This is the 3rd time I've been a volunteer at Toolik, a biology research station on the North Slope of Alaska. Toolik is a day's van ride north of Fairbanks, north of the Brooks Range, a mile off the haul road. Water flows north to the Arctic Ocean.
The main event was a pluck, lab work. I didn't get any pictures. We were splitting chunks of tundra into piles by species and splitting some species into parts (leaves, stems, rhizomes, old leaves, new leaves...).
After Toolik, Joanne and I turned into tourists. We spent a day in Fairbanks, took the train to Denali, spent a day around the tourist end of the park and 3 nights at Kantishna Roadhouse out near Mirror Lake. Then we took the train to Anchorage and spent 3 days there.
(The name Denali is ambigious. It refers to both the train station near the park visitor center and also to the tallest peak in North America, the namesake of the park, 75 miles west of the train station. I'll use Mt McKinley, the old name for the mountain, in order to reduce confusion.)
Toolik
Faribanks, Museum of the North
Train to Denali
Denali
Kantishna
Anchorage
