Alaska’s winter may not be for everyone, but it’s special for many

For Alaskans, I think it’s a pretty predictable conversation with someone we’re just meeting while traveling. Inevitably, after learning I’m from Alaska, the person I’m talking to muses aloud: “Oh, I don’t think I could ever live there. Too dark. Too cold. And, I think even the summer time with all that light would mess me up.”

I never quite know what to say to this, but my brain leaps in several different directions at once.

The first place I go is deep winter. I’m picturing waking up in darkness and fumbling to shut off my alarm. I know it will still be pitch-black outside for hours, but I have an office job to get to that still starts at 9 a.m. The world in its artificial patterns keeps moving, and I need to give myself a push out of bed to move in those rhythms that feel so different from what the conditions outside urge me to do — hit snooze.

Yet, at the same time, I’m picturing the world just on the other side of the wall of my warm bed. There is a snow-filled driveway flanked by evergreen trees, completely dwarfed by nearby mountains that sit still, hulking, and gigantic no matter the time of year. When the sun starts to rise in winter and again as it sets, the stillness and quiet is filled with a soft movie-set lighting that fills the sky with pink and purple alpenglow. It is, in short, breathtaking. Literally — in those very cold mornings, I step outside and the air is so bitterly cold it catches in my throat if I don’t have something to cover my mouth.

Winter in Alaska is brutal. It’s cutting. It is brilliant. I hate it, but I’m also entranced and more alive for it. I love it. I feel something due to winter, whether that something is cold, or warmth after being relieved of the cold, or desperate and sad, or in absolute quiet awe. Winter wrests everything out of me, good and bad, pleasant and not.

I think about winter in other places I’ve lived. In Boston, where it truly can be more bitterly cold by the water, with the Atlantic breeze hurling itself through the streets, than in Alaska. Or New York City, where snow falls beautifully one morning, blanketing everything in an innocent, downy layer that is quickly turned to an evil brown slush that splatters all over everything and dissolves into disgusting gritty puddles.

Alaska winter is — at its best — true winter. Snow falls and sticks and stays, retaining the bright white layer over everything as long as climate change isn’t rearing its head too badly that particular day or week — a big if. Alaskans prioritize getting outdoors even in the toughest conditions, whether that’s through dog mushing, skiing, sledding, walking the dog, ice skating, fat tire biking — you name it. In many other places, winter is something to be dreaded, then weathered. Everyone collectively dreads and talks about pulling out their shovels. Here, yes it’s killing cold, dark, and long, but it also just is — winter is beautiful, celebrated, and inhabited.

Then, I think about summer. Sure, there’s the part of summer which is frankly exhausting in its own way. The go-go-go of never-ending light has me pushing myself to make the most of any beautiful day, trying to fill my own tank with daylight and sunshine so I have a supposed battery to draw from in winter — does it work like that?

But anyone who has done a sunset hike or overnight backpacking trip in the summer can attest to the feeling of being out in some river valley, camped on an alpine bench with a view, or at the summit with the sun finally lowering. The quality of the light gets low and warm, and the air cools with just that slight edge of chill that reminds me I am in some ways close to the edge of the world — this is how I think of the far north. Again, with that late sunset comes a quiet feeling. I’ve also experienced it when riding my bike home late summer nights along the coastal trail, witnessing the lowering light shimmering on Cook Inlet and hearing the tide coming in as small waves rhythmically hit shore.

It’s hard if not impossible to describe that late summer evening sun over the Inlet, with the fierce blue in the sky and daylight, still, on my cycling self careening along a trail in a far north city where these things are possible.

So, I think in those moments when someone remarks offhandedly that they couldn’t ever see themselves living in Alaska that honestly, I can’t really either. Meaning — I share it with them, that I also can’t fathom living here. Alaska is a truly difficult place to live, in so many ways. I’m hyper aware of that.

But what is the alternative? This place is so special. It gets under your skin. I’ve moved other places, and more than likely will again at least for a time in my life — and I know, because I’ve experienced it, that I’ll miss Alaska in a fierce and elemental way.

While it is tough to live here in all of its extremes, it also tells me what it is to be alive, every single day.

Again, though, I am unable to say all of that in the moment. So I nod, and say something benign and short like, “I can understand that,” even while I’m thinking about everything else.