pinnell mountain trail

I'm back. I've just last night had my dry cabin in Fairbanks set up for cable Internet. It was quite an operation that took three GCI guys (in three separate vans) about an hour. One climbed an extension ladder to the top of a utility pole to get to the cable (not buried around here), while another put a ladder to the roof and brought the cable over. A third drilled through the cabin wall. Anyway, now I have fast Internet and an outhouse.
I've wanted to post some pics for a while, so here goes, from a hike over the Pinnell Mountain trail northeast of Fairbanks at the start of the month. A few hours into the first day, with the sun still shining, it started to pelt down hard, cold rain (that's called elkonh dehoon hek-edee'onh in Denaak'e). The rest of the trip was beautiful, breezy, high above treeline. We saw a caribou and a marmot.
Much of the land is slowly sliding downhill in little clumps that form their own shadows and micro-systems. Jim Dau, the area biologist out in Kotzebue, talked about something similar during the Kotzebue hearing of the state climate commission.