By Steve Ulvi, Journal contributor

In this northerly seascape, there is an unusual annual moderation, a relative ease of living with rare weather extremes. We enjoy diminished winter precipitation, hallmark blue-hole sun breaks, uncommon hard freezes, lashing winter storm fronts and warm goldilocks summers gliding in after a long symphony of spring.

Our short, mild winters are typified by sullen atmospheric rivers of oceanic evaporation. The Cascade Range, still rising, now shedding remnant glaciers, blocks more seasonally extreme weather from the east. Ice and snow, perhaps the most fascinating and impactful forms of water, rarely visit and never stay long, despite an occasional steroidal nor’easter howling out of the Fraser River drainage.

In contrast, as a younger man I relished living in the unrelenting grip of the winter-dominant subarctic for several decades. The effects and seasonal dramas of water and air temperatures were stern taskmasters, especially in our simple lives deep in the Interior of Alaska. The “meteorological paradox” thereabouts is that of annual temperatures spanning some 150 degrees most years. Here? Maybe half that. So easy, almost hum-drum.

There are fascinating aspects to unrelenting subarctic cold; huge water bodies freezing for many months, deep permafrost preventing summer surface drainage, the devilish nature of “overflow,” moon halos, creek-side brush jeweled with hoar frost, booming ice, wind-carved packed snow sastrugi, astonishing physiological adaptions for non-migratory creatures, feather and fur annually whitening and the physical characteristics of surface snow and ice-related to air temperature, so vital for roaming creatures and humans.

It is fascinating that water on earth is the essential change agent, an awesome shape-shifting substance – as a fluid, as solid ice and as a vapor – a prerequisite for the evolution of life and a ceaseless force in shaping and redistributing the earth’s surface. Water exhibits amazing properties, and ours is older than the earth itself, probably arriving in barrages of frozen asteroids.

Any given water molecule has been recycled through infinite evaporation/condensation cycles since simple cyanobacteria – living on plentiful carbon dioxide, water and sunlight on a warm earth – oxygenated our atmosphere. Oddly, water occurs nearly everywhere on Earth, in nearly all things living or not, but is rarely created or destroyed.

As the most vital substance for biological life, any water we sip today may have coursed through the steamy gut of a triceratops, formed the blood of a blue whale or plumped a berry eaten by an early hominid a million years ago. Use your imagination. So, there is a hint of a deep-time truth in the old barb that bad beer “tastes like it has been through a horse.”

Our archipelago is an open book regarding the effects of glaciation and retreat; straits deeply sculpted by mile-thick ice, saltwater slowly rising 400 vertical feet to shrink the extent of land, isostatic rebound and relentless wave erosion. We should rejoice in the winter certainty and ease of purified water falling to recharge surface lakes and age-old subsurface storage in highly fractured parent rock.

Our summers are transcendent; promising, fair skies, fluttering air and relaxing temperatures. For cloud observers like me, our summer day length, backlighting and differential topographic heating generates spectacular atmospheric panoramas. Mainland thermals spawn battlelines of cumulonimbus over our ring of mountains but cool waters de-energize the boomers that sail our way, minimizing the possibility of lightning-caused wildfire ignitions.