[Vision2020] 'Cold' is a Relative Term

[Tom Hansen]

Courtesy of today's (January 10, 2009) Anchorage Daily News -

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'Cold' is a relative term
  
Sure Anchorage is freezing, but you don't even want to know what this 
latest cold snap has been like in Interior Alaska. 

"The coldest temperature was 67 below in Chicken yesterday," National 
Weather Service meteorologist Jim Brader said Friday. "And we've had a 63 
below in Tok yesterday." 

When it gets that kind of cold, mushers can't mush, small planes can't fly 
and gasoline turns to a slushy pudding in your gas tank.

"You can actually scoop it out," said Maurice Shultz, who owns Napa Auto 
Parts in Tok and has seen the usual winter rush of customers buying fan 
belts, fuel filters and magnetic heaters.

The freeze, which began in late December, has hit Fairbanks, the Copper 
River Basin and the Yukon Valley the hardest, according to the National 
Weather Service.

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Ice floats in Cook Inlet, near the mouth of Ship Creek at the site of a 
tugboat dock on January 7, 2009.
http://tinyurl.com/ShipCreek
 
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Meantime, Anchorage made it above zero Friday, and forecasters say there's 
an end in sight. Meteorologists expect temperatures to rise a few degrees 
this weekend, with a warm-up next week. 

That's a little late for students in the village of Fort Yukon - about 150 
miles north of Fairbanks - who stacked their school concession stand with 
nachos and soda pop in hopes of playing their first home basketball game 
of the season Friday. 

Local temperatures approaching 60 below put a stop to that: The scheduled 
foe, Northway, couldn't get in.

"The issue is the traveling. When temperatures are lower than minus 60, 
they just don't fly," said Principal Ron Frieh.

Instead, the local men's team will challenge the high school boys, said 
school secretary Georgianna Engler. The girls will play the women, or 
maybe a group of middle school players. 

"The 'little dribblers,' we call them," said Engler, who is catching a 
ride to work on the school bus because her truck is frozen.

In other words, life goes on.

The chill factor in Bethel, where temperatures dipped to 25 below, 
prompted local officials to close schools Wednesday so students wouldn't 
have to walk to school or be caught outside waiting for the bus. By the 
next day, they were back in class, said Superintendent Gary Baldwin. 

In Fairbanks, where the low was 43 degrees below zero Thursday, pizza 
delivery man Jon Kincheloe keeps climbing into his Ford Focus to bring 
soldiers and college kids their pies.

The worst part is shivering on the porch while customers mill about before 
answering the doorbell. Plus he's had four flats in the past month.

"I've got frostbite on my hands from changing (tires)."

Car trouble is a common complaint at those temperatures. Which is why Dave 
Granzow of Northway -- 61 below Friday morning -- has outfitted his pickup 
with four extra heaters.

There's the block heater and the battery heater, he said, the oil pan 
heater and the transmission heater. 

"There's some people that say anything colder than 40 below doesn't 
matter," he said.

They're the ones who don't go outside.

About 65 miles north of Northway is Tok, where local blogger Aliza Sherman 
Risdahland posted a photo this week of an electronic temperature gauge 
seen at the Tetlin National Wildlife Refuge office.

It read 70 below. 

"I've been trying to drive a little bit into town, and as you drive, you 
can feel your steering wheel freeze up," Sherman Risdahland told National 
Public Radio this week. 

That minus-80 doesn't count for the record books, however. 

The coldest official reading in Tok this week was 63 below, said Brader, 
the National Weather Service meteorologist in Fairbanks.

Brader said many store-bought temperature gauges don't perform well at 
temperatures colder than minus-40. 

Whatever the temperature, it's cold enough for local musher Dale Probert 
to let his dogs sleep in the garage. Probert said his daughter had to take 
her team to Anchorage to train. 

"It's way too cold to run dogs. I think even the distance mushers are kind 
of held up right now," he said. 

As for what happens next, Brader said temperatures could begin a turn 
upward this weekend. 

"We haven't broken individual day records, because believe it or not, 
Fairbanks is a pretty cold place," he said. 

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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho
 
"For a lapse Lutheran born-again Buddhist pan-Humanist Universalist 
Unitarian Wiccan Agnostic like myself there's really no reason ever to go 
to work."

- Roy Zimmerman


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