The Longest Day

The Longest Day
We worked to take the tent down in darkness for the first time in many weeks. As we were driving along the coast highway, Phil commented that this was the first night driving in several weeks.
The longest day seems to have ended sometime around Haines. One of the things I wanted to experience during this trip to the Arctic was the 24 hours of daylight. We did that on June 20-21 in Inuvik. The thing that surprised me was that the longest day would continue through our time in Alaska and part of the time in Canada.
One of our camp sites was a dry camp near the McLairen Glacier, off the Denali Highway. We made camp around 3PM and watched the sun work its way around the cloudless sky. Around 9PM the sun dipped in the Northwest behind a mountain (what might have counted as a sun set) but popped up again a minute or two later as it moved to a new position without a mountain to block the view. We did end up having twilight, but no actual darkness.
How do people live without the sun’s cues for day and night? I have not had on a watch during this trip. Most of the time we have been traveling, I have had no clue as to the specific time of day. This has not presented a problem while camping or driving. In speaking with people in the region, they suggest that the extra daylight doesn’t present a problem for them, even with 24 hours of light. Room darkening curtains and sleeping masks were the suggested methods of blocking out the light. “You just don’t notice after a while,” someone told me. I guess that’s true since this is the first time I’ve actually had to deal with full darkness. I must have taken the daylight for granted. Another person suggested that her sleep patterns were very different summer to winter. She mentioned that she has much more energy in the summer’s long light. That set me to wonder if she lacked any energy during the long winter nights. We have averaged waking up at 5AM daily. This morning was the first time that this was complete darkness. Strange that didn’t mean rolling over and going back to sleep. Nature called and Molli wanted out. We do tend to be early risers and this trip was no different. The best time for viewing wildlife (and our experiences would support this) is when no one else is out on the road in the early morning. On the Dempster Highway, we saw our grizzly bear at 4:30AM. We also saw a moose in the middle of the road in a mountain pass at about 5:15 day before yesterday. There was no place for him to go off the road and into the bush, so we drove next to him for a few minutes before he disappeared. Longer daylight means that the plants in the north are huge in summer. After just a few weeks of growing in her garden, Trish’s peas are already producing. One day they were flowers, two days later she was ready to harvest the peas! Does longer daylight also mean that the animal’s metabolism works double time? (I found a study on Bears that suggests a huge difference in the heart rates, but not sure this answers my question- http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=AD0643263)

The Polar day begins around March 21 when it is vernal equinox and the sun is right above the equator and the day and night are equal splits on the clock. At the Arctic Circle, the Polar day reaches its climax around June 21 when the solar orb is so high that at no point does it drop below the horizon. Check out this day/night map. http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/sunearth.html
I think I’ll appreciate my day/night cues when we return to the farm. We may not have a long growing season, but I have a better sense of the passing of time. On this trip, the longer days have meant that we’ve not really felt as though we’ve been on the road for five weeks. Maybe that has made us explore many more roads along the way.