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By Root 243 0

in. We stored our boats and explored the land instead of the sea. I was more adept as a skier than John, and I wasn’t afraid of the cold. I learned quickly how to dress for a ski trip: Wear far less than what seemed rationally appropriate. In cold temperatures, sweat can be dangerous. Once wet, your body can lose heat rapidly. I wasn’t afraid of getting lost, either; beyond the familiar scattering of houses, the land creased into shallow valleys holding creeks that all ran, faster or slower, toward the same narrow river, and soon after to the sea. There were no tiderips to plan around, no clues in the surface of the sea to pick up on. By midwinter, the topography behind our place was etched in my brain: Twitter Creek ran by Lookout Mountain; Beaver Creek Flats would take you to the North Fork of the Anchor; Crossman Ridge humped up between our place and Ohlson Mountain.

As friends and family back East repeatedly asked me how I was handling the long winter, I realized I had become sensitive to the subtleties of the season: the acute angle of light, the way fresh animal tracks in the snow dulled during the days after they were laid, the red hue cast by thick stands of leafless alders. Summer was why people came here, but winter was why many of us stayed.

But lately, you couldn’t count on winter. Friends who had lived in Alaska for years lamented the recent whimsy of winter. You couldn’t depend on there being good snow anymore, they complained. That winter, Iditarod dog mushers were forced to cross fifty miles of bare ground—their sleds bounced over tussocks and brush in an area usually blanketed by snow. The previous winter, racers worried that the unusually warm winter temperatures—in the upper thirties—would overheat and dehydrate their dogs. Frequent news reports suggested that the typical deep freeze of Alaska’s winters was no longer a sure thing. On Alaska’s Arctic oil fields, winter freeze-up allowed massive machinery to travel off the network of gravel roads that linked the scattered drill pads and processing facilities. But this season of ice roads was getting shorter, threatening the slow-growing tundra beneath the heavy equipment. Each winter, the tiny, half-Native Interior village of Nenana held a competition in which people all over the world guessed when the village’s river would break up. The jackpot of about $300,000 was shared by those who guessed the right date, hour, and minute. The river was now breaking up, on average, five and a half days earlier than it had in 1917, when the contest was initiated by railroad workers itching for spring. Late winters and early springs made travel more difficult and even deadly in the Bush: Snowmachines and trucks sometimes crashed through thin ice in places where villagers had once been able to rely upon safe passage. Warming temperatures were unraveling winter’s fabric.

ON OUR SKIS, we continued downstream beyond where the creek joined another. There was no one around but the old zipperlike tracks of snowmachines fading in the creek bottom. From time to time they’d highmark their machines, driving up steep sides of the drainage in dare-devil loops. In the backcountry, these routes could kill snowmachiners because they triggered avalanches. Up ahead, a series of beaver dams hemmed ice-covered pools. The pools drained into a reservoir that held the town’s drinking water.

I stopped on my skis when I spotted a caddisfly crawling across the snow. These half inch-long insects wear wings tented above their brown bodies. The sight of this fragile creature crawling across the wide expanse of snow was a reminder that spring, eventually, would come. As larvae, caddisflies live in cold and swift-running creeks, wearing elaborate homes they’ve pieced together out of twigs and pebbles. They spin nets to catch food, and when they’re fully grown, the larvae close themselves in their houses and begin the first stages of metamorphosis. In early spring, the insects crawl out of the water, and step out of their old skins wearing new wings. Then they mate, lay eggs, and die. Would this