AMERICAN SCENE: Barrow, Alaska: Cold Frontier

TIME Correspondent Karsten Prager, based in San Francisco, journeyed to Alaska for a look at the nation's biggest, frostiest state. He stopped in Barrow, the northernmost city in the U.S., 330 miles above the Arctic Circle. He found it in some ways startlingly unusual, in others oddly like any other American town of its size.

IT is dark now and the bitterly cold wind drives waves of snow across the flat, white landscape that is Barrow, Alaska. In mid-November, the sun dipped below the southwestern horizon, bringing winter darkness that will last...

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