The Deep Hike

A long hard walk through the snow.  A beautiful blue sky and some wondrous sights to see was the adventure for the day.  You never really know what will happen on a hike through the village but the guarantee of some adventure is definitely there.

The snow had been falling quite often for quite some time and the clear beauty of the day was exciting.  What do we do on an exciting day?  Go for a walk, of course.  When it snows a bunch and then you go walking, sometimes the snow gets rather deep in spots.  Trudging across the road, it's not really that deep.  The road has been plowed several times.  Step off of the road and you hit deep snow.  We hit the lake just by the school and it was immediately knee deep sometimes deeper.  Along the way I found a few things that peaked my interest.  I stumbled along snow sitting on interesting dead plants, students upon hills, and a fox on a hill that we crept up on and watched as it saw us and then decided to leave.

It looks great, a fantastic mountain....we'll let you think that.  The boys showing the way.

I was thankful to be in the back of the pack.  The rest of the trekkers could break the trail and I could just tramp it down a bit more.  Through the snow we continued across the lake to the banks of the lake where the kids knew it was much deeper.  They had a plan in mind, knowing how deep it had been in the past few days while they had been out walking around.  Now, they wanted to see how deep it was and put me in the lead.  Let's see if the teacher could actually get through it!

Imagine for a second if you will, two students who are 6'2" plus, pushing a 5'4" (almost) teacher in front of them to see just how high up the snow is.  Well, in the beginning I was up to my waist in snow.  Each time I took a step it was walking from the hip.  Not just moving the leg and the knee but actually picking up my leg, swinging it up and over the snow at waist level, and then taking another step.  A few steps in, I found myself chest deep in snow.  Time to be in the back of the pack again, I was just not up to that task of blazing the trail.  Don't get me wrong, it was fun, it's just hard to walk when you can't bend at the waist any longer.

We ended the day with some flips off a snow bank, gymnastics skills coming in handy.  The walk was long and tiring but I did have fun once again and will continue to enjoy each experience I have in Egegik.

We got a good amount of snow, the tree was looking rather festive.

So much snow and wind

The snow just kept coming down, blowing around and just socking our town with lots of the white stuff.  Just outside the school I'm here with the school truck in the background and you can see that my hood is covered in the flying snow, houses are still hard to see and I've got my face pretty much covered up to protect it from the chill.  The wind is brutal when it is so cold and it gets hard to see when snow is blowing into your eyes.  Instant watering can happen when the wind flies right into your eyes too.  Then you have a problem, tears plus cold wind can equal ice right near the eyes.  Long eyelashes sticking together isn't always that fun.

Anyhow, with all the winter weather, it was fun to walk around the school grounds and see what it was like to walk in the wind and snow but I was glad that I did just walk around the school and wasn't somewhere that I had to walk to find shelter.  While the blizzard was in our area, planes didn't fly.  That means that the mail doesn't come.  When mail doesn't come that also means that food doesn't come either.  I was still waiting for my milk to show up from Anchorage at this point.  (It finally came but it was delayed because of this storm!)

Once the storm had passed, roads were plowed and the village started to breathe again.  Mountains of snow started to appear near our little school parking area and the younger kids were excited about them.  A snow slide formed on one side and we climbed up and down the other to take pictures time after time.  

The older kids have the exciting job of shoveling the boardwalks here on school grounds so that everyone can travel safely from building to building.  They had quite the workout!  They had a good amount to get rid of and with each toss, I swear more just fell down onto the boards.  They got it pretty clear though, enough so we could get around.   You see a 4-wheeler here pretty buried in snow and then a picture of myself kneeling on the shoveled boardwalk.  Most of that snow is gone now as we have warmed up over the last week.  Now we have piles of snow where the drifts were and some bare areas.  

The frozen window

When I got back from the Christmas break, it was very cold in Egegik, it had been for some time.  In my spare bedroom, the windows had completely frosted/iced over the sills.  As you can see in this first picture, the ice completely covered the black casings of the window.  Now completely white, no opening of the window was possible.  Not like I'd want to anyhow, but it was new for me.  The bathroom window was the same way as was the giant window in the kitchen.  Sometimes that one gets opened when cooking goes awry!   What I didn't know is that when they start to freeze and stay that way for so long, cracks start to appear.  In this first picture you can kind of see it but in this second one, you can see how long it is.  It wasn't there one day, and BOOM, there the next.  Amazing what a little cold weather and pressure from all sides can do.  The window just couldn't "breathe" anymore because it was frozen all around.  The crack in this window and the one in the front room from the beginning of the year are now all covered with bright pink duct tape thank you maintenance, so things look bright and cheery!

As school creeps along through January, the blizzard warning came in, we got dumped on with snow, blowing snow, high winds and some more snow!  It was amazing to see how our little village changed in a matter of hours it seemed.  Everyone says it's the most snow they have ever seen here.  I'm glad it's the winter I am here.  I love the fact that I am getting a big winter with a lot of snow to play in.  Though when you are outside, it's cold and you have to bundle up well, it's worth it to go and play!

Here we have our Elementary students out with their teacher.  They are out by the gym where a snow drift has started and it's one of the only places where you can almost get away from the wind.  The wind is blowing the snow around so much that you can barely make out the houses in the background.  They were starting to dig into the drift to make a cove of sorts.

Huddled into the little cove in the drift, the two girls caught a break from the wind before jumping through the snow in the playground just before lunch time.  Snow like this doesn't come very often and they really seemed to enjoy themselves.   Oh, I did too, let's not kid ourselves!

Changing Education- RSA Animate

If you have never seen this, it's something I look at from time to time to remind me of a few reasons that I am in education, to remind me that we are teaching people, that there may be reasons why the students are not excited at school and to try to find a better way to integrate the technology, real life situations and to connect with them every day.

   

Something I never thought I'd see.

It was a myth, something I'd only heard could happen.  It was finally cold enough, we were just silly enough and we had all the right tools.  A cup, hot water, a camera and the cold weather.





Yeah for Alaska and the cold.  You'll never see that in Oregon!  (I hope!)

Do you see what they see?

The eyes of a child can sometimes show us what we are missing.  They can enlighten us to what we skim over, forget what we once saw, or sometimes......what isn't even there.  For the rest of the year, I'm not only teaching high school, I'm teaching elementary school science and history as well.  My high school kids are being taught writing by the other teacher here and during that time, I get the little ones.  Through their eyes, I'm sure I will learn just as much about the world, the way they learn and about myself and my teaching style as they could ever learn from me.

That being said, a story for your enjoyment.

Evaporation.  One way to separate a mixture.

Our mixture on Wednesday was water and epsom salt.  They were amazed at how quickly the water and salt combined to form the mixture of a solid and a liquid.  The salt seemed to dissapear.  Where did it go?  How do we get it apart again?  Some of the other methods we had used wouldn't work and they were skeptical that this new way would.  I told them we'd check on it tomorrow.  So we did.  Nothing really changed, still "all water".

Over the weekend, because we didn't have science on Friday, of course the water finally evaporated and left behind beautiful crystals of salt.  I was excited for their reaction as they were about to see that the water had disappeared into the air and left behind the solid that we had added to the mixture before.  Not to disappoint me, they came with great reactions.  WOW!  What is that?!  Is that really what's left?!  It looks like a snowflake!

Epsom Salt Crystals

We chatted about it, I let them touch it and then immediately wash their hands and then I pulled out the microscope.  Oh goodness, you would have thought I was royalty!  They loved every minute of it.  After some time looking at the crystals and seeing it look like wood or a sideways river, they began to see pictures in it.  I'm not quite sure where salt crystals turn into bears eating fish in a river but that's what they saw today.  There were also animal heads, birds amongst other creatures.  I tried, I really did.  I even showed them how to move the little pointer to show me just where they were talking about.  I just couldn't see it.

Maybe through the eyes of a child we see new and exciting things.  Much like I see Egegik in a new way that the people who have lived here their whole lives don't anymore.  Today though, it just wasn't happening for me.  Maybe another day.

Star light, star bright

First star I see tonight.

Check the website.  Auroras are supposed to be "highly active."  Even down this far, we should be able to see them low on the horizon.   Upon looking out my window, the sight of a star high up in the sky signals to me that the possibility of clear skies all over further into the night might mean I get my first glimpse of the Northern Lights.

A little restraint, I know I needed to wait for the night to progress.  Maybe I didn't.  The site did say for the little half hour forecast that it was "extremely active," why wait?!  So, I got my gear on, packed the camera up, the tri-pod so I could get video for everyone to enjoy, a water bottle (so I could watch it freeze), and my gun.  Layers upon layers of clothes so I could burn inside and just stay warm outside went on and off I went.  A nice evening walk through town to get away from the lights in the wind-chilled -22° weather and I was at a decent viewing spot (I think).

Low clouds, low on the horizon there were still some clouds right where they said we'd be able to see the lights.  What a bummer.  I figured I'd wait awhile and see what happened.  Maybe I'd get lucky.  Now, I don't know if what I saw was me WANTING to see them so bad, but I swore I saw a dance of blue lights across the sky but I wanted to see them again before declaring that I had seen the Northern Lights.  So for now, I will say that I am still without a sighting.

My night was not without excitement though.  I was rewarded for my efforts with an awe-inspiring sight.  As I stand, watching the sky for dancing lights, a burst of light flew from one side of the sky and burned it's away across the sky until fading out as it went through the atmosphere.  A true shooting star that seemed to be there just for me made my evening.  It's my first one even!  Standing all alone in Alaska, in a tiny fishing village away from the world, all I could think about is how lucky I am to have this experience.  All I wanted to do was to share it with Eric.  A smile and elation about the moment washed over my face and the emotion of the event was a little overwhelming.

As I decided that the cold was then a little too much to handle, the flapping of an American and Alaskan flag waved goodbye as I scurried down the road to reach the warm comforts of home.

A shooting star in Alaska, how lucky am I?