Bearded Seal

The other day my neighbors killed and harvested a bearded seal. I know nothing about bearded seals but they were cutting and preparing the meat right outside my doorstep so I decided to take a few pictures:

Lovely May Weekend...

As I showed in my last post, the lousy weather that can be displayed during May up here...this weekend the opposite happened as the weather was very good. So I took my camera out and went along the shoreline of the coast of the Bering Sea and took some footage documenting the great weather:

May Snow Day

Just when you think the snow is melted and gone, and you wear that nice light jacket to work, you go outside for lunch and.... you're staring right into the epicenter of a late-season blizzard. By the time I made the 10-minute trek back to my house, I was sopping wet, covered in snow.















Although the snow banks around town have almost (keyword) completely melted (only a few small ones here and there), this stands as a reminder that it's not over til it's over. And up here, you can't expect the snow to be completely gone until at least June, then you can look forward to a month or more of rain. When I arrived in Anchorage last August, most of Alaska had gone 60 consecutive days with rain. And you wonder why I would prefer to spend my summers in the lower 48?

April Snow Drifts

Above is a picture of the front of my house in April. The weather in April was actually worse than March. It consisted of a 3-day rotation of: Snowing, freezing temperatures, and high winds. That's basically what you get in the winter in Unalakleet. It will snow for a day or two, then it will be become fairly cold, then it will warm up a bit but you'll have high winds. And when you have high winds, you get snow piled up all around town (including this mound of snow in front of my house that I have to get around each morning).

To the right is a picture of the snow stairway to my workplace. Because of the snow drifts, I never see too much of the actual steps for a good portion of the winter. So after I take my ten minute walk in snow boots to work, I scale the snow stairway that eventually leads to my office.

The local speed limit sign in Unalakleet is covered in snow. And below is a picture of the Catholic church in town, nestled behind a large snow bank.


The daylight has been getting progressively longer. I try to wear something over my eyes so I can fall asleep at a decent time. It's light til about 11:30/Midnight. And when I say "light" I mean that I could go outside without any street lights or anything and find my way around fine.

I'd probably estimate at this time that there's about 4 hours of actual darkness. I figure it doesn't getting totally dark til about 12:30/1 A.M., then starts getting light at about 4:30/5 A.M....In a couple weeks I'm going to create a video documenting currently how much light you will see in Unalakleet on an average night in May. I'm heading back down to the lower 48 at the end of May for about 2 months. So before I leave, (in creating the video) I'm going to stay up until it's completely dark and see exactly when that is.