Haines residents know how to manage darker days, but after this December 21st winter solstice things are brightening up.
Here’s how a few Haines residents spend their days tilted away from the sun.
Scot Nichols: “I feel really tired and deal with it… But then dance and all of a sudden I’m like, ‘Oh, there’s sunshine! It’s just inside us!'”
Brent Crowe: “Two days after Christmas we’re leaving for Mexico for two months. A great way to manage it is to find more sunlight somewhere else.”
Carol Tuynman: “I realized we were coming into the solstice and it was daylight in the middle of night. I thought I left the light on downstairs. It was the moon shining on the snow!”
Jedediah Blum-Evitts: “Vitamin D is a thing a lot of people supplement with. And I’ve never done that. I grew never even having heard of it until I moved here. I was like, ‘Huh! People take these extra vitamins or have these special lights!’ I’ve never done that. And have special lights. It helps a lot of people!
Kerry Cohen: “I just like to have some lights, like twinkle lights, and candles going. And then of course dancing with my grandchildren is really special.”
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December 21st is the shortest day of 2017, the winter solstice. Haines residents have different reactions to the extra hours of darkness. But from now until the summer solstice on June 21st, the days will lengthen.
Wes Adkins is a General Meteorologist at the National Weather Service Office in Juneau. He says the winter days in southeast can be particularly dark.
“With the clouds and the fact that this is wet season we tend to be darker during the daylight than otherwise a clear day would be. Even though the science says we should be getting six hours of available daylight, much of the time our skies are not making that daylight so available. So we’re getting shortchanged.”
In other words, we’re not always getting that full six hours. But the daylight is coming back. Slowly. Adkins says tomorrow will only be about 35 seconds longer than today. The days lengthen more quickly around March. That’s the midpoint between solstices, called the vernal equinox.
