So I took a few pictures along the way... me crusin' my 'hood.. I used the little built-in camera on my MacBook Pro. This is an extremely challenging and rather inadvisable way to take decent pictures, the only redemptive thing being that a laptop is a fantastic tripod (er, monopod).
My Acre of pristine Black Spruce... I got a little bit of work to do... but not today... I ain't even getting outa the truck today...
Same place on a pretty spring day last year... Down in the Valley is historic Fox, AK.
Just down the road are some really interestingly zoned parcels... My neigborhood covenants say things like I need to have a minimum of 400 square feet, and no livestock, or sewage treatment plants, or penitentiaries, or nuclear reactors... But I guess my neighbors can have Geodesic Domes and Ice Tower's. I'm glad, these things are Cool with a capital C... but I'm skeptical whether they're MY style...
Just accross the street is the Trans-Alaska Pipeline... a nice pullout for millions of tourerists that come thick as 'skeeters in the summer. Actually, I bet this is the most frequently visited/photographed hundred yards of the whole 800 mile affair. From my cabin I think I'll be able to see a nice cleared swath of forest on the opposite side of the valley where the pipe's buried... It's aboveground at the viewpoint, as even tourerists are likely to presume...
Down the road from the viewpoint, there're some real highlights of the high-latitudes. The furthest north microbrewery, Silver Gulch, and the 'Dawg across the street, and the true source of all things good, the Fox Spring. A popular T-shirt reads: "Fox, AK. Where the People are Unusual and the Beer is Unusually Good." I'll plead the 5th...
And if that weren't enough, I forgot to mention that between the pipe and the drink, is my favorite hole in the whole world. The Cold Regions Research Engineering Laboratory Permafrost Tunnel. I like to think of it as a time-machine. Inside there are literally bones and roots sticking out of the walls from organisms that lived 10's of thousands of years ago. It smells like a barnyard. I've heard it described as "Odeur de mammouth." It's dark, cold, and dirty, and old. I love it!
Oh, so why the tunnel? Well, this whole Fox area was a bigtime gold mining area the first half of the 20th century... This fact makes it remind me in a big way of my beloved home state of CA's motherload region...
Fox is also the fork in the road to Alaska's two highways into the arctic. The Steese goes up to Circle, and dead-ends at the Yukon River. The Elliot goes to Livengood, where the Dalton Highway will take you 414 miles further to Prudhoe Bay...
On my way back to UAF, a couple other noteworthy residential building concepts present themselves... I don't think the plane-house is being lived in now... not sure about the Tower-house... sorry for the crap picture, it's actually impressive... but again, not my style...
So, bottom line: I think I'll not be doing tunnels or towers or planes or domes... I think I'll stick with a good old log cabin... Here's a map of the places I visited... note that the unvegetated area on the valley bottom is not city/concrete, but gen-you-ine historic mining tailings...
All for now... see ya later... stop by Fox sometime!
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