Day-by-day look at Alaska

We met Ken, Mary and Dan at the Ice Museum, where we saw a movie about the ice carving contest that is held in Fairbanks every March. We walked through 20-degree coolers and saw eskimos, sled dogs, mining cabins, trees and all kinds of things carved out of ice, much bigger sculptures than I would have guessed. Vic was bundled up in his many layers of clothing, plus his winter coat. Ken walked through in a short-sleeved shirt, shorts and sandals. Two chainsaw artists did a demonstration of ice carving techniques, right down to a final blast from a hair dryer to melt the surface and give the sculptures a nice sheen.

Mary and Dan went shopping to complete his new wardrobe for his first winter in the arctic. He'll be staying all winter in Galeena, a small village that is accessible only by plane. Ken, Vic and I toured the University of Alaska Museum of the North where we saw, among many other things, Babe the blue steppe bison.

The frozen carcass of this ancestor of today’s plains and woods bison was found in remarkably good shape by miners who were blasting a slope with high-pressure hoses to extract minerals. The skin of the steppe bison turned blue shortly after it was unearthed because of a reaction of several minerals on the skin with the air.

The 38,000-year-old steppe bison had been preserved in the permafrost and was pretty much intact.

Paleo-forensic studies indicated that the bison had been killed by American lions, a huge ancestor of African lions. They used to live in Southern California, too, but died out here around 12,000 years ago.

Ken's thesis advisor was the scientist who did most of the research on the steppe bison carcass. Ken told us that the guy even ate a piece of this bison, now extinct, to see what it tasted like. The 38,000 years of freezer burn had pretty much rendered it inedible. I can't imagine even trying to eat something like that.

We next went to the botanical garden at the university where they are experimenting to see what varieties of plants can be grown in this climate. It gets down to minus 60 degrees in Fairbanks, and yet there were all kinds of things growing there, including a hardy variety of tea rose and apple trees from Siberia. They are experimenting with peonies, which bloom a couple of months later in Alaska than they do in the eastern U.S. and in Holland. They hope to develop varieties for the cut flower industry that are available when peonies from Holland are not in order to create a new industry for Alaska.