Winter Solstice
It is 7:30 a.m. as I sit down to write this. Looking out the windows in our living
room it is still pitch black. I know that I still have at least two hours till
the sun comes over the mountains. I find myself looking forward to the 21st
of December like I looked forward to Christmas when I was a kid. The 21st is winter solstice
in the northern hemisphere.
Solstice in Alaska is the magical date when the minutes of
daylight start increasing each day.
I’ve never given it too much thought before, but up here it is a really
big deal.
The Alaska we fell in love with and dream about is green and
beautiful, with more hours of daylight than a human can handle. It is a place with
trails to hike, rushing rivers and streams full of salmon and mountains too big
to describe. That Alaska seems like such a distant memory that I have to remind
myself what it was like to keep my spirits strong. The Alaska of winter is mostly
black and white. It is still
amazingly beautiful, but in an Ansel Adams sort of way.
If my calculations are correct, by the 21st we
will have lost about 40 more minutes of morning light and another 40 minutes of
evening light. That should put
direct sunlight times somewhere around 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., give or take. That doesn’t mean it is completely dark
after those times. There is
twilight, the time right before the sun comes up and after it goes behind the
mountains. It doesn’t seem to get
“nighttime dark” until 4 to 5 p.m. Since the ground and trees are covered with
snow, there is a serious amount of reflected light all night long from the moon
and stars. However, when it is cloudy, it is seriously dark for long periods of
time each day!
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