A couple of days ago, the weather channel issued an alert about a severe storm bearing down on the Aleutian Island of Shemya and expected to move across the Bering Sea and onto Western Alaska, striking it somewhere around Nome and the Seward Peninsula. The forecast was for winds in the seventies, boat-swallowing waves, and perhaps a foot of snow. When I
mentioned it to Dean, he said Shemya, at least, won’t even notice seventy-mile-an-hour winds and snow. He is speaking from personal experience, because when he was in the Air Force, he did time – metaphorically speaking - out there on the fringes of Japan and Russia, farther from Anchorage than from Tokyo. He assessed Shemya’s standard wind speed as hovering around fifty miles an hour, and snows and rains spit horizontally across the island year-round. Walking across the runway is like traversing a wind tunnel under a fire hose, and if a plant ventures out of the ground, it reaches only a few inches high and leans at 60 degrees. So no worries, as he sees it. In conditions like that, the snow will blow right across the island.
I have no personal experience of Shemya (and have lost nothing, Dean says), but Dean and I spent some time in Nome while a Bering Sea storm was blasting onshore (spent more than we'd planned, in fact, since the airport was closed to all flights for a couple of days). I don't really know how much snow fell because the wind blew so hard it piled the snow into drifts that could swallow totem poles, but I do know that, when it was going on, if you wanted to go from one building to another building a few storefronts along Front Street (to eat when you got desperate, say), you waited until a car had passed and, to avoid the knee-high snow on the road, leapfrogged in behind the passing vehicle to lean against the wind and plunge down the street in the newly-packed-down chain tracks. If you were lucky, the car was going slowly enough that the tracks persisted to your destination (and it usually was going slowly enough, since faster would have been a more Evel-Knieval act than trying to jump the Snake River Canyon). Coming back, you waited for a car going the other way and drafted in those tracks. These conditions were apparently not new to Nome, because we learned on that trip that it is possible to go basement to basement between many of the buildings to avoid venturing outside.
When the airport opened, the taxi driver, who was hauling a cab full of us to catch our rescue flight, told us, "Chains are wonderful things," as he proceeded down the road backwards, sideways, and sometimes in circles. "Sure wish I had some."
We made a point of watching the weather channel’s coverage of the storm’s onshore track across Nome. One of the Lower 48 weather commenters, looking at the scene, announced, "That doesn't look like earth!" After a pause she added, "That looks like Mars or someplace." I don't know if she meant the storm, the place, or the inhabitants of Nome. It could have been any of the above, I suppose.
Our one trip to Nome was in late January, so our timing was right to see the Bering National Forest. (See it, that is, for the short time before the wind and white-out hit us.) The Bering National Forest may be the sole winter-only forest in North America, and also the only all-evergreen one of a more-or-less-uniform height and age. For the uninitiated, non-Nomites who have never heard of that particular national forest, this is the story. In January, the residents of Nome take their Christmas trees out onto the frozen Bering Sea, which lurks just off Front Street (and sort of identifies what Front Street fronts). They auger out a hole, set the trees upright in the sea ice (some still adorned with tinsel), and let the sea water freeze around them. Until ice floes pile over the forest, or breakup takes their woods out to sea, they have a nice and sometimes glittery little Bering or Nome National Forest to enjoy. Eventually, alas, the ice melts, and the trees sink or are carried away, but there is always the hope they will rise again the next year.
mentioned it to Dean, he said Shemya, at least, won’t even notice seventy-mile-an-hour winds and snow. He is speaking from personal experience, because when he was in the Air Force, he did time – metaphorically speaking - out there on the fringes of Japan and Russia, farther from Anchorage than from Tokyo. He assessed Shemya’s standard wind speed as hovering around fifty miles an hour, and snows and rains spit horizontally across the island year-round. Walking across the runway is like traversing a wind tunnel under a fire hose, and if a plant ventures out of the ground, it reaches only a few inches high and leans at 60 degrees. So no worries, as he sees it. In conditions like that, the snow will blow right across the island.
I have no personal experience of Shemya (and have lost nothing, Dean says), but Dean and I spent some time in Nome while a Bering Sea storm was blasting onshore (spent more than we'd planned, in fact, since the airport was closed to all flights for a couple of days). I don't really know how much snow fell because the wind blew so hard it piled the snow into drifts that could swallow totem poles, but I do know that, when it was going on, if you wanted to go from one building to another building a few storefronts along Front Street (to eat when you got desperate, say), you waited until a car had passed and, to avoid the knee-high snow on the road, leapfrogged in behind the passing vehicle to lean against the wind and plunge down the street in the newly-packed-down chain tracks. If you were lucky, the car was going slowly enough that the tracks persisted to your destination (and it usually was going slowly enough, since faster would have been a more Evel-Knieval act than trying to jump the Snake River Canyon). Coming back, you waited for a car going the other way and drafted in those tracks. These conditions were apparently not new to Nome, because we learned on that trip that it is possible to go basement to basement between many of the buildings to avoid venturing outside.
When the airport opened, the taxi driver, who was hauling a cab full of us to catch our rescue flight, told us, "Chains are wonderful things," as he proceeded down the road backwards, sideways, and sometimes in circles. "Sure wish I had some."
We made a point of watching the weather channel’s coverage of the storm’s onshore track across Nome. One of the Lower 48 weather commenters, looking at the scene, announced, "That doesn't look like earth!" After a pause she added, "That looks like Mars or someplace." I don't know if she meant the storm, the place, or the inhabitants of Nome. It could have been any of the above, I suppose.
Our one trip to Nome was in late January, so our timing was right to see the Bering National Forest. (See it, that is, for the short time before the wind and white-out hit us.) The Bering National Forest may be the sole winter-only forest in North America, and also the only all-evergreen one of a more-or-less-uniform height and age. For the uninitiated, non-Nomites who have never heard of that particular national forest, this is the story. In January, the residents of Nome take their Christmas trees out onto the frozen Bering Sea, which lurks just off Front Street (and sort of identifies what Front Street fronts). They auger out a hole, set the trees upright in the sea ice (some still adorned with tinsel), and let the sea water freeze around them. Until ice floes pile over the forest, or breakup takes their woods out to sea, they have a nice and sometimes glittery little Bering or Nome National Forest to enjoy. Eventually, alas, the ice melts, and the trees sink or are carried away, but there is always the hope they will rise again the next year.
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