When I was drinking a coffee with a friend to the taxi driver in the same vintage last week, he said about my occupation: “It’s the best job in Alaska.”
After a few seconds of reflection, I nodded.
It has been 11,000 days since October 25, 1994. It was at this point that I wrote my first story, a play on the theme of Halloween on the little brown bats, for the scientific forum of the scientific ‘Alaska.
The Science Forum is a weekly story that we have sent here to the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute in the Alaska media and 358 subscribers per email every week. Created in the late 1940s, the geophysical institute is a place where a few dozen researchers study the Aurora, earthquakes, permafrost, glaciers, atmosphere, snow, coastal erosion, ice sea and other northern phenomena.
The sweet sale of public relations known as the Alaska scientific forum is prior to my long -term arrival. In 1976, the researcher of the Geophysical Institute, Neil Davis – who among his many other achievements helped the poker flat research of the boreal forest north of Fairbanks – sat and listened to the teacher of History of the UAF Claus-M. Naske. Naske spoke of a “growing gap between progress in science and what the public knew about science,” wrote my predecessor Carla Helfferich.
Davis typed the first story of the Alaska Science Forum – on the viability of Fairbanks’s expansion to the south through the Tanana river – in February 1976. The publishers of Fairbanks Daily News -Mineur published it, As they have done every Sunday in the past 49 years.
When I finished seasonal work as a forest ranger in the fall of 1994, I responded to an advertisement in this same newspaper for the work I have today.
I replaced Helfferich retired, whose pieces made me feel smarter for reading them. She had taken over the writing of the weekly piece of Sue Ann Bowling. The bowling alley was a meteorologist and one of the first scientific women of the Geophysical Institute.
For most of the unique existence of the Alaska Sciences Forum, the directors of the Institute (currently Bob McCoy) have placed the bill to pay the writer. In doing so, they gave media – printed and digital – free content that was checked by researchers. (Scientists have corrected these stories for years, saving us a cargo of errors and improving my grammar.)
These leaders of the Institute and my bosses allowed me to continue to write – around 1,500 stories and to count – through a time when the newspapers disappeared en masse because of their lost advertising revenues.
I did not see the digital era coming when I got out of my last UAF journalism lesson in the Bunnell building. Now I realize the chance to respond to this classified ad; This led to abnormally stable writing work.
Due to my need to go out and the curiosity of what is happening around the hill, I did this work in something different from the previous writers of the column.
My favorite weeks are the ones I travel with scientists to explore somewhere that I have not been before. I can dig holes or wear batteries for them, while ensuring that a story on their work will appear in a media form in Alaska.
Last week, I counted 86 outings on the field on which I have accompanied scientists in the past three decades. These men and women offered me seats in trucks, floating planes, snow and research ships that I could never have allowed myself as an independent traveler. Some would say that it surrounds the integrity of the product. This is a valid point, but I would again make the same choices to hold on the top of Denali, to sit on the flat rocks of a Japanese Shinto sanctuary while overlooking the Kiska hills, and to feel the Aerial Sofur of Caldeira du Mont Katmai de la Caldeira du Mont Katmai. .
It looks like a story of retirement, but I have not yet filled these documents. I am rather in Toot my own horn for several reasons: the first, my deadline is approaching and I have nothing. Second, I’m giving a public conference next week.
As the first lecturer of the annual science series for Alaska discussions of the Geophysical Institute (which exists longer than me), I will present “The Alétians at the Arctic Coast: covering the science of Alaska for 30 years »Tuesday, February 4, 2025, at 7 p.m. in the UAF Schable Auditorium. Also on Zoom or Facebook Live. More information is on Gi.alaska.edu.