska Highway. There are a good, solid sequence of them… the rivers must be crossed, the highway must be built, so here they are in the mid-1940s style, when the original Alaska Highway was built as a defense route – a joint US/Canada project, between 1942 and 1944 or so; nearly all dirt, a tank path from Spokane to Anchorage.

Alaska Highway going dead straight for a while.

Every hax0r’s dream sign!

I have no explanation for this one. It’s clearly some sort of a rainbow, but I’m not sure what. It didn’t appear in the right position with respect to the sun to be a traditional rainbow (and besides, red should be on the bottom). Certainly not a circumhorizontal arc, as those occur only around high noon and in this photo the sun was almost set. Not an iridescent cloud, as those would be on the same side of the sky as the sun. Your guess is as good as mine.

Sunset over the trees.

There’s always interesting clouds in Alaska, especially around sunset. Oh, did I mention that sunset lasts six hours??

The best part about having a sunset that’s essentially six hours long (well, beside the fact that you get twelve hours a day in enhanced lighting – and you wonder why I never slept!) is that you get to carefully observe it glint off each and every last object. Here, it is the power lines that glow orange for a minute or two.

Municipal puddle, for the win.

The Tok communications tower at dusk.

but it’s so pretty in the sunset, I can’t help but notice it!

A bridge, past Tok and past sunset.

Going to Chicken on route 5. That is a Yukon 9 trailblazer up there… when the 5 crosses the border, it turns into Yukon highway 9. Yukon is badass and color-codes its routes.

The road to Chicken. There aren’t many people on it, especially at this time of night. Did I mention that the sunset is six hours?? It is still twilight, at 10pm!

About eleven at night; the last of the sunset. Yes, that is a huge rain cloud overhead.

A thousand little sunsets.

Still on the way to Chicken.

Chicken is part of Alaska’s interior region… it is rather different from what people imagine when they think “Alaska”. Namely, the area is occupied neither by tall, snow-covered peaks, nor by polar bears. Still, though, it is the coldest part of Alaska, with temperatures dropping to -75 in the winter. Many patches feature only various and sundry grasses, none higher than four feet.

We have arrived! And yes, the road dirted out… you don’t tell the rental car company, and neither will I.

And we’ve even got ourselves an old white milepost. 66 miles back to Tetlin Junction, where we split off from the Alaska Highway.

Definitely the most remote post office I’ve ever been to.

Our first northern light. Not immensely impressive; you can barely see it coming out of the cloud at left, pointing towards 1 o’clock. The sky on the bottom side of that cloud is suspiciously green-tinged too, but it is still too light out for a real show.

The northern lights!

Two purple jets visible in this photo. The left edge, parallel to each other, with the left one much brighter than the right one. Oh, and there are green arcs. Plenty of green arcs. Amazing.

The aurora in green, and the last of the sunset in purple.

I’m just posting all the photos I took in one spectacular hour and twenty minutes … between about midnight and 1.20am; 25 degrees outside and the northern lights exploding overhead.

One long jet across the sky.

Sometimes they get incredibly bright. Note the red fringe at the bottom of the green. When they get really bright, they do that – the green is due to a hydrogen atom, provided by the solar wind, hitting the upper atmosphere and releasing some of its energy in the form of a green photon (light particle). The red? If the hydrogen is sufficiently energetic, it releases two photons: the green, and then the red, which is why the red tends to appear below the green. The purple, by the way, is due to an oxygen atom releasing some of its energy – and if you get some really energetic oxygen, you get yellow mixed with the purple. You don’t see that here; yellow is very, very rare. Purple is uncommon enough!

One last one, with the last purple fringes of sunset, still visible at 1am – or is that sunrise by then?? Gotta love the northern latitudes!

And that does it for day two. Next up: day three! Day one was the wild creatures; day two, the atmospheric effects. Day three will be all about the mountains.

Here are days zero and one – I landed in Anchorage around 10pm so a few photos bleed back into the previous day, but in general they are of Day One and all the glories it contains.

Now 35% more bears.

Grim dawn weather in the southern-coast port town of Seward. The first day was pretty patchy, never getting any clearer than a moderate “partly cloudy”.

A lake, under morning fog.

Fog, fog, fog. Dunno how the white balance came out to the proverbial rose-colored-glasses shade, but I sure as Hell kept it! Intersection of highways 1 and 9.

Mount Iliamna, across the Cook Inlet from highway 1 and civilization. This is actually our second view of it – once down the spur route to Homer, and once back up. The way back up yielded much, much clearer skies.

Moose! How did I get so close to a real, live moose?? Easy – he’s sitting in a wildlife preserve. There’s a fence, somewhere between observer and moose, but I conveniently shot through the openings.

BEAR!

Mt. McKinley… 20,320 feet tall; the highest peak in North America – proudly making Mount Shasta look like an anthill since 200,000,000 B.C. About 160 miles away in this photo. Alas, this is the first, last, and only glimpse we’ll get of the peak. Non-cooperative weather intrudes as we get closer to it… from 30 miles away, all we’ll see (in the Day Two batch of photos!) is a quarter of the way up the side, barely half an edge in the ever-present fog. So take what you get: distant, nearly illusionary, glowing purple-red in the last rays of the setting sun.

I’m in your Alaska, photographing your highway signs.

Our first look at the scenery. Yep, I arrived just after midnight, and took this photo at something resembling 1.15 in the morning, on the highway heading south out of Anchorage toward Seward on highway 1. My task for the three days was to travel as many miles of paved highway in the state as I could… (there’s only like 2200 miles total! Most of the state is accessible only via ship, airplane, snowmobile, or moose!) I think I ended up rather successful, missing only highway 6 to Circle Hot Springs.

Looking back north; the light from beyond the cliff is the town of Anchorage. I wish I could claim that was a meteor to the left… it’s an airplane.

Occasional moose presence.

Foggy weather at this time of night.

When in doubt, name the road after an ever-present natural condition.

MOTHER OF GOD, IT’S A BEARMOOSE.

well, that settles that. Next week: is the Pope really Catholic??

Clearest skies we’ve had all morning.

Clearing fog in the morning.

Another from the 1/9 junction, this one zoomed out a bit.

Soon enough, we’re back in the fog.

There’s only two real types of creatures in Alaska.

Moose come in a variety of sizes, to better serve the customer’s needs.

Apparently, this is not just a Texas problem.

I am pleased to announce that I now have done over 100 miles per hour in all fifty states.

Mount Iliamna, across the seas and the fog. There’s a sign pointing it out at this little pulloff. Oh hey, what’s the coolest thing about Alaskan roads? Turnouts every few hundred feet. And you can park in ‘em. Overnight. Nobody cares. Hell, there are cars that seem to have last been moved sometime during the Nixon administration!

And Mount Redoubt. The two of them are about 50 miles away from this vantage point, and each is just a tad over ten thousand feet high. Oh and they’re both active volcanoes, because Alaska is danger like that.

And one in infrared.

The little fishing village of Ninilchik, with Mount Redoubt in the background. Yep, the origin of the name is Russian. Ancient Ur-Soviets, older than communism itself, were the first Europeans to have come to Alaska, in the 1660s. Shrugging off the cold – hey, it’s warmer than Oymyakon, Siberia – they established a brisk trade in fish and furs before selling out to Seward and the Follies in 1867. 7.2 million dollars didn’t buy naming rights, though – we’re stuck with Ninilchik, mercifully, not Fishing Village Brought to You by Capital One.

Sweet, an old white sign! Alaska, not only is it colossal and filled with large creatures… but there’s even old signs to be found! Best. State. Ever.

Mount Iliamna. The fog to the south (left in our photo) cleared out, revealing several other peaks in the mist. I’m not quite sure what to make of the dividing line about halfway up the mountain – darker below, lighter above. Some trick of atmospheric optics; it was exactly like that in real life. Trust me!

Holy crap, a Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability cloud. The distinctive sequence of vortices is caused by two layers of fluid (in this case, air) moving past, and interacting with, each other. The link I just provided has good explanations and a better example than mine here; my knowledge of fluid dynamics isn’t nearly complete enough that I can do more than point to the reference. This sort of spiral cloud is very, very short-lived. I grabbed this photo out the windshield; by the time I could’ve pulled over, it had dissipated. Searching for “wave cloud” or “Kelvin-Helmholtz cloud” on google yields some magnificent examples, far more impressive than this one. But hey, I saw this one in person, so I’ll take mine.

Nine-degree halo around the sun. By the way, for all of us enjoying the atmospheric phenomena… the second day in Alaska is gonna blow our rocks off. Stay tuned.

A land beyond the fog. We’ve reached the coastal town of Homer: end of the line for highway 1. The road into Homer descends about 2000 feet in the last six miles – this is a viewpoint from atop the hill, and yes, that is a sea of fog as the lowest layer, maybe 50-100 feet above the more traditional water-based sea. Furthermore, that is indeed another Kelvin-Helmholtz cloud at the bottom, vague and distorted.

Another one – same basic idea, but viewed at a slightly different angle, where the ocean breaks through the lowest layer of fog.

One more of the same theme.

A more traditional view, to give an appreciation of the distance to the zoomed-in three.

Why look at that, an old truss bridge. Surprisingly, Alaska is filled with them. This is on an old alignment of highway 1. Since we’re driving the spur to Homer, we may as well take the current road down and as many old alignments as we can find back.

And we’re actually back at the 1-9 junction. Totally different lighting and clouds from the morning. This time around, the fog is gone and we’ve got big, fluffy billowing cumuli.

Recognize this valley? Yep, same one that was rose-pink in the dawn… now, in mid-afternoon, clearing out.

And it gets seriously cloudy again.

But we get through it quickly. Looking back in the other direction; yes, that is rain to our south.

Plenty of clouds, and distant mountains too.

Cumulus clouds, everybody!

The tunnel to Whittier. This is a one lane tunnel that is shared between cars and the railroad… they open it for fifteen minutes in each direction, except when the train comes, in which case no car may use it. It was solely a rail tunnel until 2000, when the paving was added for cars. Whittier is, like so many other Alaska towns, a seaport – they had no real need for a vehicular land connection to Highway 1 and Anchorage and all; they’ve always done most of their business with Valdez and Cordova, by sea across Prince William Sound. But, here is a connection anyway, and thus I get to go to Whittier. Hooray.

Alas, there really isn’t much in Whittier, unless you want to take a monster cruise ship to Juneau or something… this is about the most photogenic that I could find, by strategically pointing the camera in the opposite direction to the harbor and the tourist shops and whatever else plagues the lower 48 and has found its way here. D’oh!

Back through the tunnel we go, then.

Glaciers! On the third day of Alaska, we’ll totally get our fill of the glaciers of Prince William Sound – for now, here is just a brief glimpse.

Our first rainbow! Somewhere in the distance it must be raining, even though nearby it is merely a heavy shade of partly cloudy.

A pair of musk oxen. Same wildlife preserve as the other creatures detailed above.

A large elk.

Another bear! This one is even conveniently passed out from drinking too much Jack Daniels, or whatever it is that bears drink to pass the time and endure the existential crisis of lacking opposable thumbs.

A handful of bison.

Bison calf – and a magpie going in head-first after a tasty meal.

Distant glaciers. Somewhere along highway 1, between the wildlife preserve and Anchorage.

More glaciers, two or three peaks over from the previous photo.

Truth in advertising.

Highway 1 heading north into shrouded mountains, with a paralleling bicycle trail.

Before Wasilla became nationally famous, because you can see Russia from there!

Fairbanks, surprisingly not all that far. And yes, it is lighter than it was in the previous photo. That was due to overcast skies… also, it must be noted that at such northern latitudes, the sunset takes forever. What is a half-hour occurrence in a lower-48 place is well over two hours in Alaska.

Sunset, somewhere along the road between Anchorage and Fairbanks.

There’s nobody on the roads in Alaska. Especially when the sun sets, and most decisively on the highways that take three hundred miles to get to the next major city.

Night, for real… about ten o’clock is when it gets dark, and this is into September. During the summer, it’s light all around the clock.

Gooddness, that’s it… for day one. Coming soon … days two and/or three!