Gold and Blue over White: Arctic Circle, Alaska

Posted by dj.tigersprout (New York City, United States) on 28 July 2008 in Landscape & Rural and Portfolio.

the magical time i spent within the bounds of the Artic Circle last winter was very brief... indeed, just under 24 hours! however it was amazingly cold... in fact, i could only bear the bone chilling temperature outside for periods of about 20 minutes at a time. and even safely indoors i found myself constantly shivering -- i remember a certain point where i felt like i wanted to cry. it was probably 3 or 4 hours after i had arrived and it seemed that i just couldn't stay warm enough -- my body just couldn't make enough heat! well, i finally managed to overcome that frightening stage, thankfully, and looking back i would certainly do it all again -- it was such a unique experience! for accommodation, i stayed in a contractor's mobile-home trailer unit that visually felt like i was in some sort of glorious Jack Cousteau expedition film! all the drapes, blankets and carpeting were a yellowish orange-brown with intricate 70's fractal like designs -- very groovy indeed! :)

of the 10 or so forays i made into the freezing cold, all of them were to take photographs -- that was the only reason i had chosen to head to such an unforgiving place in the dead of winter... i wanted to experience 'Arctic Wilderness' first hand -- and do my best to take pictures of what i saw. for my first outing, i climbed a steep and slippery ice bluff behind my residence, that afforded me a complete bird's eye view of the town (picture forthcoming). it also gave me a stunning and unbeatable 360 degree view of the valley i was in! it was miraculous -- simply everything was white -- the ground, the mountains, the clouds... but there wasn't any snow, it was all ice -- layers and layers of it! i was in a delicate and extremely frozen ice world and each step i took crackled and crunched beneath my boots.

this is a view looking west through the Brooks mountain range at the top of the icy bluff behind my unit. here, a snow mobile track takes off towards the not so distant mountains on the horizon. this might be a hunting trail for the plentiful caribou found in these regions -- a major food staple for eskimo and inuit tribes. overhead the coloring of the eternally dim winter light did magical things. stretching from gold on the far left to deep blue to baby blue-gray on the far right, this arc of sky stayed static the entire day -- as if frozen along with everything else. the time was about 2PM... and this was as light as it would ever get here. the Arctic sun never rises above the horizon this far north in winter. it is pitch dark from 4PM in the afternoon til about 10AM in the morning... an incredible 18 hours of night! and then for a mere 6 hours, there is this faint and quite eerie twilight, a combination of golden, violet & lonely blue-ish hues...

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