The skeletal weather knowledge acquired for Private licensure may be an unofficial meteorologist's only reference when she sits in the left seat of a floated Cessna at the end of a lake in the sunset at 11 o'clock at night, wondering what the shifting cloud patterns in the red sky imply about getting through the passes that stand between her and her home slip across the Alaska Range. Teaching weather here has to mean far more than seeing that students can get past that portion of the FAA written. I am learning about Alaska as fast as I can. I owe it to those I am teaching to fly. Saturday and yesterday, I learned that the Parks Highway, the shorter paved route between Anchorage and Fairbanks, is free of wires for the overwhelming majority of its length.
Wires crossing the road bear bright orange balls.
This partially answers a student's question of last week about using roads for emergency landing sites. In the Lower 48, roads usually run parallel and very close to telephone and power lines. Here, outposts tend to run on generators and communicate by microwave-relayed phone messages. Last night, I stood on the highway in Wasilla, victim of car trouble, and looked up every few minutes to watch seaplanes flying very slowly, cloud dogging at a few hundred feet. It was night chronologically, still three or so hours to sunset, then endless twilight.