Winter starts in October here!

This past weekend Trace and I moved into a new apartment. It's much more comfortable than the last place! More privacy with a country feeling I suppose. It's a smaller apartment on the first floor of a huge log house. It's up in the foothills off the Farmer's Loop... Our view out the front window overlooks Fairbanks even on a cloudy day and we get an amazing shot of the Alaska Range on a clear day. Our landlords are a truly genuine Fairbanks-grown family. They're a really nice couple with two boys that have totally reminded me of myself running around with my brothers when I was younger. They even brought us pumpkin muffins fresh out of the oven last night after dinner!
We're currently sitting back on the couch winding down from the days events. Tracie's reading her crazy novel 'Haunted' and I'm a bit restless, probably half annoyed that the Tigers game was postponed and half listening to our landlord's kid playing piano up stairs. We're both doing very well and happy. We posted some more pictures on our flickr account. The link is in one of the past blogs. Hope everyone is well these days. We miss you!
Oh yeah, weather... It hasn't been above 22 degrees for the past week and the sun rises at about 9am and sets at about 4:30. There is a definite layer of snow on the ground that supposedly won't melt until next spring.

Name that Athabascan Village

We flew over this village on a detection flight last week. It lies at the latitude/longitude of 66.15N/145.48W. It's first inhabitants were called the Dendu Gwich'in, who were annihilated by scarlet fever in the 1880's. It now has an Athabascan popluation of 28 and relies heavily on its small dirt runway for outside supplies and transportation.

it'snowing

We got our first snowfall friday night, two days before the start of October. It seemed strange as Trace and I both love the fall season and have somehow just caught a piece of it this year. The days are still fairly long, but we're losing about 7 minutes of daylight each day. Yesterday we started driving up the Elliot Hwy with intentions of checking out the bridge over the Yukon River, but 30 minutes into the drive we found ourselves in a heavy snow storm and decided to turn around and explore a little closer to home. We found the local ski resort and also a great spot to do some possible backcountry boarding. Seeing the snow build up on the slopes is getting me excited for the ski season! There are some trails just outside Fairbanks that draw quite a few x-country ski members from the US and Canadian Olympic Teams... They seem to be drawn to the early snow I suppose? Lucky us!! I've been running the trails quite a bit and am anxious to possibly ski next to some of these crazy people.
Last night, we saw a pretty decent display of the Northern Lights. They were mostly green in color and appeared as a series of overlapping arches over the city.