When people talk about it is a dry year in the Fairbanks area, it is important to remember, this is all relative. Fairbanks gets less precipitation a year than does Tucson Arizona, so every year is dry for both places, LOL. The heat is what makes the difference. Fairbanks is classified as a subarctic climate and could be labeled as a northern desert with the little amount of precipitation they receive. But at Tony mentioned, with the underlying permafrost of the Interior of Alaska, any moisture received, tends to stick around. Water can't get through the layer of permafrost so it just sits around on top of it, and with the muskeg vegetation on top, which is an excellent insulation, you end up with lots of lakes and swamp like areas. Sometimes the permafrost starts a few inches below the ground surface and sometimes several feet, it can be a layer a few feet thick or it can be hundreds of feet thick. Once the insulation is scraped off to build a road or to build a building, it starts the frost to melt and most has the consistency of a bowl of jello. To build on it successfully, you have to keep the frost frozen, and that is not easy or cheap to do. You put insulation down before you pave or put in freeze piling to support the building. The freeze piling work in the same manner as do most of our RV refrigerators, by absorption and don't require electricity to operate, like running on propane in our rigs.
There is a very interesting permafrost tunnel in the Fairbanks area, run jointly by the U of A, Fairbanks and the US Army. I have been able to tour it a few times but don't remember who I had to talk into letting me go in it. A large railroad sized tunnel, going back into a hill side several hundred feet with all sorts of insulated doors to keep out the heat of summer. It has one of the foulest smells, of any place I can remember but very interesting if you can get access to it.
A lot of verbiage to say, even if it doesn't rain the normal amount in the summer time, there is still plenty of moisture in the muskeg/tundra/brush to raise large crops of bugs. The bugs, mosquitoes, no see ums, gnats, white sox, horse flys, etc. are a staple food of all the migratory birds that come to the north each summer to lay their eggs and raise their chicks. So they, the bugs, do serve a useful purpose, but at times, I do wonder, when being devoured by them.
Again it is all about location, stay on gravel, in the breeze, in towns, on thawed soil, out of the trees and you can keep to bug population to a manageable number. But what fun is that to go back home to the lower 48 and not have any good mosquito stories to tell. The Denali highway is often a great source for bug stories or anywhere out in the tundra vegetation.
joe b.
Stuart Florida
Formerly of Colorado and Alaska
2016 Fleetwood Flair 31 B Class A w/bunks
www.picturetrail.com/jbpacooper
Alaska-Colorado and other Trips posted
"Without challenge, adventure is impossible".
