This past Friday morning while in Koyuk, I went for a walk out of town. (This is the part where I warn you that nothing of real interest happened on this walk.) Sadly, it was probably only a hike of a couple miles total over the course of maybe an hour or an hour and a half (I didn’t check my watch before or after the hike).

There’s something a little different about this walk than most winter walks I’ve ever taken though. First, I walked a whole lot slower, probably because I was wearing a pair of 8 lb boots. This may not sound like a big deal, but I wore tennis shoes year-round in Michigan except when snowshoeing, even in the middle of blizzards and nights that would dip into the low negatives.

The other reason for such a short walk is that the daylight is rapidly fading. Sunrise is already after 11am and the sun now sets before 4pm, leaving under 5 hours of daylight a day. This is quite a change from August, when there wasn’t even 5 hours of darkness a night. Normally, it takes a couple hours of daylight to motivate me to head out which now equates to half the day. Oh well, at least I have it better than someone I know who on the weekends can’t wake up until sunrise.

21 more days until the trend reverses and we start gaining sunlight back.

And something to leave you with, this is how I look when I go for a walk: