the evaluation of the Jones polynomial of an alternating link at $ t= -1 $. I've been looking at some graph polynomials and I found a very nice relation between the famous Tutte polynomial of graphs and the no less famous Jones polynomial of links.
Using this relation I was able to show, that for an alternating link $ L $ with an alternating diagram $D$: 
$$
\lvert V_{L} (-1) \rvert 
= \# \{ \text{spanning trees of the Tait graph of } D \}.
$$
(I used the Tutte polynomial of the Tait graph of $D$.)
Then I found in this paper, the equality: 
$$
\lvert V_{L} (-1) \rvert 
= \det (L)
$$
for $ L $ an alternating link.
So my question is: 
For an alternating link $ L $ with an alternating diagram $ D $, how do I prove that 
$$ 
\det (L) = \# \{ \text{spanning trees of the Tait graph of } D \}?
$$
Thank you in advance for your help.
 A: I think the equality you have shown is well known, though I don't know where its written down (this is somewhat close but orthogonal to my interests so don't take this opinion too seriously). Actually,  I think the first author of the paper you linked mentioned it in a recent talk I attended. 
I am not sure what you want to show if you already believe the equalities you've written down, but in fact $V_L(-1)=\Delta_L(-1)$ is true for any link (where $\Delta_L(t)$ is the Alexander polynomial and the determinant is usually defined as $|\Delta_L(-1)|$).
According to Wolfram.Mathworld, the equality $V_L(-1)=\Delta_L(-1)$ is present in Jones' 1985 paper where he introduced the polynomial, so that might be a good place to start.
For entertainment purposes: there is an "interesting" interpretation to the relationship you proved by a quite famous mathematician outside of knot theory http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/Opinion1.html
A: In A spanning tree expansion of the Jones polynomial, Morwen Thistlethwaite (journal link here, pdf link here) proves that if $G$ is the Tait graph of an alternating diagram $D$ of a link $L$, then the Tutte polynomial of $G$ evaluated at $x=-t$ and $y=-t^{-1}$ is the Jones polynomial of $L$ (up to multiplication by $\pm t^k$ for some $k$). Your result relating $|V_L(-1)|$ to the number of spanning trees in the Tait graph $G$ is obtained by letting $t=1$ in Thistlethwaite's result. 
It is worth noting that in this paper Thistlethwaite uses the relationship between the Tutte polynomial and the Jones polynomial to prove some of Tait's conjectures on the properties of alternating links.
