After a month spent on one of the greatest adventures of my life, I’m finally back in Norman. What is there even to say about my time in Fairbanks? It was a time I’ll never forget. Hopefully one day Elizabeth and I will bring our kids to Fairbanks, and we can take them to do all of the fun things that we did in the summer of 2024.
The last week and a half or so of my time turned into a real flurry. I’d thought I was busy when it was just me up there alone. When guests started to visit and THEN the weather turned absolutely Indian-summer beautiful, things jumped up several levels. And THEN, right when everyone left, the aurora jumped up to a new gear, so all of a sudden I was pulling all-nighters to view it.
The colors in an aurora are definitely never as vibrant in real life as they are on a camera. To me, those fainter green bands showed up as ghostly gray apparitions that danced across the sky above Elizabeth and me as we laid on a rock at the Parks Highway Monument. But when things got bright – like that last band above, taken around 4:00 am local time on a frozen morning near Goldstream Creek as dawn was beginning to break – it truly was just a brilliant, vibrant green. And the pillars showed off as fainter, softer colors that become brilliant purples and pinks on camera. All told, the aurora was an unbelievable experience and I’m so glad the weather cooperated for me to see it as much as I did the last week I was there.
Speaking of colors – the fall color change in Fairbanks was also magical. It proceeded in lovely stages – from the deep greens of summer when I arrived in mid-August to a hint of color in the trees days later to a full-blown yellow bonanza of birches and aspens on the day that I left.
And that doesn’t even get into what the colors looked like in the tundra spots. In Denali, entire valleys were carpeted by tundra grass and plants that turned brilliant reds in the lower elevations and equally chromatic yellows in the higher terrain. Take a look at this:
I won’t belabor the “Denali was amazing” thing too much because there will certainly be a blog post forthcoming about the park, but suffice it to say that I feel extremely lucky to have gotten to visit it twice. And that’s to say nothing of the wildlife we all got to see, as well as our glimpse of the big mountain itself!
The tundra grass didn’t just look amazing; in a lot of spots, it was edible. Take Murphy Dome, a mountain just northwest of Fairbanks. Even though it only rises a couple of thousand feet, the latitude plus the presence of a military installation on the peak means that you can pretty much drive straight to the top and walk on a short path onto tundra grass itself. This is a well-known spot among locals to go berry-picking, especially in early September. In other words, right when I was visiting.
Crowberries, lingonberries, bearberries – you can find all of those in abundance on Murphy Dome. But what the mountain is most famous for is the widespread presence of bog blueberries. They’re literally just blueberries growing in the ground. And you can pick them and eat them.
I went up there on my own, and then I took Michael up there, and then I took my family, and then I went on my own one final time. The last two times I was determined to pick enough blueberries to bring back and make an Alaskan Blueberry Cobbler in Oklahoma. Mission accomplished:
Picking for blueberries was just one of the many unique activities that Fairbanks had to offer. There was also panning for gold (both at a place you paid to do so and legit panning with Micahel on the Chatanika River), kayaking the Chena River, soaking at Chena Hot Springs:
And visiting a vodka distillery with Michael in Fairbanks.
It was a world-class opportunity to adventure, and I really tried to approach it from the mentality of saying yes to everything. Even if that included standing in a frozen river with Michael for hours while he built a dam to sluice water through, or it meant risking embarrassment with my coworker Jacob on the disc golf course:
So many times in life, we look for reasons to say no to things. I don’t view myself as antisocial, but I don’t necessarily go out of the way to do go the extra mile. But in Fairbanks, that was my goal. The result was exhausting, no doubt about it, but it was both personally and professionally rewarding to constantly commit to the adventure.
And as Elizabeth reminded me multiple times, the most important part of the trip was the professional aspect. It was a work trip first and foremost, after all. Perhaps the most exciting part of the trip was that it actually represented a temporary promotion for me. Here in Norman, I work at the NWS as a general forecaster. That’s pretty much all you *can* work as someone who’s been in the NWS for only two years – experience pays in this job. But in Fairbanks, due to the desperate shortage of people willing to do the job, someone with my experience level is eligible to be a lead forecaster. In Fairbanks, the job of a lead is much different than the job of a general forecaster, much less one from Norman. But there were still some great principles, skills, and lessons that I learned.
Surprising, a lot of the skills weren’t forecast-related. That’s not to say I didn’t sharpen my skills as a forecaster. It’s a lot more involved in Fairbanks than it is in Norman, and you have to be on your toes and have a strong knowledge of synoptic meteorology. But even beyond that, what I think will be the most lasting lesson/personal legacy from my trip was the role of leadership in the office. WFO Fairbanks is much closer to fully staffed than they’ve been in forever; they really aren’t far from my office at this point. But their general forecaster rotation is young; they have a disproportionately high number of forecasters who have been in the Weather Service for a year or less, or even as little as a month. So despite the fact that I was similar in age to them, I felt like I could provide some mentoring. In some cases, that mentoring was readily accepted. In others, the forecasters in question often seemed to think (with very, very good reason for feeling this way) that they knew more about what they were doing than me. Some wanted me to just stay out of the way, and others even wanted to mentor me.
It was fascinating and could have been a difficult situation, but I believed in handling it the way I handle everything: with a lot of energy and enthusiasm. It seemed like people responded well to that, and the shifts were open and engaging. The management at the office actually recommended me for a “time off” award (two free vacation days!), which is extremely gratifying and says a lot. Hopefully the esteem of the people I worked with is the most lasting legacy of my trip.
All in all, I don’t think the Meisters are moving up to Fairbanks anytime soon. But the great adventure I’d wanted delivered in every single way – and I learned a lot en route.
