At 12:01 AM on November 1, armed only with their wits, a ridiculous deadline, and sometimes the vague outline of a story, more than 425,000 people around the world will set out to become novelists. Would you like to be one of them? November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, the world’s largest writing challenge.

UAF’s Outdoor Adventures (OA) welcomed students with the Fall Wildness Welcome Orientation Trip, where students spent four days climbing, hiking, and canoeing in the Eastern Alaska Range.

In the communion of this year’s Starvation Gulch, just one pyre-night shy of its centennial, the burgeoning atmosphere among the clustering crowds is tenuous yet voracious, one of tentative rapture, with a cloud of uncertainty hanging above underclassmen, grad students, event staff, campus firefighters, and the present Fairbanks community alike.