By the time you read this, I will have been one week in the Moose Camp 150 miles North of Fairbanks, Alaska near the town of Manley Hot Springs. Each year I go up as the Chaplain for North Country River Charters based in Fairbanks, Alaska. We do mission trips and minister to the hunters and fishermen at the moose and bear camps along the Tanana River. Tough job but somebody's gotta do it.

In our last overseas assignment in the military we were assigned to Fairbanks, Alaska which is about a two-hour drive south of the Arctic Circle. They call it the land of extremes. In Fairbanks in the winter it can get to minus 50 degrees below zero Farenheight and in the summer it can get up to 90 degrees. I can remember one summer in Fairbanks when it got so hot that we had to sleep in the basements with fans on to keep cool. I can also remember one winter in Fairbanks where we got 12 feet of snow. This was the heaviest snowfall in their recorded history. I can remember the engineers were afraid the snow would collapse the roofs of our houses so they called out all the soldiers to come to our homes and shovel the snow off of the roofs. This sounded like a good idea except for the fact that when one throws a shovel full of snow off the roof it begins to pile up beside the houses. It finally became so deep that it covered up all the windows and the front sidewalk and the front door. So now you had a house where the roof was relieved of the weight of the snow, but you couldn't open the front door to get in or out of your own home. Out came the shovels again and it was much quicker to dig a tunnel to your front door than to remove several hundred pounds of snow. So now the igloo was complete !

Then when you finally got out to the road to drive anywhere, the snow plows had thrown this 12 feet of snow beside the roads to keep them open. This created literally mountains of snow along the road-sides.

Finally in May, "breakup" would come. This was when the snow would all begin to melt as it had for thousands of years and the rivers would rise to capacity and carry all the melted snow to the ocean.

Then after all this long winter, the most awaited fun time of your life would begin. The salmon runs would start and it would be time to fill up your freezer with fresh wonderful salmon. Imagine someone saying there is no God and at the same time watching the salmon. It has been proven over and over again, year after year, that these little tiny one-inch long baby salmon, which are born in a fresh water stream hundreds of miles in interior Alaska, finally make their long journey to the ocean and go out to sea for several hundred miles.

After two to three years God tells them that "it is time." At this precise moment , they turn their hearts and minds towards "home" and start back toward the exact fresh water stream that they entered the ocean from two to three years before. They then swim upstream against many, many obstacles and the crossing of several rivers that come together to the very spot where they were born. Then they spawn and die there.