Joyanne Hamilton and the students of Innoko River School report:

Monday, January 28, 2013
Temp: -37ºF
Hours of Daylight: 7 hours and 9 minutes, gaining about 5-7 minutes of daylight per day (YAY!!)

We are celebrating the returning of daylight to our village, even though we are still deep in the temperature and weather of winter! Where are the Gonandadoys? (DegXinag for "Robin), they are no where near here, that's for sure! We are anxious to watch Journey North's interactive map! We're watching your updates, too!

When do YOU think we'll see our first robin?
Make Your Predictions

These are photos taken Dec 21. 2010. We are measuring shadows. To do this, we had to go up to the runway, three miles from our village, because the sun does not reach our village: We are on the south side of a hill. The time is approximately 2:00 pm. See how low the sun is in the sky? Our shadows are about 200 feet long.

Bird feeding time!

Students on Skype chat with San Igancio School in Lima, Peru discussing migratory birds that we share

Since we don't have groundhogs or woodchucks up here, we thought we'd just go see if we could find our shadows ourselves today! We were also curious to see how long our shadows would be compared to Dec 21, 2010. As things turn out in Alaska, there was a thick fog that fell in right when we got up to our runway, 3-miles from our village. It was still beautiful, though. The sun looks ENORMOUS next to the children. Guess what? They couldn't see their shadows! But we had fun observing the beautiful frost on the trees and ice fog hanging above the hills. So officially, the children didn't see their shadows on Groundhogs Day!

Meet the students from Innoko River School.