This was my first real day in Alaska, and Layla and I decided to take it a little easy and spend the day tromping around the woods around her house. We started by going up the hill and exploring the nearby woods. We took the dogs with us, and boy, were they happy. They climbed all over everything, up and down hills, sniffing and exploring, rolling in poo, and being general good company.

The weather during the trip was perfect for hiking; all the days were 70F and the nights were between 40 and 50F. However, there were constant reminders wherever we went that Alaskan winters don't go gently into that ... wait. Alaskan nights aren't dark in summer. Never mind. Just look at that picture -- that's three solid feet of ice, with the river rushing along underneath. It's down from the six-to eight-feet that it was a few months ago. The river never stops running; it just keeps going along, finding new paths around the frozen blockage, and freezing layer on top of layer, like an icy pearl.

Fox, the area near Fairbanks where the Lawlors live, is an old gold mining community, meaning that the dredges have already come through, removed the majority of the gold, and the ground is covered with piles and piles of gravel and rocks spat out by the equipment. Alaskan plants are hella tenacious, and it's not unusual to see mounds of bare rock sporting six-and eight-foot trees, only a few decades after the topsoil was entirely removed and turned over. It's rather amazing to see how fast the ecosystem starts taking back man's work.

As is usual with man's work, however, there's a lot of detritus left when the work is done, and we found most of it on our first day's hike. Seems that the majority of the stuff we found was brought up here soon after statehood, ie the early sixties. We found three abandoned cabins, a couple of spent bulldozers, a flipped-over, decapitiated Snow Cat (a big, tread-driven tanklike snowmobile thing), some modern mining equipment still in the process of actually being used... and cars. Oh, the cars.

There were probably at least fifteen vehicles out there, ranging from huge lumbering land yachts like these -- for most of them we found no insignia, so I don't know the models -- to an ancient red International Harvester truck that was cut into a zillion pieces and scattered over a fifty-foot radius. There were some really weird wrecks, like this old Mercury peppered with buckshot and shoved down an embankment (obligatory joke that only Jen and Sol will get: these are apparently the Hills of White Mercury) .

After a while, the wrecks stopped being creepy and ironic and started getting disheartening. They just kept turning up, one after another, and further and further off the 'road'. It was really eerie; the further in you went, you just kept seeing more lichen-encrusted ancient cars, and the more the wilderness felt like it had been violated. The wrecks were so well-preserved (relatively speaking, anyway) that it felt like I was stepping into the photography of the Lost America site.

That's another odd thing: Fairbanks is technically almost a desert, and only gets about 10 inches of rain and 70 inches of snow per year. The permafrost sits an average of two to three feet below the surface, and that means all the water gets trapped in a very shallow area -- but basically things don't rust or rot the way they do in the lower 48 because the air is so dry. That means that you get ridiculously well-preserved old wrecks like these.

When we came in from hiking, Layla suggested a trip to the Tanana Valley Farmer's Market, so off we went to score lunch. The market was wonderful, and though I didn't buy anything touristy there, I did make a bunch of mental notes for later. Lots of good crafts, friendly people, and the obligatory kettle corn! Yay. We ate good oriental food, hit the supermarket for provisions, and returned home.

After some nappings, we went back into town with Orion to pick up some equipment. On the way in, we passed a flipped SUV. The wreck was very fresh, and the lights were still on. We stopped the truck as soon as we could and pelted back to the scene, where another pickup was already pulling up to help investigate. It was a particularly bad rollover; the windshield was popped completely out, the contents of the vehicle were scattered for twenty feet in all directions, and the car was facing the opposite direction it'd been headed. We spent some time checking to make sure no one was caught inside or had been flung from the wreck, but didn't find anybody, or any blood, which was good.

Then we started looking more closely at the debris, and got a good laugh. If you'd had a Redneck Qualification Checklist, you'd have been hard pressed not to miss a box: Big black truck with exterior mounted lights, crappy CDs, a car-stereo that was actually a home-stereo put in your truck, half-eaten buffalo wings, MGD longnecks (one open, of course) , half-empty quart-bottle of Bacardi... and an empty gun box. Judging by the skidmarks, the driver had gotten distracted somehow, swerved to miss a mailbox and flipped over, then had realized if he waited for the cops he'd get tagged for DUI, so he kicked out the windshield, grabbed his rifle and took off running. If he sobered up before a breathalyzer, he'd only have to deal with the insurance company, and not the police.

So after checking to make sure that there weren't any head-injured drunken rednecks with rifles lurking in the woods, we piled into our respective vehicles and took off. We picked up Orion's equipment and headed off to the dump for some good old-fashioned garbage-picking.

Fairbanks doesn't really have a dump, not the Fresh Kills kind, anyway. They have what the locals call a "Transfer Station", which is a big dirt lot with a ring of dumpsters, and a sheltered area where people can leave stuff that still has some use left in it. We saw a good many people picking over the piles of used stuff, like ravens, only looking for socks instead of eyeballs. Orion's a welding freak, so we dug around and found him some galvanized pipe, a couple lengths of cable, and then we hit the Mother Lode. In the 'used metal' dumpster, the one as big as a tractor-trailer, we found a sleigh. An honest-to-God Santa Sleigh, probably left over from some rooftop decoration. Orion hemmed and hawed, even took off without it, but the siren song of the sleigh forced him to turn around. He jumped up and down on the scrolly bits until it fit in the back of the Suburban, and gleefully took it home.

Thus ended my first full day in Alaska. I have a picture around here somewhere of the sleigh, but I can't find it at the moment. When I dig it up, I'll be sure to post it.

What's that, you say? You want more of the World's Cutest Pug Puppy? Oh, all right. Let's end this on a happy note: