Allow me to introduce myself,
My name is Ronn and I am an Alaskan Photographer here to share my experiences with you. Glamorous I know right!? I live in the most beautiful and untamed state in our nation, I run around chasing exotic wildlife and beautiful Eskimo models and I make tons of money taking pictures of it all.
OK, so back to reality here. Actually it is very rewarding to live here and to be a photographer but, it is also a lot of hard work for little pay. It takes a special breed of people to live here. I live in Fairbanks, Alaska and while amazingly beautiful, it can be a really really harsh place to spend a winter. Temperatures can stay well below 0° F for months and there is very little daylight to be seen in December and January. The little sun you do get is often hiding behind the dense ice fog that fills the valleys and does not actually rise more than a few degrees above the horizon. We actually nearly broke a record this year with 86 consecutive days of -20°F or colder(the record is 87).
Winterizing your car here takes on a whole new meaning. You don't just check all your fluids and install a block heater. You actually install several heaters, a block heater, a transmission heater and a battery heater are the bare minimum. You stay plugged in every moment your not driving somewhere (most businesses here have posts in the parking lot with outlets for this purpose) and if your lucky you car wont freeze. However leave it sitting for more than 30 minutes and the tires loose air pressure causing them flatten out a bit and then freeze in this shape. Thus, when you do venture out, your car feels like you have square tires and you thump thump thump down the road for five miles or so until they warm up enough from road friction to start returning to their regular shape once more.
Add to this the fact that we are still fairly under-developed here(a blessing and a curse) and things such as Natural Gas heating don't yet exist, and it becomes clear that energy costs here are incredibly high. Most people either burn wood, diesel fuel or a combination of both. Unfortunately, this combined with the ice fog keeps the air pretty nasty in the winter. One more notable item might be the fact that unless you live within the city limits you are likely either calling someone to fill your water holding tank or you simply don't have water. That's right, not a lot of wells here because of permafrost and extreme cold temps in the winter. There truly are a lot of folks who simply don't have running water. Fortunately we do have a holding tank that gets filled once a week for a flat fee of $50 whether we use the entire 500 gallons or not. But, with only 500 gallons we do not have a washer and dryer and must venture out at 50 below to do laundry as well.
After a few months of this the people you used to love for their amazing kindness and chipper spirit suddenly turn to near zombie-like creatures with very little patience. The trip to the grocery store that used to be accompanied by loads of friendly smiles from strangers who felt more like lifelong friends is now scarce of even the slightest bit of eye contact. If you do catch someone's eyes you feel as though they drill right through your soul and try to suck out any optimism you have left.
So I'm a little over imaginative but it really does change in the winter and the general attitude tends to fade with the arctic winter sun or lack thereof. But then comes summer and that's another, much more positive story...
We are on the down hill slope of winter so let's venture towards something a little more optimistic shall we?
While Alaskan summers are short lived they are well worth every single patch of frost-bitten skin you acquired the previous winter. It truly is like an entirely different planet let alone season. No really, it is. I'll write more about that in another post and you can see examples of my Alaskan Summer photos on my website.
In the future I plan to include many more photos here and also some photography tutorials. Keep checking back and if your reading these hop into my photo website and sign my guestbook to say hello.
