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As spring approaches, ushering in longer days and more sunshine, Alaska’s famed auroras will become less frequent. However, this doesn’t mean the skies are devoid of fascinating phenomena.
Experts have offered insights into recent unusual sightings in the sky. While these aren’t the typical displays seen in the Last Frontier, they’re intriguing nonetheless.
Alaska Man rating: 5 out of 5 for spectacular meteor explosions.
Meanwhile, the annual Iditarod race is in full swing. This year, a rookie musher had an unexpected encounter with an aggressive bison along the trail. In a stroke of ingenuity, she devised a clever strategy to navigate the situation and continue her journey safely.
The fireball — which streaked across the sky at around 7:32 a.m. — was also caught on camera.
Brian Collyard was driving to work when the flash of light caught his attention on the left side of his vehicle.
He initially thought it was an oncoming car with its high beams on.
“There was literally — what I would say — hundreds to 1,000 different light trails that came off this thing,” Collyard described. “It was absolutely phenomenal.
“It was the biggest explosive meteor I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’ll never forget it.”
Collyard said the flash illuminated the hillside north of Fairbanks, lighting up trees and an open snow-covered field. He described the aftermath as a descending display of individual light trails that lasted for an extended period.
Here’s what the high-forehead folks think that was:
Aaron Slonecker, director of the Planetarium and Discovery Center at the Anchorage Museum, said the event qualifies as a fireball.
“[A] meteor is a piece of rock that’s moving through the Earth’s atmosphere,” Slonecker said. “And we call it a fireball when it gets really bright and kind of fiery like that.”
Slonecker said rocks traveling through the atmosphere at speeds ranging from 25,000 to 160,000 mph generate friction with the air that causes them to heat up, disintegrate, and produce bright light.
Not exactly the usual lights in the sky we see here in the Great Land, but interesting all the same.
Alaska Man score: 5 exploding meteors.
Then there’s this: This year’s Iditarod is ongoing, and one of the rookie mushers encountered an aggressive bison on the trail. Fortunately, she found a novel way to make it back down.
When the pistol in 48-year-old Fairbanks rookie Jody Potts-Joseph’s hands refused to fire at the wild bison her dog team encountered on the Iditarod trail, she remembered the story her grandmother told her years ago.
It was those words that helped drive away the large animal from the spot on the trail where the dog team ran up on it.
Potts-Joseph, who is from Fairbanks but runs her kennel out of Eagle Village near the Canadian border, left the Rohn checkpoint at 3:35 p.m. Tuesday running near the back of the field.
There’s a lesson here: Before heading out into the bush, make sure your sidearm is in good working order. Especially if you might encounter a big, aggressive critter, which we have plenty of here in the Great Land.
“I got into a standoff and all I had is — my Glock wouldn’t fire,” she recounted in a cell phone video she took minutes after the encounter. “It was charging me … and it kept charging but it wouldn’t actually touch my dogs, but it was head down, pawing, and it would charge and then would stop. It did that three or four times.
With her pistol clicking but not firing, Potts-Joseph said she had to make a quick choice.
Grandparents are great. They lived a long time and have lots to share. But this?
It was then that she remembered a story her grandmother told years ago when they encountered a bear in the Alaska wilderness. Her grandmother began speaking her Native tongue, talking to the bear in the words from the Hän Gwich’in people.
“[It] means, ‘Go away, have mercy on us, leave us alone,’” Potts-Joseph explained. “And that bear just calmed down and turned around and walked off.”
Tuesday afternoon on the trail, Potts-Joseph repeated those same words.
“That was my last resort,” she said. “I said that, and the buffalo turned around and ran up that hill.
“That’s what they say, that animals can understand our Native language, and we didn’t get hurt.”
Well, you can’t argue with the notion that she wasn’t hurt, her dogs weren’t hurt, and the bison wasn’t hurt. But as far as it understanding the native language? Well, there are a lot of native languages spoken in Alaska. How do the bison, bears, and so on learn all of them? Look, I love and admire that people are keeping this vast land’s Native traditions and languages alive, but if I’m facing a bison or a bear, I’ll rely on a well-functioning firearm. But even so:
Alaska Man Score: 5 moose nuggets, as all’s well that ends well, and nobody was hurt.
Now, I’ll spread some of my worries around by sharing them.
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