From Dawson City, Yukon Territory                           2016 Sep 09

Hello Everybody,

The big projects for this summer were birding in Oregon with EV, and
with Amy and Lewis when they visited in July, and driving to Fairbanks
so EV could fly to join me for ten days to drive the 1000 mile round
trip dirt and gravel 'Haul Road' (officially 'The Dalton Highway', one
of the fourteen numbered roads in Alaska) north to the Prudhoe Bay
oilfield at the edge of the Arctic Ocean. It has been a great summer!

From Portland to Prudhoe Bay and back is about like Portland to New York
City and back, except for nearly all the way through British Columbia
and the Yukon, and in Alaska, most of the time all to be seen is big
mountains, forests, lakes, rivers, and the road: it's usual to go 15
minutes between seeing other vehicles or a building, and the feeling is
of limitless space little affected by mankind. South of the northern
Yukon, the roads are excellent; nearing Alaska, climate change has
partially melted the permafrost under the roads and they are noticeably
rougher than I remember them from 2004/2005. Nobody knows what the
future will bring. While waiting for EV's arrival, I spent a few days
northeast of Fairbanks on the Steese Highway (another of Alaska's 14
numbered roads) which runs to the village of Central and ends at Circle
on the Yukon River. When I left my campsite for the highway back to
Fairbanks, I drove for an hour and fifteen minutes before seeing another
vehicle and in that time saw only four small buildings.

The Dalton Highway was the first and is the only road penetrating the
vast lands north of Fairbanks; even today most of the transport east and
west of the Dalton is by air, water, or dogsled (being replaced by
snowmachine). The road starts out in heavily forested mountains, then
climbs up alongside rivers to Atigun Pass in the Brooks Range, which
runs east-to-west and separates the mountains to the south from the
profoundly flat tundra and muskeg of the 'North Slope' which edges the
Arctic Ocean. One of the pictures in the slideshow is of a map display
at the Yukon Crossing on the Dalton, and although neither the Brooks
Range nor Atigun Pass in named on the map, it's clear what the layout
is. (Deadhorse is the name for the civilian area outside the restricted
and gated oil production area: around 50 permanent residents and 4,000
itinerant oil workers who rotate in two or three week shifts.) In such a
pristine and remote location, the huge mess of high-tech buildings and
machinery seems bizarre. Both Amy and EV have taken the commercial tour
required to actually get to the edge of the Arctic Ocean (the Beaufort
Sea), but they did not try a swim as some have done.

In 2005 Amy and I had a lot of smoke haze, and sometimes flames in the
low growth a few feet from the edge of the road, but this year there was
no smoke at all. Amy and I had mostly nice weather except for a messy
snowstorm just north of Atigun Pass; EV and I started out with lots of
dramatic looming clouds and spitting rain and non-sticking snow (EV,
having just left Portland at 99º the day before, was charmed), but by
the end of the week it cleared and warmed to be beautiful and we enjoyed
the autumn gold colors in shirtsleeves.

EV and I had hopes for seeing some of the boreal birds seldom seen
farther south, and we did pretty well, EV seeing 8 and I seeng 6 new for
our 'life lists'. There were a couple more we could likely have seen,
but that leaves something for next time. Juncos (in the Sparrow family)
are very common in the lower 48 and we see them all the time, but we
were suddenly seeing the far northern 'slate-colored race' which looks
quite different and at first was very puzzling.

On EV's Arctic Ocean tour she met a couple driving the Dalton in their
new-style VW Bug, and they told her of earlier meeting a young man on
the final push of his solo bicycling tour from the southern tip of South
America (Patagonia) to Prudhoe Bay. As we were heading back south, we
came on them talking beside the road --pretty gutsy!

One of the roadhouses on the southern Dalton was surrounded by flowers
with some huge sunflowers-- with 20 hours of sunlight and plenty of
moisture, things can really grow in the short Arctic summer.

With a couple of days to spare, we revisited my earlier campsite on the
Steese Highway northeast of Fairbanks, and tried a known birding site a
few miles west of Fairbanks which turned out to be not very nice in a
muddy forest on a rough road -- but there we met 'Bob' who was out in
his Jeep running his two huge friendly dogs, and he took us to a great
camping spot at the top of a 500' bluff with a fine view over the
Tanana River plain. The view from there of the upper parts of Denali,
150 miles distant, was perfect. A great way to end the visit.

The server address is:     http://john-armitage.com

The new slideshow (at the top of the list) is:
16_07-08_Jul-Aug_OR_CAN_AK.exe and the equivalent in .zip format for Mac
users. This email is also repeated there in .txt format.

Boilerplate follows: Remember, these large files may take several
minutes to download; while waiting to get a really fast uplink in Santa
Cruz, Joey has migrated me to the commercial host ICDSoft, which will
greatly speed things up for those of you who have a fast download
connection. There has been a myriad of opportunities for typographic
errors in putting up all the older slideshows; please let me know if you
run into any problems.

If you can easily change your screen brightness, you might optimize it
for the best viewing.

NEW: For Mac users there is a .zip file to download, and here is how to
use it (please let me know if you have any problems):

go to    http://john-armitage.com/   and click on the blue line for a
list of slideshows

click on a zip file for a slideshow

after downloading, open the zip file

open the extracted folder which will be in the same folder and have the
same name as the zip file (likely in Downloads)

select the first jpg file and then all of the jpg files, using Cmd+A
(select with this method only, to keep the files in numeric order)

use the space-bar for a Quick View slideshow

click the tiny circle with the backslash through it near the upper left
corner for full screen (in Yosemite and El Capitan)

don't click the menu bar, it will disappear

use the right and left arrow keys to navigate

use Escape to exit full screen

optional: delete the zip and/or extracted folder

Each browser is a little different, but generally you can either choose
OPEN to view the show once, or choose SAVE TO DISK and then OPEN if you
want to have it your hard drive for future re-viewing.

Right-Arrow or Right-Click or SpaceBar will advance to the next picture.
Left-Arrow or Left-Click will return to the previous picture. Esc will
end the show at any time; use Esc if the show ever seems stuck.

If you would like any of the individual images, perhaps to print, just
let me know. If you don't want to get any more emails like this one in
the future, please let me know. If you have friends who might be
interested, I'll be happy to add them to my email list and they can
download the slideshows if they have a broadband internet connection.
None of this is commercial or copyrighted, the more who enjoy the
pictures, the better.

Regards, John Armitage 1-970-250-6080 john@qued.com