World Ice Championships

Fairbanks has the best ice for ice sculpting in the world.  I don't know the details but I believe it's something about it being so clear and forming in large blocks.  There are three divisions - Single block classic - Multi block classic - Fairbanks open.  The single block 5' x 8' x 3' and weighs 7800 pounds and the multi blocks are 4' x 4' x 3' and they're given 12 of them and can use heavy machinery and some turn out over 20 feet high and weight over 20 tons.

Anyway, we went yesterday - it's pretty much the end of the competition and I took some pictures (there are probably 4 times as many sculptures - I tried not to take too many.  A lot of them had melted or broken too as it's been warming up this past week.

I was pretty shocked - everything is gigantic.  These towers were at least 10 feet tall

 

There were lots of slides for the kids.  So of course we played too

 

They also had ice tunnels so we played in those too

 Bigger slides

 Even bigger colored slides!

Fish slide

 

There was even a big ice maze that we explored

I don't want to make this post too long so I'll just post a few of the competition pieces and the rest of them are in an album

 

This one was my favorite - more pictures here

http://www.icealaska.com/component/zoo/item/mbsite-14-2.html

 More pictures can be found here

Catch-up IV

Last week I went on a snowshoe trip with the school's Outdoor Adventure club.  It was about a 2 hour drive out to Eagle summit and we hiked around for about 6 hours up in the white mountains.  The views were spectacular.  Here's some pictures.

 Found some cool formations from the wind and cold

 We crossed over the Yukon Trail and saw some trail markers

A bush plane kept flying back and forth over us - periodically dropping what looked like florescent orange spikes that stuck into the ground in what seemed to be a grid.  We didn't go see what they were but probably some survey of some sort of the terrain.

We stopped at an interesting tavern on the way back down the Steese Highway for some hot chocolate then headed back to Fairbanks.

Hopefully I'll have time to update a few more times this semester before my trip back in May

Curling!

I went curling...  Actually I went twice.  If you're not familiar with curling by name, it's that game in the winter olympics where you slide big rocks down the ice and there are peopling sweeping the ice in front of it.  If you're not familiar with that at all, it's a game created in Scotland and is actually a lot of fun (and surprisingly a really good workout).  The Fairbanks Curling Club had a rookie tournament so Steve and I found ourselves on a team.

The games are very long - each team has 8 rocks and 4 players and you alternate throwing rocks down the sheet with the other team for a total of 6 rounds (so a total of 96 rocks are thrown in a game total).  The scoring is a little strange and there are a ton of crazy rules but the idea is to slide the 40 lb stone while balancing on a Teflon sole down the 150 foot sheet and try and get it as close to the center as possible while blocking or taking out other stones.

The sport is based on good sportsmanship... and drinking/socializing.  There is a bar right in the curling club with a very nice lounge overlooking the sheets.  The whole sport is based on sportsmanship - players call their own fouls (if you touch the stone with the broom or body part) and the wining team cleans up the ice after the game and buys the losing team drinks.  If you get a stone directly on the center (the button) you buy your team a pitcher.  And my favorite part, if you believe you have no chance in winning the match, you can concede the match and offer the winning team congratulatory handshakes before all rounds are completed to allow more time for drinking and socializing and does not carry the same stigma as quitting or forfeiting.

 Pretty much everywhere in Fairbanks has an ice sculpture out in front

This is how to determine if rocks are closer to the center or not.  The scoring is a bit strange, but only one team can score per round.  At the end of the round, the team with the rock closest to the center gets a point for each rock inside the house (orange circle) but only if each rock is closer than all the opponent's rocks.  It's hard to explain but it makes sense I swear.

Anyway it was a ton of fun even though we lost both games, we had drinks after and it was a good time.

Pictures of the Aurora

 There were a few days in February that had some increased sun activity.  I drove over to a friends apartment one night and when I got there everyone was out in the parking lot.  After I parked I realized they were all looking off into the sky and very faintly you could see some green haze above the trees.  We were in a parking lot with streetlamps on a brightly lit campus so to be honest my first Aurora sighting wasn't really that great.  But later that night once I got away from campus they were much brighter.

About a week after that the skies were clear again and we decided to drive up Murphy's dome around midnight.  By the time we got up there the lights were starting to fade but I had borrowed a friend's tripod and brought my camera so I decided to try and get some pictures.  I had never photographed aurora before but my first exposure was the best one I took.  After that I think it was a combination of the lights fading and my playing with different exposure times and I never got anything better.  Hopefully eventually I'll get another shot.

 

The first exposure - 20 seconds f/5.6 ISO500

 A little hard to tell but I did a handstand here and fired the flash at the beginning of the exposure

 I'm not sure if it's just the way the photo came out or if the Aurora was really a little red but I like this one a lot

Winter Adventures

So I haven't updated much this semester but I'll try to put some pictures up of what I've been up to.  It might take a few posts though.

It took three tries to get back to Fairbanks.  The first day my flight to Chicago was canceled and the second day the same flight was canceled for bad weather.  Finally made it to Chicago the third day but had to sit there for 5 hours because my next flight was delayed and I missed my connection in Seattle.  They put me on a later flight and I finally made it back.

There was a nice warm (above zero) day in January so we decided to go Ice Fishing.  We rented a little hut from the state and drove about a hour from Fairbanks to meet some guys from the fisheries department.

We drove right out onto the ice which was pretty cool

 Our hut had a little wood stove so we managed to build a fire and it kept pretty warm in there.  The huts had corners with holes in the ice but the holes were frozen over and the auger the guys we met had was too big for those holes so we had to fish outside.

The ice was about 5 to 6 feet thick so they use motorized augers

Inside the tent they had where it was darker you could see right down into the hole

 Later in the day the temperature dropped off pretty fast and our beers froze shut before you could finish them

I decided to do a handstand over the hole

Our plans also included snowshoeing that day but we got off to a late start so we ended up going the next day.  Jason, Steve and I had rented snowshoes so we took them out to some trails about a half hour from town.

I made tracks

 Most of the snowshoe was on packed trails from snow machines (snowmobiles)

We found the summit with a bit of a view and ate our lunch.  It was another nice day around 10 degrees above

Afterward Jason let Steve and I shoot off a round with his .44 magnum into some snow.  Our ears were ringing for a few hours at least.

There are more pictures on Steve and Jason's cameras but they're just as bad as me at uploading them.