As if this isn't long enough, just a note. You may
have already received this as I was trying to send it out last night and had
difficulty. I finally sent it to work so I could send it from here and I had 5
copies waiting when I arrived. So, if you got multiples, sorry.
Hey ya'll,
Well it's mid March and the temps for the most part have been above zero.
Frequently they've been in the upper teens to mid twenties. Spring is rapidly
approaching the Arctic and I had to chuckle a couple of weeks ago when the temps
climbed above zero and the sun was shining. My Environmental Services Manager
and another employee were in my office and talking about all the cleaning they
had been doing at home. I guess it's the same everywhere-there's a major warming
and folks just get spring fever. I suppose you just have to take into account
where we are. I mean when you consider temps above zero with the sun shining
bright but with it still freezing out there being a trigger for Spring
Cleaning........ No, no one's going to be planting any flowers anytime soon
especially since the fronts of many buildings still have upwards of 6-8 feet of
snow piled against the walls. Besides, when the time is right and Mother Nature
runs Old Man Winter away for a brief spell, the flowers will return in great
abundance. They have to just to insure the survival of their species. So,
there's no need to run to the nearest Home Depot for flowers. Especially since
as I have mentioned before, the nearest parking spot is over 560 miles away.
Last Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, the wind was blowing and it was warm, in
the upper twenties above zero. There was plenty of snow during that period and
this snow was a real heavy, wet snow that stuck to everything. I have to say
that when you consider the frequent change in temps, the snow conditions, the
wind, the existing ice and snow, or whether the sun is shining or not, just
going to and from work everyday can be an experience. At the start of each day
we look out and based on predictions, what we see, and what the thermometer
says, we make a game plan. You just don't walk out oblivious and then make your
way along. We have to decide which clothes to wear, which machines to take,
which direction can we go, is the machine going to start, and so on. Shoot, we
park our machines close to the building in hopes of keeping them from being
buried by a heavy snowfall. With the warmer temps and the sunshine now, the snow
on the metal roof melts daily and we now have icicles again. Now we have to take
into account where we park, the slope of the roof, the length of the
icicles-some as long as 4-5 feet and 4-5 inches around-and be very careful
coming and going.
They didn't plow our driveway those windy days and the only way to get out
was with the 4 wheelers which we had to drive up a steep incline next to our
apartment. We do this on a regular basis during the summer but right now it is
not only ice covered but the incline is much steeper due to the snow and ice.
This is the same incline I wrote about that I was attempting to climb when I was
thrown from my snowmachine. The snow blocking the drive was about 4 feet deep
and the wet sticky stuff I mentioned so even our snowmachines would have bogged
down trying to cross it. So, I took the only way out and I rode both machines up
that slope to the road to keep Patty from having to do it, and each time just as
I reached the point where I thought I was going to topple backwards, the front
tires went over the top and gravity saved me. After surviving getting to work
once again that day, the wind stopped and ice fog descended limiting visibility
to a few yards.
What can I say? Never a dull moment. Hey, we don't have to worry about
termites, rats, ants, snakes, rotten wood, mold in the house, or weevils or bugs
in the cereal! All we have to worry about is huge animals, huge carnivores,
freezing, falling through the ice, getting lost, and during the summer for 6
weeks, mosquitoes. Which would you chose? >
Don't answer that!
Daybreak is now around 7:30am with full dark returning about 9:30pm. Pretty
soon it will be light way past 10pm and the fish will be closer to town. That's
when folks here venture out onto the ice after work some nights going after
them. We will probably do that a few times ourselves.
Patty and I have gone out three times in the last month in search of fish.
We have been hearing rumors of folks catching but we had not spoken directly
with anyone who had nor had we seen anyone fishing on our treks. We haven't even
seen any holes or evidence of anyone fishing.
What we are looking to catch are Sheefish. I have written about them before
but I will mention them again. This is a fish that averages around 10 pounds but
can I believe get up into the 40's range. They are like small tarpon in
appearance and are torpedo shaped. They have an odd looking face that tapers to
a point but they have a large mouth. They are silver in color and have a firm
textured white meat that is delicious, especially fried in cornmeal New Orleans
style. These fish live in both salt and fresh water and although I am not sure
of the particulars they migrate yearly from fresh rivers to open salt water and
back. They are in Kobuk Lake pretty much all winter. Kobuk lake starts on the
other side of the peninsula about 15 miles and is a pretty big body of water.
Some Inupaq net the Sheefish there under the ice all winter long which in itself
is an interesting story.
Our first venture carried us about 5 miles to a point of land visible from
town where rumor had it folks were catching. The second venture carried us
across the sound and up the Noatak river on our snowmachines. This is where last
summer Patty's sister Susan and her husband Tim went with us on a boat ride. We
did see some ptarmigan along the way which are good eating but since we were
armed only with .44's we did not have any for dinner. Yes, we do carry the .44's
in winter too. There are plenty of moose up here and they can be downright mean.
When you are traveling on a snowmachine you have goggles on, your ears are
covered, and the machines are noisy. The peripheral vision is limited as well as
hearing so you can pass close to one without seeing it. We are also in the range
of the polar bear although there have been no reports of any this far south this
year. (Of course a .44 against a polar bear? Hey, we could get lucky.) We have
been told that in Point Hope up the coast, our furthest village, the Polar Bears
have been in town and folks there have to be extremely careful just traveling
around the town. Another reason for carrying the .44's is the offhand chance of
getting a caribou. The meat is quite good and there is always someone in town
with a need for the extra groceries to feed the kids or elders.
We did not catch any fish on those two forays. I spoke with one of our
dentists last week who stated he had gone with a group and they had caught some.
"Where did you go?" "I don't know." "Did you follow a trail?" "I don't know."
"Were you close to land?" "I don't think so." Educated
people....................
Last Saturday (the 12th) dawned overcast and the
forecast was for 1-2 inches of snow so we decided not to go. About 11:30 the sky
was clear, it was sunny, and there was no wind. Weatherfolks are the same all
over.
We went. Of course we did bring the VHS radio and the GPS. We followed the
trails marked by willow branches every 50 yards or so, each with a piece of
reflective tape attached. These markers are placed by SAR at the beginning of
each season and most folks follow them. We traveled 16 miles across the sound
and down the coast and chose a spot at random, pulled a couple of hundred yards
off the trail, and drilled two holes. We were about a mile to a mile and a half
from the north shore. The temps were in the teens above zero with a slight
breeze and we did keep an eye on the sky which for the most part stayed clear.
This time we scored. I landed the first one which ran about 6 pounds. Patty soon
followed with a> smaller one in the 4-5 pound range. I felt real magnanimous
that day and I let Patty catch the rest with the score ending up three to one
for a total of 4. The other two Patty caught went from about 8 pounds to about
12 pounds. We came home, filleted them, had some neighbors originally from
Fairbanks over and fed them a crab, shrimp, and corn chowder, along with the
Sheefish fried New Orleans style as well as baked with bread crumbs and rotel
tomatoes.
Cathy and Gary rode to the village of Noorvik on snowmachines two weeks
ago. Gary had a relative that died and they went to the funeral. They chose to
save the airplane fare and ride snowmachines. They made the roundtrip ride in
one day, returning home safely that night. Of course they took one of our
machines and following the usual protocol when they borrow my snowmachine, they
damaged it yet again. This time they broke the taillight-again. The one I had
just bought in Anchorage and put on the machine three weeks ago, replacing the
one they broke last winter. At least Cathy paid for it by being sore for days
from the long ride.
Speaking of villages Patty is starting to fly again. She went at the end of
February to the same village, Noorvik, as Cathy and Gary. She was scheduled to
go to two more this last week but the trips were canceled for one reason or
another.
The Iditarod finished recently and most of you folks
know it is a dog sled race. It started as a commemoration of the teams that made
the run from Anchorage to Nome one winter in the 1920's to bring serum for a
typhoid fever outbreak. Dogs have been used in rural Alaska for hundreds of
years and just raising teams of sled dogs is a full time job. Iditarod means, "a
far distant place". I know the route they travel and I know how Alaska is in the
winter. I recently watched a special on TV about it and the route they travel is
hard to comprehend. They traverse interior Alaska in winter crossing the Alaska
Range and never forget, Alaska is over twice the size of Texas and almost all of
it is wild. Add to that the Alaska winter and I take my hat off to those hardy
souls. These folks make the hardships faced by professional athletes look tame.
One more thing I will mention is we have been having some pretty days as of
late and one night last week when I looked out the window, the aurora just lit
up the sky. It can sit in ribbons and change slowly or it can be swirling and
undulating while changing in intensity moment to moment. This night it wasn't
there at 10pm and at 10:30 it was fabulous. I dragged out the camera and got
some low intensity shots and just as I was taking it off the tripod, the lights
flared real bright again in intensity. For about a 1 minute period the colors of
the rainbow were highly visible along a portion of them and I got two shots
before they went away. In the past we have seen a hint of color other than green
but this time there was no doubt and we have the evidence to prove it. The
pictures are on the website
www.samsicles.net
Well, this is going to be another installment letter that really should be
sent in two parts. I began this one early last week on Tuesday, and it is now
the following Sunday. Between work and being able to get out more in the warming
temps I just have not been able to crank out the words. This is to the relief of
some although a couple of folks do humor me by writing me and reminding me I
haven't written in a while. I tried to make adjustments in the times above but I
may have missed a few, sorry. I am also pretty thorough in reading and rereading
what I write to correct grammar and make it more interesting. This time I feel
the need to just send this letter as it has been a while since I wrote last. I
do feel it may be a bit grammar schoolish though for lack of a better term and I
extend my apologies for that. >
I am going to continue because I just feel compelled to add the following:
The rest of last week followed the usual path until Friday. I got a call
about a problem at the Point Hope clinic about 1pm that day. I contacted Human
Resources about it and Patty told me that I might have to fly out there that
evening. I told her "no way is this boy flying to Point Hope this late on a
Friday afternoon". At 2:30 pm I was at the airport with Patty-the HR
representative-waiting for our chartered flight. (See, that's the hazard of
working for the same company your spouse does. She tells me what to do at home
and she tells me what to do at work too!)
The pilot was a nice guy and he led us to the Cessna 207 that had just been
pulled out of the warm hanger. This is the one I often refer to as the
Volkswagen with wings. Theoretically it is a 4 seater, although I'm just not
sure 4 of what. Whatever the 4 is, it has to be real small believe me. Patty and
I wedged in side by side wall to wall in the two seats behind the pilot. (At
least being that tightly wedged in, if some mishap occurred I don't think we
would have moved and inch.) One other thing about the 207 versus the larger
planes-it is slower, traveling around 145 knots instead of the 200 knot speed of
the larger planes. This is not too much of an inconvenience when flying to some
of the closer villages. It's a literal pain when traveling to our farthest.
Guess which one Point Hope is? Right! The farthest of our villages! Well over
one hundred miles north of here-over an hours flight in the flying toy.
The pilot was experienced and a pleasant guy and after a smooth takeoff we
headed north. Just across the sound on the coast is Cape Krusenstern National
Park. No, there are no marked boundaries or ranger stations. It is as wild as
the rest of northern Alaska. We were flying over it and soon the pilot was
pointing out little bunches of black dots against the white landscape, most of
which were groups of musk-ox, and some caribou. We traveled along the coast and
since this was a charter, he offered to take us down closer to the groups of
animals. We had a schedule to keep so we opted for doing it on the way back. The
water around Kotzebue is all frozen solid but a few miles up the coast the
Arctic Ocean begins showing patches of open water in the western distance. The
further north we traveled the closer to land and more numerous these leads and
open spots became. We passed some cliffs and another spot along the way that
generated some serious turbulence for a period of a few minutes. This is some of
the most dramatic turbulence I have ever experienced. The plane would literally
jerk up on one side or the other or just drop violently as if a giant hand
slapped the top of the fuselage. Patty gets motion sick easily and she was a bit
green around the gills. Me? Just as calm as a cucumber (on the outside-I do
believe I left finger prints embedded in the seats).
Looking at the snow softened mountains, the groups of animals, the dramatic
cliffs that in summer are so covered with migratory birds that the pilot said
they could not fly as near as we did due to the risk of bird strikes, the broken
ice and the open leads on the ocean............... We just looked at each other
and grinned. Again I say that we were seeing and experiencing things that most
folks will only see on TV-and getting paid to do it!
I asked the pilot about polar bears and he told us he had seen one on the
runway at Point Hope two weeks ago. Traveling up the coast he pointed out a
place where the snow looked plowed along the pack ice and told us it was a trail
made by a polar bear.
Along the way we passed the storage buildings for the Red Dog mine, the
worlds largest zinc mine. They mine inland and haul the ore along a manmade road
in huge trucks to these storage buildings, each painted with the red and white
stripes of the American flag with the blue field containing the Big Dipper and
North Star representing the Alaska state flag. The ore is housed in these
gigantic buildings > until after breakup. Then barges are brought up and loaded
from lighters that haul the ore from the docks to the waiting vessels.
We also passed the village of Kivalina which is located about 50 miles from
Kotzebue and is situated on the coast. I have written about it before as I have
spent the night there before. It is perched precariously on a spit of land that
is now cut off from the mainland by water. This is one of the poorer villages
and most buildings are in disrepair. They have running water but due to money
and environmental problems, no sewerage. The folks use "honey buckets" for
toilets-including the medical clinic.
Anytime I view any village and even Kotzebue from the air or a vantage
point that affords a view of the whole town, I am struck by how tiny and
insignificant they appear in all this vastness. The village of Kivalina
especially so. How these people have survived here for thousands of years.......
We arrived safely at Point Hope and conducted the necessary business. I
pointed out to Patty the crosses made of paper and other materials, each with a
prayer on or close to it. Patty had been there before but did not know the
significance of the crosses. The people at the clinic feel it is haunted which
accounts for the crosses everywhere. It is said to be a good spirit though.
We walked to the Point Hope Native Store where our pilot and ground
transportation was awaiting us. We picked up a couple of items with Point Hope
emblazoned on them for souvenirs and of course a local caught Patty and offered
a hand made doll which Patty bought. I have to say it was worth the $150 asking
price though. I know, you're thinking "HOW MUCH"? All I can say is art is worth
whatever you are willing to pay for it. This doll stands a good 12 inches tall
and is of an Eskimo man seal hunting. The head is made of walrus ivory carved
with all the features including hair, a mustache, and a labret. (A labret is a
bone or ivory plate or ring the natives used to place in the cheek or lower lip
for jewelry.) It has removable snow goggles carved from ivory in a
representation of the way locals have made them for thousands of years, complete
with a caribou leather strap . The clothing is made from beaver, spotted seal
fur, and other furs. The hood can be pulled up or down and has a fur ruff. The
boots are made the same way and of the same material as real mukluks are. He is
holding a wooden spear with an attached ivory shaft complete with a separate
ivory point. All is lashed with caribou leather and the rope is caribou leather.
This is all mounted on a piece of whale baleen with chunks of ivory here and
there representing ice blocks and there is a fur rendition of a seal sticking
it's head out of the "ice". I know what art here costs and what it costs in
Anchorage. This handmade piece would go for over $500.00 in Anchorage but as I
said, art is worth whatever you are willing to pay for it.
The young man who transported us to and from the airport (a real truck this
time, not a snowmachine and sled) told us they were getting ready for whaling
season. This is one of our villages that hunts the bowhead whale. They still do
it from skin covered boats that are hand paddled. He told me that they are
sewing the skins onto the boats right now and whaling will commence as soon as
the water opens enough to allow it. He also told us that there have only been a
couple of polar bears that wandered through town this season. He stated there
are usually more.
When we arrived back at the airfield which is actually about a mile from
the main body of the town, we looked north and noted dark clouds. The pilot
stated that is wasn't bad weather but is a sign of open water. He stated that is
one way ship captains in the past navigated. They looked for the darker areas
which indicated open water. The lighter areas are caused by the light reflecting
off the snow and ice. >
After takeoff he traveled north a few miles flying about 500 feet and we
all kept a sharp eye out scanning the edge of the pack ice for polar bears. We
did not see any and reluctantly we headed back south.
We passed the same cliffs I mentioned before and the pilot told us this is
where the military back in the 1950s had plans to explode a nuclear device as an
experiment at making an instant harbor. I had heard about this in the past but I
didn't know exactly where the site was. They never carried it out thank goodness
as who knows what havoc the radiation would have played on the environment or
people, not to mention the thousands of birds that nest in those cliffs every
year or the sea and land mammals. We also passed a barely discernable old
airstrip on a ridge that was built and used during WWII.
The pilot took a more inland route about halfway back to Kotzebue and we
hoped to drop down for a closer look at some of the groups of musk-ox. This is a
treat for the pilots also as they are usually making commercial runs to the
villages and are unable to fly close to the animals. We spotted a group and the
pilot made a gentle turn and descent for a closer look and I attempted to get
some photos without success. Just as we passed the group the plane smacked into
more turbulence as I described above and we were dashed about for a couple of
minutes until we crossed back out over the sea. Patty was green again and I had
left more fingerprints so I told the pilot we had had enough fun for the day.
The rest of the flight was uneventful and we made another smooth landing, this
time on the gravel small plane runway at Kotzebue, before taxiing across the end
of the main runway to the terminal.
I actually started the second segment of this letter Sunday morning. I am
now finishing it Sunday night because Patty convinced me to take advantage of
the 20 above temps and the bright sunlight and we hooked up our sled and made an
8 mile foray across the sound to the mouth of the Noatak river to fish. We
passed a number of dogsledders along the way who were participating in a sprint
race-a short speed race that is only around a 10-15 mile run. This time we met
some folks from work as well as others out there on the frozen expanse of sea
and fished a while enjoying the company. The wind picked up a bit blowing the
snow across the ice in a fashion reminiscent of scenes I have witnessed on the
Discovery Channel so we headed back in after about two hours.
I started to type we came back empty-handed but in the
middle of typing I realized what a narrow view that would have been. We did not
catch any fish, but we came back with a treasure trove of experiences. I cannot
begin to describe the lifetimes of experiences we are having on a weekly basis.
It is easy to forget that when facing life's daily travails but I have to repeat
what I said in my last email:
We are truly blessed and we are well aware of it and are truly grateful.
If you would like to share a bit of it, we'll always make a place for you to
stay.
The Sam's
For problems or questions regarding this web contact
carlo@samsicles.net
Last updated:
08/29/05