I went looking for giant vegetables but came back remembering the stares. Palmer in the Matanuska Valley of Alaska is known for world record size vegetables, the fertile soil and nearly 24 hours of sunlight of summer working in tandem to grow cabbages from your wildest dreams. Budget and rental car restrictions had required me to focus on the Alaska below the Arctic Circle, but this green and idyllic valley was where I met strange denizens from way north. Tracking signs for the “Musk Ox Farm”, I ended up face-to-face with what my untrained eye and lazy description would call midget bisons. Information boards told me that they were closer to the goat family tree than to cattle and how their evolutionary superpowers to withstand extreme cold meant that in the Palaeolithic age they roamed the Arctic tundra in the hundreds. Their down under-wool called qiviut being eight times warmer than wool and about a third finer than cashmere, finding a “use” for them helped them barely survive the onslaught of a particularly vengeful species. Shaggy, suspicious and ineffably cute, they gambolled about this resort created to preserve their population, both of us mutually casting curious looks.
[Part of the Series: Notes from the Last Frontier]
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