Originally Posted by Missileer

Been there (Ft Greely and Bolio Lake) won't go back.

Alaska is the state I most want to visit. What made you dislike it, weather?

I was gonna ask the same. Is there any particular reason you disliked being stationed there?

Originally Posted by Marinerhodes

I was gonna ask the same. Is there any particular reason you disliked being stationed there?

I was there on business with the Army Cold Weather testing on IIR devices. I landed in Fairbanks and drove to Delta Junction. 100 miles of nothing and nobody except tundra and one humongous glacier. I'm a city boy, when I get into the country, I like to be able to hear or see something. There is a dead silence that seems to press against your eardrums. If you are a loner, you'll love it. There were stores still selling prospecting equipment. I was there in March and it was +20 deg F, a hot spell, the Inuits were in shirtsleeves. There was a damn moose in Fairbanks next to the street and he was bigger than my Chevelle.

Any time you stop, restaurant, hotel, bar, whatever, there is an extension cord on the front bumper of your car and posts with 110VAC in front of every building. This is your engine block heater so you can start your car later. Now that's not Winter where it hits -40 deg F. The highways are frozen so hard that you can drive 60 to 70 mph and not slide, even around corners or stopping quickly.

Snow blowers look like giant threshing machines and they run every night. Everyone has plastic/rubber mailboxes and they get pushed down by the blower and just pop back up. When the snowbanks get to about 10 feet high, a front end loader and dump truck is used to load the snow and haul it out to the tundra and dump it. Forget about digging a hole unless you build a fire out of telephone poles and let burn all night, then very quickly dig the holes for a foundation or fence before the permafrost refreezes.

That's the easy stuff that everyone is familiar with who live there. You can have it.

Funny

Well Missileer,

I'm a redneck country boy, so I think all of your reasons for disliking Alaska are attractions.

I came back to Texas a day early and the Engineer in charge of the program asked why I didn't stay and take in some sights. I told him the sights were all the same, snow and mountains in every direction except at Anchorage, that wasn't too bad. It's just that every day is one kind of struggle or another.

I guess its kinda like marmite, you love it or you hate it.

Well, I did notice that near Delta Junction, there were a few expensive log homes out in the wilds. There were also shacks that were from the 1800's still standing because nothing rots. The old timers built outdoor privys with the back of it hanging over a deep gorge and propped it up with long lodgepole pine logs. The waste would accumulate at the bottom but the problem is it became part of the landscape forever. Just think of hanging your butt over a 100 ft deep gorge with about 1 foot of the privy on the ground.

At the airport in Fairbanks, they have Alaskan animals stuffed and on display and with it a diorama of a typical settler's cabin with it's privy hanging over the side of a mountain. Very interesting problems to overcome.

Love it!

those are all great