Indefinite Ceiling, Sky Obscured, Visibility 2 Miles with Smoke

I've NEVER seen it as smokey as it was last evening. Visibility dropped to a couple of miles downtown and at the airport. Big fires in the Yukon and northern B.C. and smoke has been funneled into northern Southeast Alaska. YIKES!

Last evening I hiked to the end of Perseverance with Dr. John Farrell, Executive Director of the federal Arctic Research Commission and a friend and colleague of Martha Stewart's back in D.C. The smoke provided an opportunity for some interesting pictures...

Starting up Perseverance. Never seen so much smoke!

From the end of Perseverance looking back towards town.

Dr. John Farrell

John is but a recently minted federal bureaucrat. He's a geologist by training and has done lots of research in the arctic - he told me a fascinating story of an expedition to the North Pole on an icebreaker - taking core samples of the seabed in the Arctic Ocean. Way cool. They actually had three icebreakers - including a Russian nuclear powered ship.

Now he's learning the political trade at Martha's knee. And it looks like he's having some success based on an article in today's Anchorage Daily News - Senator Begich just introduced a package of bills relating to arctic research.

http://www.adn.com/mark_begich/story/886413.html

In other news, yesterday I borrowed Dougie's skil saw and planned to cut-up a bunch of old fence into uniform pieces I could then chop for kindling. However when I arrived at Elderburg I immediately switched to "Plan B" which was to rebuild the section of the fence that Yogi had knocked over the night before. So....today it's back to the kindling plan - and I now have more fence pieces to saw...

TallyHo!