Ice, Ice, Baby

Everything is frozen!!  The streets, trees, sidewalks, driveway, and everything else you can imagine.  The picture above is on a road we took during one of our adventures this week.  You can see that the road is still snow covered.  Actually, it's ice covered.  Road management in Alaska after a snowfall is as follows;  plow as much as you can and sand the roads.  What ends up happening is that the snow on the roads melt during the day and freezes up again during the night.  Hence ice on the roads.  But everyone here seem to be used to this concept and drive accordingly.  A lot of people have steel cleats on the bottom of their shoes so they don't slip in a store's parking lot or on their driveway.  There is absolutely no salt used ANYWHERE.  Can you imagine if they did this in Chicago?  There would be wrecks all over the place and people suing businesses left and right!

This was waiting for us at the end of the road.  Super creepy!

Everything being covered in ice means that the lakes in the area are frozen!  This gives us an excellent wide open area for Zeph's favorite activity, fetch.  The above picture shows Ryan and Zeph walking on Sport Lake.  Yes, this means that there is a truck parked on the lake!  The red tent is actually a shelter used for ice fishing.  Sport Lake had sharp icy chunks on the surface so we went over to a smaller lake, called Loon Lake.

While out on the middle of the lake, Ryan and I heard a "BOOM" and felt vibrations under our feet.  We gave each other a look and did a fast walk/run back toward our car.  On our way we realized that the ice was not caving in so we stopped to check it out.  We decided the noise and vibrations was the ice splitting.

When we were at Ryan's parents' over the holidays I saw that Ryan's mom, Laurie, had pictures from her visit here beautifully framed.  I realized that I had forgotten how lush and green it is here in the summer.  Here's a comparison of how it looks now and what it looked like in July (same bend but down by the river).