I went out at today about 1:00pm to take a look the washed out section of road towards Point Barrow. This is looking northeast along the coast in the same area where the road was washed out near the end of October just past the "Road Closed" sign. The buildings in the distance are referred to as "duck camp". On the far side of the buildings is the baleen palm tree that I had photographed before. The ice has a nice blue tint which is difficult to see in this picture. No direct sunlight in spite of it being after local sunrise.
This is looking towards the
DEW Line site which also houses some NOAA labs doing atmospheric monitoring. The flat foreground is not water but an old military runway which serviced the NARL facility back in the cold war days. Words that come to my mind when looking out over the tundra are flat, isolated, windswept, cold...
I must be easily thrilled. This capture from a webpage shows that IPv6 is up and running in Barrow. For any not aware of what I'm talking about, IPv6 is the next generation Internet protocol that replaces IPv4, the protocol that the Internet runs on. Over the years I have taught workshops on this topic and I have been trying to get the University to turn on IPv6 system wide. Getting it turned up in Barrow is a start. Getting IPv6 running up here was not my primary reason for coming up but it's a nice addition.
I just checked the Barrow webcam! Nice snowfall!
ReplyDeleteHer's another webcam to look at during the day. It's on top of the BARC facility and there are four cameras connected to one camera server. One camera pointed in each direction.
DeleteIt's not really a public webcam as there is insufficient CPU within the server to maintain a bunch of connections...
DeleteThose are really dark images, but I see snowfall!
ReplyDeleteThere aren't any lights up on the roof and you don't get a view of the parking lot. The cameras are only about 8' above the roof deck and are mostly used as verification that the network is working. Local sunrise is at 12:17 and sunset is at 2:08. Any other time will be kind of dark. It did snow for a bit last night but it has tapered off now.
DeleteDesolate is the word that comes to mind when I see those pics Richard....the urge to ride there comes next, though there are no roads to that location. Pity.
ReplyDeleteAs to IPv6, I wonder if it'll be deployed generally before I decide to hang up my networking mantle and do something else.
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Desolate seems to fit, until you look west and see the streetlights of Barrow. A colleague who used to live up here said that very few things look better than seeing the streetlights when your coming back to town. He and his brother would go hundreds of miles out to go hunting on snow machines. And when it was blowing snow, you would just be following the GPS arrow back...
DeleteI think IPv6 is finally starting to catch on in this country now that APNIC and RIPE are on their final /8. Soon there will be even larger groups of potential eyeball networks running native IPv6 and double NAT'ed IPv4. When I looked at my connections, everything Google was IPv6 including this blog...
I think you described the tundra very well.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoy all the pictures you post from Barrow. Someplace I'll never visit so it is cool to see it through your eyes.
You never know where you'll end up. I never thought that I would get to see Barrow either. It really is beautiful out on the tundra in the summer.
DeleteDesolate maybe ... but you've captured its own special beauty. Winter is a price you have to pay for summer, it's just a bit more expensive in Alaska.
ReplyDeleteThere are quite a few folks up here who really enjoy the challenges of winter and summer is something that is endured. For example, those that run dogs.
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