17 Alaska’s transition from winter to spring and the ensuing muddy mess that comes with all that melting snow, is usually abrupt, but this “breakup” as Alaskan’s call it, was fast by any standard.
When Soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 25th Aviation Regiment at Fort Wainwright were getting ready to go to the field in the Yukon Training Area for an AH-64 Apache helicopter aerial gunnery range, a winter storm dropped nearly two feet of fresh snow on the area.
The weekend before they moved out, temperatures dropped to 29 degrees below zero.
Two days later, as the battalion was setting up a Forward Arming and Refueling Point at Firebird LZ, temperatures soared into the 50s.