The yearly rediscovery of that weird, bright dot in the sky

As it so happens, 9 a.m. is a morning hour. An eat-your-oatmeal-and-read-the-news kind of hour. I forget this every year.

From mid-November through February, 9 a.m. seems more like 5 a.m. to me -- the time when no one arises natually. An hour to battle your alarm clock.

My late-night job doesn't help matters. Because I go to bed at 2:30 every morning, I really shouldn't be getting up so early. But up I am, with or without blackout curtains.

It's just more evidence to support that I am a creature of the sun's habits. I grew up walking barefoot to the beach. It's in my nature to be powered by warmth and light and such.

So March is always a fun month in Fairbanks. We're getting more than 13 hours of light now, and there's much to do.

The World Ice Art Championships came back. Here's the winner:

And the favorite in my heart:

James got the ingenious idea to make a King Kong sculpture look even bigger by taking a shot from the ground about 10 feet away. He had to lay in the snow to get this:

People were staring. We didn't care.

The ice park has tons of interactive sculptures, mazes and slides. They're aimed to amuse kids. That didn't stop us.

I waited in line with 5- to 11-year-old kids to go down a slide. One boy's mother accompanied him in line, shoved him off and turned around to exit the adult way. We caught eyes.

"I'm 9," I said with a smile. She quickly exited the slide, possibly to call the authorities.

I had a pretty fun wipeout at the bottom. It must have looked cool. People were concerned.

Can I get a "hell yeah" if you're as lost as I am

There were finally enough hours in the day to take a leisurely hike on the Granite Tors trail about 40 miles outside of town. I'm a heck of a lot better at driving on icy roads now, so getting out there wasn't a problem, unlike last time.

The local grizzlies haven't yet awaken from hibernation, I'm told, but since I was walking alone I wasn't going to chance surprising one. So I sang ... and sang ... and hummed ... and rambled to myself about life ... about death ... about the state of music ... about how much I was rambling.

I exasperated my entire mental Butch Walker catalogue before the going even got rough. Weezer went even quicker. Then Grand Buffet and Astronautilus. Later, pirate songs and Irish drinking tunes gave me a boost.

I was out there for seven hours, just long enough to get to a point where I couldn't find the trail anymore. Finding my way back wasn't a problem; my snowshoes left craters that would give a T-Rex flashbacks.

The first mile is a flat stroll that winds alongside the Chena River's north fork. 

Then it goes up a small hill that leads to a flat traverse to another, steeper uphill slope. This curiously painful cycle coninued four or five times.

This is where I thought I was as high as I could go:



And this is as high as I actually went, two hours later -- I was nearly atop the foothill:

In the quarter-mile between hills. I stopped for lunch -- munching on the cheap trail mix you can find in any airport's Hudson News. I love that stuff.

During the lunch break, I somehow found a cell phone signal. I called my mom, who was probably freaked out that I was hiking alone.

It was wonderfully silent. Several times, a king-bed-sized chunk of hard-packed snow would move under me and make a loud groaning sound. I nearly jumped out of my skin every time this happened. But mostly, I heard nothing -- other than my own voice, that is.

When I neared the top, I learned several ways to maneuver uphill in my snowshoes. Naturally pigeon-toed, I discovered the value of pointing your feet outward while climbing a hill. Also, lowering my center of gravity and clawing at the slope seemed to help at some junctures. I fell a few times, only once so awkwardly that I had to remove my snowshoes to get back up.

When I got back, I was bushed ...



... but happy.