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I didn't think I'd be putting in back-to-back diary entries this year, but the weather here has gone so completely crazy I had to say something about it. Yesterday things were merely bad; today they're beyond absurd and heading for bizarre.

It's not as if we don't have strange weather up here from time to time, but usually mid-winter is a time of relative quiet and cold, at least in the areas away from the coastlines. We normally get our wild weather in the form of equinoctial storms in the fall or spring as the seasons change. The past few days have certainly become a record-setting exception to the rule. It's hard to figure where to start.

In Anchorage, temperatures went from below zero to the mid-40s in just a couple of days, accompanied by a foot of snow washed down by several inches of rain. The news reports showed an unending string of accidents as Alaska's largest city, with a quarter-million residents, slipped and slid to a near stop in the busiest shopping season of the year. And last night and today the winds came over the mountain from the southeast at hurricane velocity and then some, with gusts over 113 mph (180 kph) in the eastern suburbs and 110 mph (176 kph) in Eagle River, where I used to live--and this was before the anemometers broke at both reporting stations. A friend of mine in east Anchorage said it was like watching Twister with 3-D special effects as tree limbs and pieces of roofs flew by (no cows, though).

In Cordova, over on Prince William Sound, winds topped 130 mph (208 kph), and damage was reportedly extensive. In the Copper River Basin, temperatures got up to the 50s in a few places while the rain poured down. Whatever snow they may have had for the Copper Basin 300 weekend after next is now a slushy mess. Fairbanks set a record high today of 45 degrees, which had even the old-timers shaking their heads. The Kenai Peninsula was under a flood warning because the incredible flow of warm air from Hawaii was pushing the freezing level up to 5,000 feet, more than enough to start melting the very heavy snowpack in the mountains, which could combine with torrential rains to put streams over their banks.

Here in the upper Susitna Valley, we went from 25 below zero late last week to above freezing Monday, almost a 60-degree temperature jump. After Monday and Tuesday's snow dump, the rain started last night and has continued virtually without letup, sometimes heavily. We've probably had two inches (5 cm) or more of rain, all on top of two and a half feet (75 cm) of snow. The snow soaked up the rain for awhile, but eventually the water started accumulating underneath the snow, on top of the frozen ground, which of course is impermeable. We're now under a small-stream flood warning as the rainfall and melting snow begins to run off. We've still got lots of snow, maybe two feet, but it's all slush underneath, and this will have to refreeze before things get back to normal.

The roads are sheets of ice with water on top and the main highway from Anchorage to Fairbanks (which I have to use just to go to the store) has been closed off and on all day. There are enough vehicles in the ditch to start several used car dealerships and even some of the big state snowplows have had trouble keeping the shiny side up. Thousands of people in the Mat-Su borough have been without power at various times due to ice-laden branches and trees falling onto power lines (helped along by the wind, which gusted to 30 mph all night). Some people haven't had lights since last night unless they have generators.

To top it all off, this morning an Alaska Railroad train carrying jet fuel from the refinery in Fairbanks to Anchorage International Airport derailed at Gold Creek, 36 miles north of Talkeetna. So far, the best estimate is that more than 100,000 gallons (400,000 liters) have spilled and the stuff is chest deep in places. The cleanup is going to be a nightmare because of the deep new snow and rain, plus the fact that the only way in or out is on the tracks--Gold Creek is where we fly the mail from Hudson's every Tuesday because there aren't any roads. In fact, cleanup crews don't expect to get to the site until tomorrow, partly because some of their equipment went in the ditch on the icy highway trying to drive up from Anchorage to Talkeetna. The wreck is a quarter-mile from the Susitna River, but there's going to be plenty of contamination by springtime even if they do a good job.

Closer to home, my dog lot is an unmitigated disaster. Parts of it have standing water and slush a foot deep and some of the dogs are huddling on top of their houses. I had to dig out my rubber breakup boots so I could stomp through the mess. Barrie and I moved as many of the houses as we could to higher parts of the lot, but some of them are still frozen to the ground. The dogs aren't very happy about it, but the warm temperatures are keeping things bearable. Some of them are actually sleeping out in the open in the rain. Their heavy winter coats are pretty much waterproof and all they have to do is shake themselves off once in awhile.

Tomorrow we're going to have to dig out some plywood and make new houses to replace the ones we can't salvage. There's no point in even thinking about running until it gets cold again and everything refreezes, which will probably be sometime next week. Just feeding the dogs right now takes three times as long as normal, and we don't have any trails at all--even the snowmachiners are holding off until they're sure they won't go swimming. I'm also thinking about going up to the local hardware store and getting a truckload of shipping pallets. I had some of the houses on them last year to keep them off the ground and they worked fine, but many of them got broken up over the summer.

As bad as it all sounds, this is just another small price to pay for living in Alaska. We've worked our rear ends off in the past two days trying to dig out and keep everything going, but it will all smooth out in a few days. This, too, shall pass, just like the bad stretches on the trail to Nome. Indeed, the rain has already stopped and it's lightly snowing again. The temperature is down to 28 F (-3 C) and dropping quickly, and we're supposed to be below zero (-18 C) again by the weekend. I have to look on the bright side--this will be the last time we'll have to go through this in this millennium, and the trails we're going to get out of this will be first-rate all the way into April.

Anyway, I apologize for not having any pictures of all of this, but it's hard to show what a mess it is, and I've been a bit busy. So, I've scanned in a few slides from previous Iditarods for your viewing enjoyment. By the way, I've added another page to the Iditarod Photo Album--some shots of Joe Redington Sr. I took in past years.

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