From the bank, we could see our two dedicated ice fishers moving over their fishing holes. The movement was busy. I had eyed them on earlier occasions thinking they were candidates for Slow TV. But today they looked fast from afar.

I had a couple of baggies with cookies for each of them. One showed no interest and wouldn’t take them. I set them down near her. She said she was grumpy. The other was making some faces, I couldn’t interpret. She was very thankful. But packed up quickly, anxious to leave. We followed her because we didn’t want to stay with grumpy. When we walked by grumpy, she slid the cookies at us and said, “Here, I don’t want your cookies.”

It was a good thing they weren’t under the same roof of an ice house.

This is a week with a number of new experiences. This drama lead us to Margie’s house as we followed her from the river. She showed us her kitchen. It was darling. And the fireplace in the kitchen heated it to 83°.

The birds are displaying nesting behavior. Birdhouses are waiting.

If Terry had time, making birdhouses might be a project for him.

The good news is there is no below zero forecast before we leave here a week from Wednesday. This is mostly due to overcast and snow conditions. How will we get that view of Denali we’ve been aiming for?

The thought of that road-to-nowhere, covered in snow was daunting to me before I arrived. I had lived in AK for eight years and I ran most days. But after being away for 13 years, I forgot how much heat you produce when you’re active even outside in freezing conditions. You just can’t stop. If you’re going far enough to require food. You’ll probably need to stop to eat that sandwich you’re packing. And of course you need to stop and take off you mitts to take a picture. And if the much dreaded headwind kicks up, you need to add layers and face covering. It’s all daunting.

We were told we needed to go up the road-to-nowhere for ten miles to get the proper view of Denali. Denali is the highest peak in North America at 20,308 feet. You’d think we could spy it.

When I was here by myself, I made it to the 3 mile marker. This gave me a good 6 mile run. When Terry arrived, we amped it up one mile each time we went out the road. By last Friday, we were at 7 miles. Our photographer friend has a nice picture from the eight mile point. Today we did 8, of course we must return so that’s a 16 mile trek. It was warm with no headwind. Perfect!

Next time we’re going ten miles. The beauty of this weather is you don’t need to bundle. I hate the balaclava, and the goggles and the heavy jacket and all the socks. But you still need to carry extra stuff, because sweat just happens. And moving into even a light breeze will give you a windchill 10-15 degrees lower.

Deb and I have spent a lot of time down on the river, hanging out with the hopefuls. Today Margie caught 2 Grayling and 2 whitefish, the best luck so far. I have developed a plan to unwind my dental floss and tie it on a willow branch, much like the locals do. Today while we walked with Elsie, she cast doubt on my idea and gave me one of her rigs, laughing that she is too old to fish anyway. The fishing equipment consists of a short piece of willow with 2 protruding screws that the line gets wound around. This simple method works primarily because cold water fish are lethargic and don’t put up a fight. Maybe tomorrow……

Thawing of the fire hydrants signals warmer weather ahead. Each has a heater cable that gets attached to a portable generator.

Power for McGrath is supplied by 3 diesel generators housed in a shed situated strategically between the grocery store, hotel, and bar. One kilowatt of power cost 71 cents. Most locals burn spruce to heat their homes.

It seems I start waiting for vernal equinox the day after the autumnal equinox. In McGrath today we have twelve hours and eighteen minutes of daylight. At 62°56’59”N latitude, I doubt anyone reading this is farther north. So from now until September 20th, you all have less daylight than here.

Because Alaska only has one time zone except for the Hawaii-Aleutian Zone at the tip of the Aleutian chain, most resident’s daylight comes late and lasts late. For us waiting to view the northern lights this puts us outside way late. Last night it was 10:30, way past our bedtime. I still woke up at 4:00 time for more northern lights.

We alway hike on the equinox. Here, if you hike 10 miles on the road to nowhere, you get a good view of Denali. It was an ambitious plan. We couldn’t leave our house until 12:30 for two reasons. # 1 it didn’t get above zero until then. And #2 We were waiting for a report on last night’s NAC attack. In other words waiting on the veggies.

We did run out of time. It was too hard in the snow to make fast progress. We ended up completing fourteen.

Happy Equinox to all and to all, nighty night!

11:00 PM.

Down the street the dogs are barkin’
And the day is a-gettin’ dark
As the night comes in a-fallin’
The dogs ‘ll lose their bark
And the silent night will shatter
From the sounds inside my mind
As I’m one too many mornings
And a thousand miles behind

The dogs were howling madly. Here’s why.

Happy Vernal Equinox.

The day gets swallowed by small detail. We stood and watched the fishing holes, as the two women fished. One standing over her hole in the ice holding her broken fishing pole with an imitation reel carved by her husband that she you used to wind the fishing line around. Baited with meat, she jigged it up and down. She talked in a calm soothing voice to her dog friend who has come down for years to hang out and investigate the holes. A nice sized Grayling tugged on her line as we talked and she yanked it through the hole. The dog, too, remained patient and calm even when she sensed a ghost.

The other woman, who is feisty and doesn’t know how to slow her metabolism, which is making her remain thin, tells us about a woman coming home from the bar, who flipped her snow machine over onto herself. No one knew about it until morning. A couple in their house heard something but didn’t check and the woman was found dead.

A dog knows when the dead woman is close. Someone saw her beckoning them to join her.

After spending a night in the haunted house in St. Louis MO, I can attest to the fact that people see ghosts. I literally saw them seeing ghosts.

The skinny woman was telling the story of doing house keeping for Davis-Bacon wages, $40.00 per hour. Maybe she was making the high wages because she saw a ghost there. The dog alerted her. I must confess I love stories about dogs hearing and seeing ghosts.

Mukluk used to growl and back up when we ran in the dark. He’d see something. It usually looked like a garbage can to me. But how can we assume we know more than a dog? Their sense of smell acuity is between 10,000 to 100,000 times greater than humans. How do they even manage it? The dogs here have their own Morse code. It travels all night alerting. The two women know the woman in Grayling who gave us Mukluk. Small world.

We learned a lot in two hours out on the ice with one elder and a near elder. The elder gave me her DOB as 4/1/1959. She said she wasn’t sure of her age, so she was telling everyone she was 65. Sometimes we are so uptight about those numbers. Where does that get us?

Once again, at sunrise there are 2 figures, out on the Kuskokwim River ice, bent low. Deb and I take a detour to check it out. Two local women, not young, are jigging their lines up and down.

One has a bunch of monofilament snarled around a wooden ladle. The other has a piece of wood carved to look like a child’s fishing pole. Between them they have caught a single Grayling in 3 days of fishing. But they are content. Both love fishing, and for them it is unrelated to catching anything. Eva fishes with a piece of macaroni, while Margaret bobs a small chunk of leftover moose pot roast.

The holes have been augured by a man who is preparing for students to have a day fishing. There are 10 students, thus 10 holes. Each is 12 inches in diameter through 4 feet of ice that lays on about 8 feet of river water. Eva said the students will have the good bait, shrimp. We will be there observing and hope to have pictures of whitefish and northern pike.

The museum has been calling us. Today was the first open day after quarantine. Two former high school teachers work there. It is a wonderful repository of local history. They also have every local animal, from a vole up to a wolf. And a large collection of mastedon tusks and teeth.

I bought a local cookbook autographed by the staff who compiled it.

Terry from McGrath

Margaret is a local photographer. She grew up in Nikolai a village of 75 people 58 miles from here. You can get there by snow machine, boat, plane or dogsled. She said she was both Athabaskan and Yupik. I don’t want to use derogatory terms but Athabaskans are interior Natives and are considered Indians, and Yupik are coastal Natives and are considered Eskimos (which is a derogatory term). She kind of chuckled and said, “you know they are not supposed to get along.”

She pulls her camera equipment around town in the best sled we’ve seen here. She’s been encouraging me to visit both the museum and the McGrath Light and Power office to see her work. With quarantine over, we headed to the electric company office. The only office employee there, a man named Ralph, 29 years old, turned out to be Margaret’s son. Margaret is married to Ralph the mayor. Despite any possible favors from either Ralphs, she had a great shot of two owls, a beaver, and Denali.

It warmed from -6 to 19. A good day to get out on the river. Terry on ski and me winter running shoes. No balaclava, mittens or large jacket. Easier to move and breathe. We found two booties one we could extricate from the ice and the other embedded frozen evidence for the future to postulate on what we were doing to our dogs.

We hoped to get four miles up river, but at three miles we ran into overflow ice and after trying to walk gingerly with spayed toes inside my shoes, and intentional breathing slowly, I’d had enough. The ice is 40 inches thick, so I wasn’t worried about going under, but getting shoes and socks submerged would not be good.

Closer to town, a plane appeared to be buzzing us. It had the blue and yellow colors of Alaska on the bottom. It was the State Trooper’s plane, our landlord. He dipped his wings to wave.

The river is quiet. The orange tipped stakes are the only visible remains of the Iditarod Trail. A fresh coat of snow hides dog excrement. The telltale signs of 600 dogs. We didn’t see any fishing or snow machining. This was the last event before break up. As the snow stops falling and the junk that lies beneath the white blanket prevails the complexion of the town is transformed from winter wonderland to a continuous junk yard. We’ll miss out on that part. Our memories will look beautiful. We fly out of here on March 31 and arrive back home on Poisson d’Avril.

It was 3 above in the morning and reached 16 above during my run/walk accompanying Terry skiing. I didn’t need a jacket or gloves.

Terry left his quarantine and went straight to the store. It was great for him to be out of my shadow and have freedom to buy what he longed for and see new masked faces up close.

Dallas Seavey was born in Virginia and his family moved back to Seward when he was five. He is a third generation musher who grew up helping his dad, Mitch, the 2004/2013/2018 Iditarod champion, train his racing teams. He ran the Jr. Iditarod four times and in 2005, Dallas became the youngest musher in history to run the Iditarod. He also wrestled for Sky View High School and spent one year training at the U.S. Olympic Training Center. He is a High School State Champion, a Jr. National Champion, and was on the 2005 Jr. World team. In 2011, he won the Yukon Quest and in 2012, he became the youngest Iditarod champion in its history. He is one of four mushers ever to hold a championship in both the Yukon Quest.