Winter in October

 

Well it's getting colder and the snow has started to fall.  Woke up on the 6th to a little bit of snow.  The road I'm on looked like this.Sunday night the indoor soccer intramural team I'm on won our 3rd game.  We're 3-1 now and headed to the tournament... or something.  I just show up when I'm told to, I don't really understand the schedule.  Our last game we were 14 seconds away from automatic forfeit but a 5th person showed up just in time. 

Rules are you play 7 people but need 5 at minimum to start so we played 2 men down the first half then 1 man down the second half.  We managed a single goal with 2 minutes left and didn't let any in.  If we can just get everyone to show up, we might be able to do well in the tournament.  If we win we get free t-shirts!  Anyway, the snow has been on the ground for a few days now.  Had about an inch of snow this morning and a bit more now.  This is the view out the window of my room to the backyard.  There's a few storage sheds but it's mostly a redneck playground with plenty of tires and old bicycle frames.  I tried my best to get them out of the frame for the sake of scenery.

Ester Dome Hike

 October 2nd I went on another hike through the school.  We drove up to the top of Ester Dome and hiked down into the village of Ester.  The entire time I thought we were going to hike back up after, which would have been awful, there was a section that was about 30 degrees down for half a mile and going down.  But had I read a copy of the itinerary, there was another vehicle waiting for us at the bottom so we kind of cheated.  Anyways, here's some pictures.  This is looking over Fairbanks in the morning.

 Ester Dome was a big gold mining area and still has a few active mines.  We came across plenty of holes that people would dig, sift through, then move on.  There's also a lot of places people would just dump stuff before there were any roads out there.

 Not sure what kind of car this was but it had a straight-6 under the hood

 The bus had an old mattress in it, looked like someone made it a home for a while

 The saloon we were supposed to stop in for hot chocolate but they didn't open until noon so we left

On the way back there was literally an entire house on the opposite side of the highway going against traffic.  Cars were coming onto the on-ramp up ahead then immediately pulling over so I'm not sure what the plan was or who came up with it.

Wickersham Dome hike

Well it's been a while since I've posted but here's what I've been up to.  I'll probably make a few posts to split it up.  September 19th I went on a hike to Wickersham Dome.  It was about 6 or 7 miles total and great weather.  Took a few pictures, here they are.

 We met some dogs along the way that like to eat mud.

Finally did a handstand in Alaska.  This seemed like an appropriate place.

The Group on the summit

The sun was much nicer on the way back.  This is the summit

I'm still working on the geography around here but this is facing south and I'm fairly certain it's THIS mountain range.

This I'm certain is Denali (Mt McKinley).  Photo taken from the main quad of campus walking back after the hike.  I think I falsely claimed a few posts ago that different mountains were Denali, but this is definitely it.