Thursday, April 3, 2008 at 12:39PM 
Photo by Andrew Stark
King’s Throne in Kluane National Park, with the Kathleen River Bridge in the foreground, in early spring two years ago. This is my current desk top photo.
Monday, February 11, 2008 at 12:01PM 
Bill Pinkham, Veteran
Glenwood Springs, Colorado
Photo: Carol Falcetta
One of the reasons I chose a dog theme for this month is that February is when the toughest dog sled race in the world, the Yukon Quest, takes place. This year, the Yukon Quest runs from Fairbanks to Whitehorse, a thousand miles along “historic Gold Rush and Mail Delivery dog sled routes from the turn of the 20th Century” at a time when
weather conditions can be the coldest and sometimes the most unpredictable of the year. The Yukon Quest race starts on schedule regardless of weather and lasts from 10 to 16 days until the final dog team arrives at the Finish Line, depending on weather and trail conditions.
The race began this past Saturday with twenty-four dog teams. Already two of the twenty-four teams are out of the race. One was withdrawn by officials “for failing to provide the dog care expected of a Yukon Quest participant”; and the other, Whitehorse’s own Frank Turner, a race veteran who has run 24 out of the 25 Yukon Quest races, dropped out because of the race’s physical demands on his aging body. Turner, who is 60, said,
it has been getting increasingly difficult each year to cope with the race’s physical demands. “It’s just not me anymore.”
He would not rule out running again next year, but said his wife “should divorce me if I run again.”
For more information on The Yukon Quest, visit the Yukon Quest website.
Thursday, January 17, 2008 at 8:14PM 
When I was a child I read a novel that mentioned a year in the 1800s when there was no summer. I read a book a day at that time and they all blend together, so don’t expect me to remember a title. What I’ve never forgotten, however, is that there really was a year without summer.
I imagined a year with snow cover all year round, when people ice skated on frozen lakes in July. It wasn’t quite like that, but 1816 was an unusual weather year. There was a snowstorm that dumped 4 inches of snow in New England in the middle of June, and there was frost overnight for several days in a row in both July and August. In between those extraordinary occurrences, there was normal summer weather, but the frosts caused crop failure in the northeastern US and eastern Canada.
In Europe, there was nearly constant cold and wet, with crop failures there, too. In Ireland, it rained for 142 days in the summer, causing a famine. There was no grape harvest in France and no grain harvest in Germany.
Historians blame the eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia the year before, the biggest eruption in recorded history. All those ash particles in the atmosphere of the northern hemisphere were bound to cause significant changes in the weather.
Not every result bad. There were brilliantly colourful sunrises and sunsets, which some say inspired the intense glowing depictions of the sun on the horizon in the paintings of the British impressionist painter J. M. W. Turner. You see an example in Turner’s painting of Flint Castle above, and another in one of his nautical paintings, The Fighting Téméraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up.
According to oral tradition, we had a year with no summer here in the Yukon, too, and people starved. In the 1970s, Yukon elder Rachel Dawson reported that it occurred over one hundred years before her time. Here’s how she decribes it.
Two winters joined together. No snow, but there was ice all over, and the winters were joined together.
There are variations to the story, and it’s impossible to pin down exactly when it was. Perhaps it was 1816, when the Tambora volcano wreaked widespread havoc, or maybe it was either 1845, 1849, or 1850, when tree ring measurement shows very little growth.
But it all goes to show that in the weather realm, strange things can happen anywhere any time.
What I’m waiting for is the year with no winter. Of course, we’d chalk that up to global warming/climate change.
