By early next morning the troop still sound asleep, Dfer had already gone fishing and prepared a hardy breakfast for the furry climbers and snow eradicator. The sun was bright making the snowy surroundings even brighter with diamond sparkle crystals over the landscape. The air smelled crisp with unadulterated oxygen, what a wonderful delight for the nostrils. The only sound interrupting the silence of Alaska’s stop over, Anchorage, were Dfer’s paws walking across the pure white northern carpet. Dfer peeked into the den where the troop were still in deep sleep, he rumbled a quiet growl, Fluffy and the rest stirred and opened their eyes, this was no dream they were really here in Anchorage Alaska. Today would be the day all had been preparing for to fly up to the first base camp at 7,200 feet and then put their body and mind to the ultimate endurance test to ascent Mount Denali.

Dfer waking the troop

While enjoying their breakfast of fresh fish, very fresh fish, they discussed their new adventure ahead and also the fascinating northern lights they had observed the night before. Merlin fidgeted with his newly acquired breakfast, not wanting to insult his gracious host, Dfer, but he thought this fresh fish was a little too fresh for his liking and had no clue how to make it disappear with Dfer’s watchful eye now and then raising his left eyebrow with suspicion at the little wabdragon.

“Problem with the fish?” Dfer asked Merlin somewhat in a sarcastic tone. This of course made Merlin somewhat even more nervous around this massive white furball, letting out a huge projectory plume of fire due to his nervousness, instantly BBQing his own fish as well as Fluffy’s and Mikey’s who were sitting in close proximity of Merlin.

“No, no not at all!” Merlin exclaimed with delight and cut into his tasty cooked fish. Dfer rolled his eyes and sighed. The rest of the troop tried to muffle their giggles the best as they could but miserably failed at it.

Mutzi cleared her throat to get their attention then asked how the northern lights were manufactured and who lights the match to make all these lights in the sky. While Fluffy began to explain between taking more bites of his fish, Dfer reached into his pocket and produced his favourite pipe and tobacco. After having stuffed the pipe he leaned towards Merlin with an inquisitive smile. Merlin leaned back somewhat and looked nervously back at Dfer.

“Boo!” mused Dfer. Merlin blurted out another plume of fire along with some incomprehensible syllables and Dfer lit his pipe with a satisfied grin on his face.

“Allow me to explain,” Dfer motioned with his pipe interrupting Fluffy.

“The sun and the earth are connected although we can't visibly see how. Events that happen on the sun influence phenomena like the Aurora that happens on the earth. The magnetic field and solar particles from the sun influence the magnetic field of the earth. Events, which happen on the sun, like the creation of coronal holes, flares, and sunspots, move and change the magnetic fields of both the sun and earth. Changes in the magnetic field can force beautiful and dynamic auroral events to occur on Earth.”

“That’s right” continued Fluffy “Our sun although 93million miles away where its light travels at the speed of light and takes 9 minutes to get to our earth, its solar flares traveling at near speed of light take approximately three days to travel towards us, depending on the magnitude of the CME (coronal mass ejection) at the time. Our earth is protected by a magnetic shield like an embryo, the magnetic field deep within the hot molten core of our earth. The distribution of currents can be quite complicated, with numerous open and closed loops, and thus the magnetic field of these currents in their immediate vicinity is also quite multitwisted. At large distances, however, the magnetic fields of currents flowing in opposite directions cancel out and only a net dipole field survives, slowly diminishing with distance. Because the major currents flow in the direction of conductive mass motion (equatorial currents), the major component of the generated magnetic field is the dipole field of the equatorial current loop, thus producing magnetic poles near the geographic poles of a rotating body. This in a short explanation protects us from the solar winds as well as all space weather and its radiations from our sun and other stars deep in space. Such as the gamma rays and supernovas and of course solar winds, which are radioactive. Once the solar flares get into our magnetic shield some particles get captured by our magnetic field such as on the north and south poles and we see the products in having a beautiful aurora borealis.”

While Dfer and Fluffy continued their exchange of information and stories of past experiences. The girls began to clean things away and pack what needed to be packed, while Snow-white groomed Merlin. Grooming is very important to felines; it takes priority as highly as it does sleeping and eating. Merlin completely enjoyed this scenario he lifted his head and turned it towards the left, then towards the right, bowed his head to be groomed on top of the head and all those hard to reach places. He thought of adopting Snow-white while he snuggled his face into her white furry belly so she could reach and groom his back also. But when Snow-white nudged his head out of the way to wash his tummy Merlin fell into an uncontrollable giggling spasm, kicking his paws and fluttering his little undeveloped wings. Suddenly he was airborne. Not much just some inches but airborne nevertheless. Everyone stopped what they were doing and aaaaahhh’d at the sight of this little wabdragon, this or the fact that he saw himself off the ground made Merlin quite nervous, which inevitably made him plop to the snowy ground immediately pluming out another flare of his own singeing Snow-white’s whiskers that came across as the appearance of a T.V. antennae twisted in a hurricane..

“Oh great!” Dfer raised both eyebrows and looked up towards the summit of Mount Denali, shaking his head. Merlin turned to follow Dfer’s gaze towards the summit of the Mountain. Something strange stirred within little Merlin, something he didn’t understand.

A beautiful sight to behold