No more ice on the rivers

Record high temperatures! After weeks of rather cool spring (where the April felt more like March most years), suddenly we are breaking temperature records on the hot side.
This is definitely not typical Fairbanks May weather:

Things are melting super fast.

Yesterday all that was left of the polar bear sculpted out of ice that was standing by the university entrance were a few pieces of ice. Candle ice - you touch it and it falls apart into long thin needles.




Chunks of ice floating down the Chena by Alaskaland. High water.


We stopped at Alaskaland to look at Inari's drawings in the Bear gallery, including a drawing of a stuffed cat that Sonja had with her during a trip to Mary's cabin in January. Sonja had during that trip sat the kitty down on the hot stove. To warm up. Poor kitty. Its leg had a burn from the hot stove. Inari drew in that detail too when she sketched the kitty later that evening. Inari had also an opening today at the Well St gallery - I dragged the kids there, but Sonja would not go into the room where Inari's paintings were. She was pulling on me as hard as she could to keep me away too.

After the two galleries (two minutes per gallery), we went to a playground. Coming back to the car, things look green!


Then I thought may be we should go look at the ice on the Tanana before it goes out. So we went. To find out that it had already gone out on the main river, though not so much on a side slough. We went to the beach from where we went skiing and dogsledding a month ago. Open water. Other kids. One of them, a girl in a swimsuit, jumped into the water a few times. Brrrr. It ends up we know the parents - her mom went skiing today probably the one last time at Birch hill, while the daughter goes into the river the first day it's open... (though I don't think it's open at Nenana, I don't think the tripod went out yet - I stand corrected, the headline on the Nenana Ice Clasic website is that "The Ice Went Out 8:41 P.M. May 1, 2009")




Big chunk of ice. The kids were trying to get Jose to jump onto it. See the mosquito in the upper right? The bugs are out, in full force. At least they are still the big slow ones, not the small fast ones.

Sonja did not want to leave:

Nor did she want to talk to Martin, who called while we were there at the beach. When I asked her this evening in bed why, she said that she was busy when he called. (Busy playing in the mud.)

Long day today, we still had to take a very quick bath to get sand out of all the crevices that it can fall into...

And for Martin, who is travelling, one more picture of the girls yesterday in our driveway: