Breaking up

After a hiatus of nearly six months, this blog is vastly overdue for an update.

It's May, and spring is finally winding its way into Western Alaska. The season is bringing with it melting snow, long days, and temperatures that are finally allowing Nome folks to walk to the post office or Wells Fargo in light jackets, without hats, gloves, or earmuffs.

For a long while now, the snow that we've had since October has been making its long, drawn-out exit, stage right. Around early April the temperatures finally rose above freezing long enough for the mounds of snow to start turning into rivulets and pools on the ground, making for liberal amounts of chocolate-brown mud on virtually all of the streets of the Gold Rush City.

This week, the temperatures finally broke into the 50s and even strayed above 60 on a few brief, glorious moments. As the snow makes its last stand, the mud is drying back into khaki-hued dust, the schools are closing their grade-books on another year, and locals are getting primed for summers spent at fish camps, hiking on the verdant tundra, and fishing in the nearby rivers.

Across Western Alaska, as the snow is going away, so too is the ice on the rivers and seas. The radio is broadcasting a daily report on this gradual process of ice disintegration, which lends to this entire season the label "break-up." One of the signals of spring in Nome, indeed, was seeing the Norton Sound's white ice finally give way to the midnight-blue waters beneath.

Meanwhile, we're still four weeks from the summer solstice, but the days are already exceptionally long. As I write it is just about 1am, but a powder-blue twilight lingers over the eastern sky, and fades into a rouge-colored glow over Russia, to the west.

It's a beautiful time to be in Nome.