It was, of course, a very good day for the gift shop. King Neptune showed up on deck to perform on-deck baptisms into the Arctic via a ladle of ice cold water. Instead of salvation he offered shots of Schnapps.
The next two hours were profoundly moving in another way. I had always assumed that because Norway remained neutral, the German occupation was relatively benign. So wrong! Clearly, neutrality meant little to the Germans. Today was a day of profound contrasts. We experienced excitement and new adventure, but also images of death and despair. We experienced the silly as well as the profound. We were overwhelmed by exhilarating beauty and evidence of mind numbing destruction. The best and the worst of humankind.
View all posts by kayjaybee Like Like. Your writing and observations provide such an incredible insight into both your travel and human kind. Like Liked by 1 person. You are commenting using your WordPress.
You are commenting using your Google account. Latitude refers to the invisible horizontal lines that circle the earth. Four special parallels of latitude mark a specific area on the planet that has a unique relationship with the sun. In addition, these four lines mark the geographic boundaries of the frigid and torrid zones, which were first coined by Greek philosopher Aristotle.
He stated these two zones were inhabitable because of the cold climate found in the frigid zone and the hot climate in the torrid zone. See Reference 1 and Resource 5. The Arctic Circle runs at 66 degrees 33 minutes north latitude, making it the northernmost special parallel of latitude. This event -- called polar night -- happens each year around December 21, and ranges from one day at the Arctic Circle, to six months at the North Pole.
This event also ranges from one day at the Arctic Circle, to six months at the North Pole, and generally occurs around June The Tropic of Cancer runs at 23 degrees 30 minutes north latitude and marks the northernmost area in which the sun passes directly overhead in its most vertical position at noon.
This event occurs during the summer solstice for the northern hemisphere, which is usually June 21 or The Tropic of Cancer also is the northern border for an area called the tropics. Because the sun consistently stays high in the sky year round, the tropics do not experience a range of seasonal climate changes. We think we have our magnificent areas here in the lower 48 in terms of mountains and valleys and scenic vistas. We found Alaska above and below the Arctic Circle to be all of that and many times more.
Here are some things we did not know before we went:. In fact, the largest one, Wrangell-St. Elias, covers 13, square miles. We visited a temperate rainforest in Ketchikan, where fire danger is always low, and forests in the inland national parks, where the fire danger was always high. We marveled at the seeming frozen power of glaciers and heard their crackings and poppings and boomings as they ground their way forward.
We even flew out to one, the Mead, near Skagway, and hiked around on it for a while in special spiked overboots. Glaciers are filthy with the debris of the ground they grind over. Glaciers are forces of nature that can only be experienced by being among them. Their power—and their vulnerability—leaves one grasping for superlatives.
More than forty percent of the people in Alaska live in one place—Anchorage. Another four or five percent live in Fairbanks. The rest are scattered, and we do mean scattered, throughout the vastness of the place. Go and be quiet. Go and listen. Go and soak in a place where only one-percent of the land is allowed to be in private hands.
Go to see something gone in our part of the nation. Go to respond to another Robert W. Service poem:. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. From the big, dizzy mountains that screen it To the deep, deathlike valleys below. The mountains were higher.
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