On Friday I went with my poetry workshop class on a mildly impromptu field trip to the Permafrost Tunnel. It's one of two such places in the entire world (the other is Russia, Alaska's back yard). It was beautiful in the way that frozen silt is beautiful, which is to say you've got to be a certain kind of person to find that kind of thing beautiful. It was a truly amazing experience though. Our guide was a straight forward German fellow who admitted to knowing only as much as fifteen years of being a tour guide had taught him (still a considerable amount). During our safety talk we learned that we were some of the few people on earth to come into contact with the mold growing inside the tunnel because it was endemic (it wasn't dangerous though, no worries). It was a strange thing to consider that we were a fraction of the few hundred people (a small drop in the well of our population) who had come into contact with a strain of mold thousands of years old.
A safety talk and a hardhat seem sufficient preparation for entering a tunnel through which people have safely traveled for a few decades, but because the tunnel (which isn't really a tunnel because there's no opening on the other end) belongs to the military, everyone had to sign a check-in sheet which listed our names and the time of entry. Not so unusual, except that sheet is then faxed to the military base. If it isn't faxed again in an hour signalling that everyone has made it out alive the military comes and saves the day. Intense stuff for some frozen dirt.
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| Dramatic image of the entrance |
The first thing I noticed stepping into the tunnel was the smell. It was sour and musty with just a faint hint of over-ripe sweetness lingering underneath of it. The smell of rotting bacteria. As the ice in the ice wedges sublimated (turning straight from ice into vapors(the world is a crazy place)) the anaerobic bacteria trapped in the ice came into contact with the oxygen in the air and died (sad day for anaerobes). It left the exposed ice covered in a layer that looked a lot like dusty cobwebs but was actually decayed organic matter. Delicious!
The ceiling itself (where there wasn't solid ice present) was an array of free-hanging old root systems, spidery and silty after thousands of years, and in the entrance you could see 10,000 - 30,000 year old bones belonging to animals that once (hypothetically) drank from an old watering hole that scientists believe existed where the tunnel entrance now is.
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| Handy signs were hanging around letting us know the age of things. 14,000 is young compared to 30,000. |
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| Potential Sheep Horn jutting from the wall. |
There were two different pathways leading into the earth. At the end of one we stood beneath a convergence of ice wedges which formed a polygonal cross-way above our heads. At the end of the other we saw chaotic crystal patterns, formed by small movements in the ice pushing the outer layers of frozen silt into sharp geometric patterns. Those two places were where the really beautiful things happened.
After our trip into earth we went to eat at a brewery right down the road called The Silver Gulch, which has really delicious food and even more delicious brews.
The following day Zack (rockstar and astronaut extraordinaire) and I went to Chena hot springs. It was a really lovely evening and my first time being in a hot spring. It was particularly interesting because it was around -35 and the water was around 100+. Which meant I was really warm but my hair and eyelashes were icy. I need to build up a heat tolerance and go back. On the drive home we also saw a really amazing and intense aurora, several skeins of it in varying intensities of pink and green sweeping and bunching across the sky. A wonderful cap to two great days.
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