Note from Agate: With this story contributed by Sara de Sobrino, Agate kicks off an occasional series featuring the voices of young people from the Great Lakes Region whose work in conservation, natural resources or environmental science has taken them far afield.
This spring I arrived in the arctic for my second time working as a summer science support technician at Toolik Field Station, a research station in arctic Alaska that’s nine hours north from Fairbanks, and hours away from the nearest town. It’s situated on Toolik Lake, from which it gets its name, and is in view of the mountains of the Brooks Range. It operates year round, and during the summer population peaks there can be over 100 people working there. Most of those people are visiting students and researchers studying things like arctic plants, streams, and soil, but there’s also a slew of staff that enables arctic research to be conducted in the first place by keeping the generators running, flat tires patched, packages shipped, and sewage pumped so that we may all live in relative luxury. I would be remiss not to mention everyone’s favorite part of life at Toolik, which has nothing to do with the spectacular, remote wilderness surrounding us and everything to do with the delicious food that the Toolik chefs prepare every day. My job, not nearly so important, entails collecting baseline environmental data, on things like plant phenology, permafrost thaw depth, and precipitation, maintaining resources and equipment for researchers, and providing them with field assistance. That can either involve completing their research protocols for them when they’re unable to be in the arctic themselves, or lending a hand on their team for a day or two.
I arrived in May just as spring was beginning in earnest, when the melting snow trickled noisily down and rushed underneath the hoarfrost layer, forming little water tracks under the snow and braiding along the driveway into camp. The plowed driveway was the only place we could walk without snowshoes, as the warming temperatures drove the snow to softening and slumping all around, every step punching through up to our hips where before it was firm and could hold our weight. Clumps of soft snow knocked off the ground surface revealed the green leaves of cottongrass underneath, with flowers already beginning to form. The growing season here is so short that many plant species are ready to take advantage of available sunlight the second that the snow melts.
And the birds! Migrants from all over the world flew through and stopped to rest on their way to the bounty of summer breeding grounds on the arctic coast. Every roadside pond and pool was full to the brim with birds—delicate shorebirds I didn’t have a hope of identifying pecking along the shore, swimming Northern Pintails and Mallards, and gaggles of Snow Geese and White-Fronted Geese all adding to the gleeful noise of springtime. Roadside here refers almost exclusively to the ditches of the mostly-dirt Dalton Highway, the lone road north that exists to service the oil fields in Prudhoe Bay. We join the industrial traffic along it when traveling to sites away from the immediate bounds of Toolik Field Station, and I almost always bring a pair of binoculars so that we can pull over to the side of the road when we see something. The unglamorous reality of most of my wildlife sightings in the arctic is that they occur over the ubiquitous rumble of an idling diesel engine, and at any point you’re liable to be sprayed with dust from a passing semi truck. In a perverse cycle, most of the carcasses that I see birds feeding from are roadkill.
Shortly after all the migrating birds arrived this spring we were hit with a calamitous cold period. The snow stopped melting and the smaller ponds refroze, driving all the birds to crowd into the larger ponds and hunt hopefully for scarce food when the smaller pools iced over. Sparrows were found dead in the tundra, starved to death after traveling thousands of miles to reach a spring that hadn’t yet come.
Caribou migrate through the Toolik region in the spring, too, on their way to the north where coastal breezes offer some respite from the relentless mosquitos. They were scruffy and a little mangy looking, their fur attached in clumps from the process of shedding their winter coats. Sometimes they moved gracefully over the landscape, and other times they bolted clumsily and got stuck in mud or snow after seeing us. They were all leggy, but the colts were especially awkward, and the protruding tussocks and mossy mires of the tundra are not the most forgiving ground upon which to learn to walk.
Ice on the lake was a meter and a half deep, and didn’t fully melt out until the first few days of June. It started with the flowing of the inlet stream to the lake a few weeks earlier—a trickle visible flowing on top before the full thing broke up, gushing through. In the beginning the water was dark brown and ran high up on the banks over anchor ice still remaining in the stream bed. The streambanks calved snowy bergs that rode the flow and crashed against the shore and the water was quite literally ice cold. Eventually, the inlet ate away at the lake ice, and a moat formed all around the lake. Rain, wind, and sun helped to break up the lake ice until only patches remained, and then eventually those melted, too.
Now, in August, it is certainly still summer—the hills are obviously and unmistakably green, but there are hints of fall color wherever you look closely. The blueberry plants are blushing purple, and branches of willow are flagging yellow in patches. Dwarf birch, the diminutive cousin of the tall birch we know in Minnesota, has little fingernail sized leaves with crenulated margins that turn orange and yellow in the fall. It starts from the margins in many plants—the edges of leaves rusting, dark red margins spreading into the green of the leaf. I walk out to nearby vegetation plots at least twice a week with a clipboard to note the phenological stages of a few key plant species, and now I’m mostly looking to record the date for fall senescence. Although there are no trees in the tundra, the fall colors are impressive nonetheless. The other day I saw my first properly bright, crimson bearberry plant—not just the darkening of a leaf, but the full brightening into fall regalia.
And as the plants prepare for fall, the berries are ripening. The most prolific species we have here is the low-growing bog blueberry. Tart lingonberry, too, and many lingonberries persist through the winter to stain our knees red when we kneel on the damp ground come spring. The winter freeze sweetens them and although they’re soft and collapsed in the spring, that’s when they taste the best to me. Bearberries are the largest berries, but unfortunately I don’t like them very much—they’re bitter and astringent. Cloudberries, like orange raspberries growing erect and sun-up from a stalk, are a controversial pick. Some people think they taste like socks, and there is an undeniably savory note when they’re fully ripe so most people prefer them just a touch beforehand, when they’re a bit tart.
Mushrooms show up this time of year, too, brought to the surface by August rains. They’re mostly brown boletes, or tiny orange toadstools. The tundra floor, especially in drier patches, is carpeted by different lichens that form a miniature forest. The other day I saw a newly-emerged patch of fairy barf lichen, a gray crustose mass dotted with soft pink fruiting bodies. Caribou lichen is sculptured like coral, and provides critical forage for caribou.
I get off the gravel pad of camp every day to walk through the tundra, but I find that without the focusing lens of a datasheet to record on or the expectation of writing in Toolik’s public-facing Naturalist Journal that evening I’m not always very observant. I can easily go about my job for several hours with one earbud piping music in and my eyes focused on a task at hand, and fail to come up with any observations of the natural splendor around me besides whether I was too hot, cold, or wet.
Late August is the rainy season here, and as the temperatures continue to drop the rain will begin falling as snow. Low temperatures signal the end of mosquito season, which is what we’re all really counting down to. And it will start getting dark again, too, which as someone who had never experienced the 24 hours of summer sunlight in the arctic seemed like a crazy thing to look forward to— isn’t the worst part of fall that it starts getting dark earlier? But after the constant exposure of the midnight sun, the darkness seems comforting and exhilarating all at the same time. We’ve gone from golden hour sunlight at midnight during high summer, to dusky, twilight sunsets that last for hours, and soon will have the true setting of the sun in the evening, giving us the first natural darkness we’ve seen in months. And when the sky is dark and clear of clouds, the aurora is visible. Dancing bands of green light fill the sky, and move slowly against the glow of the Milky Way. It’s a nice end to the long, long day of arctic summer.
About the author
Sara de Sobrino grew up in Scandia, MN, went on to study ecology at the University of Minnesota—Twin Cities, and now finds herself working somewhere with even more mosquitoes. She is among the contributors to the Toolik Field Station Naturalist Journal.
