Ups and Downs

This has been a week of ups and downs in more ways than one. The day after my birthday was the worst. It started out quite well -- we spent the snowy day snowshoeing up King Mountain and sledding back down.  

I got the most epic GoPro shots yet, but alas, I will never see those shots. Somewhere in the last mile or so of the hike back as it was getting darker, windier, and snowier, the GoPro must have fallen out of my pocket. I got back to the car and reached in my jacket to pull it out, but all I found was a pocket full of snow. I snowshoed back as far as I could following our footprints, but the further I got, the more I lost the trail under the blowing snowdrifts. It was nowhere to be found, and for all I know, could have been buried in the time it took me to realize it was gone. I wanted to cry -- I still do, just recounting the tale! It was my own fault for losing track of it, and I feel absolutely horrible after having spent so much time to get it, spending nearly a week's paycheck to buy it, and then losing it just a few weeks later. Of course, I knew that could happen with it and I'll just have to live with the guilt, but it doesn't make the blow to my pride (or bank account!) any softer. I am still in mourning. 

I guess the good thing is, of all the ups and downs this week, that was the worst thing that happened. The rest of the week we had winter training at work, which involved everything from winter safety and survival, to environmental interpretation talks, to talks with park researchers. I gave a presentation as well, on our social media strategies, which was a lot of fun.

In addition to a schedule packed full of training session, I also found out that I'm going on a kind of spur-of-the-moment trip out to the village of Deering next week. This is one of the smaller villages, but the high school students are taking a trip to Serpentine Hot Springs this spring so they're sending me there to talk with them about the hot springs and hopefully get some materials (photos, videos, quotes) to use in my visitor guide project. It'll be an overnight trip, and then next week I'm taking another overnighter in Shishmaref to work with their high school students as well on the same topic. It's pretty exciting, but also somewhat stressful!

Another "low" point in the week occurred temperature-wise! Last night and this morning the air temps lingered at about -30 degrees! Brrr....

Nome "National Forest"

Despite the obscenely cold weather, we took a walk out on the sea ice yesterday to enjoy the rare sunshine.The beginnings of Nome "National Forest" are showing up as people leave their Christmas trees in the sea ice for the rest of the season. Apparently when the ice breaks up in the spring, they just let the trees sink to the bottom or float away. That's one way to get rid of your Christmas tree, I guess.

At any rate, I expect this week to be a little crazy with traveling and preparing for Iditarod. Can't believe I only have 5 weeks left here!

Snowmachining a couple weeks ago

Birthday bowling and bonfire

A relatively unremarkable (but enjoyable) birthday yesterday turned into one I'll never forget. I was happy enough just to be in Alaska for my 23rd, but sometime after dinner I started hearing people coming into the bunkhouse. I came out to see what was going on, and ended up spoiling what was supposed to be a little surprise birthday. But hey, I was still surprised to find people in my house.

Had some delicious cake with a small group of friends and then headed down to the rec center for a couple rounds of bowling in Nome's 6-lane bowling alley to the beat of bad 80's music in the background. And I managed to only score the second lowest!  :)

Afterwards, a few friends proposed having a bonfire out on the sea ice, something they've all been talking about for several weeks now, but it keeps getting vetoed due to the freezing cold weather. This time it was a go though, and after everyone dispersed to go change into warmer clothes (I wore 3 pairs of pants and 4 tops), we met up on the beach and hauled a bunch of wooden shipping pallets down onto the ice (it's minimum 3-4 feet thick, frozen all the way to the bottom in some parts).

For the next couple hours we huddled around the roaring fire as snow fell gently around us, dancing with the sparks flying up from the flames, and the northern lights swayed just out of sight above the clouds (I thought I saw a glimpse of them, but it could have been lights from town). Whoever would have thunk I'd spend my 23rd birthday in northwest Alaska, standing around a bonfire on the sea ice?

Life is so full of surprises!

Mush!

Instead of watching the Superbowl on Sunday, I found myself at a dog sled race, driving a snowmachine. A friend from town was helping out with the Nome Kennel Club Dog Sled Race, and offered to let my roommate and I borrow his snowmachine to go out on the trail and take photos.

After a short practice run around the block, we sped out across town at a breakneck speed to make it to the start line before the mushers took off. Riding in back that time, it was all I could do to keep from getting bounced off. The GoPro had a hard time of it too; I thought it was filming the whole time, but when we arrived, it turned out it had frozen up, probably from the cold affecting the battery. Bummer!

Nonetheless, once we were there, the snowmachine was handed off to me and we spent the afternoon between the start line and various points on the 7-mile loop trail watching 9 teams of local mushers racing across the tundra.

First teams in the lead

This guy above was racing with his daughters, and taking pictures of me taking pictures of them! They ended up winning with the fastest race time. Some racers were fairly competitive, but for the most part it was all very lighthearted.

Coming back around the loop

Team of Greenland dogs

After the race we got to talk to some of the mushers and help send them on their way -- some drove in with their dogs in the backs of their trucks or towed in sleds behind their snowmachines, and others just mushed back to town.  One woman asked me to direct her lead dog onto the road, and I was amazed at the strength of the team as they strained to run once she got on the sled -- it felt like holding back a bunch of horses, but lower to the ground!

It was a great time though, and although the GoPro was being a bit fussy with the cold, I salvaged a few decent shots, edited together in the shot film below. Enjoy!

GoPro: Hiking to a Dredge

It's finally here: My GoPro HD Hero2! Took it out for a practice run yesterday to snowshoe to one of the gold dredges just outside of town. Took some getting used to, and I still need to work on stabilization and composing my shots better, but it's not too bad, all things considered. 

It was about -8 degrees when we left, but got increasingly windier as we got closer to the dredge and dropped to about -20 with windchill. I was feeling pretty close to mild hypothermia in the dredge so I stopped filming once I couldn't press the buttons on the camera anymore (we did make it to the top of the dredge though!). Managed to get a couple more shots on the way back through a ground blizzard, which looked pretty spectacular in the sunlight!

Let There Be Light!

Today has been a very strange day. First, I had to get up at 3am(!) to be at work to Skype with a high school biology class in Pennsylvania, coincidentally not far from where I interned at Shaver's Creek last summer. It was a pretty cool experience, using an iPad to talk to a classroom of 26 students 4 time zones away. We Skyped with them for about 45 minutes, showing them our visitor center, telling them about our jobs with the NPS, and answering questions. They were supposed to be asking us about climate change and the arctic, but most were more interested in what it was like to live in Alaska!

At risk of sounding like an old person here, I'm gonna say it anyway: I could never have imagined using technology in this way, even 10 years ago! Though it's still an imperfect art, it was a good run-through for a first time remote classroom program.

Well as it was, I decided to stay at work and get stuff done in the wee hours of the morning so I could open the visitor center at 8am and then leave for the rest of the day by 1. I did end up getting a lot done, and although I felt like a zombie running on only a few hours of sleep, the morning passed quickly.

That was when I noticed the other strange thing about the day -- it was BRIGHT out! Like, real actual normal sunlight, not that sunset bogus we've had for the last 3 months. Okay, so maybe that's a little harsh, but I am impossibly happy to see how high the sun is in the sky (which still isn't that high). I wasn't even that annoyed when I realized it it was hitting me in the eye through the window when I got back to the bunkhouse. It's amazing how different everything looks and feels; it's a cloudless day and the world just seams brighter with the sun reflecting off the snow and the white mountains contrasting sharply with the vivid blue sky. Too bad it's freezing cold as death outside.

I hope it stays this nice, because that brings me to my other bit of good news: I finally got my GoPro camera! It works great, has everything I need and then some. Now I just need a way to get out to the mountains to test it out...

Things are finally starting to pick up pace all around, work-related and otherwise. Preparations for Iditarod are underway; final revisions to the visitor's guide are being completed; I'm applying for jobs like mad; working at the town Winter Fest this weekend; winter training begins in a few weeks; travel plans to visit Shishmaref and Serpentine are in the works; and so many more things I know I'm forgetting.

It's getting a little crazy, but I'm glad to be busy. I'm glad for the sunlight. And I'm so glad to be here (even though I'll also be glad to come home in a couple months!).

Life in the Bush

I have been intermittently aware over the last few months that I've failed to thoroughly described to you what it is really like to live in the Alaskan bush. Maybe you've gotten some idea if you've read enough of my posts, or if you remember some of my initial deer-in-the-headlights reactions when I first moved here 7 months ago.

But every so often, I am reminded that what has become daily routine and "normal" life for me was a totally foreign concept last year and still is for 99% of my friends and family.

The "beach"

If you think I'm living in the wild, think again. I mean, I am in some ways, because although Nome is home to over 3,500 people, it is literally surrounded by tens of millions of acres of nothing but tundra, mountains, and wilderness to the north, and the Bering Sea to the south. However, it's no Las Anchorage either: there is only one paved street, no stoplights, and no roads connecting Nome to the "outside" world. The only way to get in or out is by one of 3 Alaska Airline flights per day, weather permitting. These also bring in the cargo and supplies needed to run a functioning town. For local travel, bush planes offer daily services to the handful of villages around the Seward Peninsula and northwest Alaska, or in the winter you can snowmachine. But for all intents and purposes, Nome is in the middle of nowhere. Flying in at night, the moon is brighter than the twinkle of town lights, and it illuminates the landscape such that you can hardly even pick out Nome from the air.

Some weeks, cargo shipments don't come in because of the weather and we won't have very much fresh produce or meat, or sometimes they freeze on the way over and go bad before they can be sold. And if you plan on eating anything at all (which is often not in great condition by the time it gets here), get used to paying $3-6 per fresh fruit or vegetable,  $2-4 per canned good,  $5 for a loaf of bread, $10/lb for meat, or $5 for a box of cereal. If you eat out, expect to pay at least $12 for a sandwich, an order of Chinese food, or any hot meal, or $25+ for a pizza. The only chain restaurant in town is Subway (it doubles as the local movie theatre).

In the winter, the isolation of this place is much more obvious than it was in the summer. With the tourists and gold miners gone, we are down to just the locals. On any given day, I'll see a man riding a 4-wheeler down the road with a dead seal bouncing around on the back; a request for moose liver or whale meat on the local town listserve; a reindeer riding in the back of someone's truck; a mid-day drunken street fight being broken up by the state troopers downtown; dog mushers training along the road; or tiny children bundled up in their fur parkas, playing in the street totally unsupervised. The culture and customs have become surprisingly commonplace to me. From hearing the unhurried local dialects, to expecting the long, exaggerated stories when talking to someone, it all makes up the tapestry of life in the Alaskan bush for me now.

Old St. Joe's Town Square

Nome feels to exist in its own little bubble, sometimes seemingly forgotten by time and the outside world. Most of the local and regional news is provided by the radio station. Every hour on the hour, the weather is read out for every village in western Alaska. This is sometimes followed by a reading of local announcements ranging from "Doris of such-and-such village wishes her nephew a happy birthday," to "Jim, please drop off Betty's box at her home, 111 Blank St.," to "Play with and read to your children," to "Jesus loves you." A few times a day, traditional King Island drumming will come on, an eclectic playlist of any kind of music you can imagine, some national or world news, and a mock traffic report ("A car is driving down main street. Now it just parked. Sir, if you're listening, your headlights are still on."). Followed by another hourly reading of the weather.

There is so much more to say about Nome and rural Alaska. I could write an entire other post about the rural education system, the Inupiaq culture, and so on, but that will have to wait for another time. It's hard enough to even begin to accurately and sensitively describe the basics.

Holding a Flat Stanley from a student in CA
under the Iditarod finish line

So much of my perspective has changed in the 7 months (to the day!) that I've been here. I wonder how much more it will change in the next 2, and after that when I have returned to the lower-48?

January on the Tundra

January has been an interesting month so far. Work has been moderately busy with various publication-related projects, but otherwise relatively uneventful. The last couple weekends have been warm enough to bring on winter storms and thus great snowshoeing opportunities. 

Battling the blowing snow

Last weekend the wind was extremely strong, probably a steady 20-30mph with even higher gusts. Snowshoeing up a mountain proved to be a trying task, but great fun nonetheless.

Up we go!

Snownado

There were these snow tornadoes ("snownadoes" we dubbed them) that would come spinning up out of nowhere on the harsh wind. It was really cool, unless you got caught in the middle of one, in which case it was just cold and icy and you couldn't see anything for a few seconds.

The Kigluaik Mountain Range

Once we got to the top of the ridge, the view was spectacular. The Bering Sea far away to the south, and the Kigs range to the north. Even more incredible, when we crossed to windward side of the ridge, the wind was  driving at probably 60mph up over the mountaintop! It was strong enough to push me over, and I could lean against it with all my weight and my arms out and it would hold me up! Most amazing feeling in the world -- it felt almost as if I could just jump up and fly away on it (except that it probably would have just thrown me back against the rocks!). I wish I had gotten a picture of everyone leaning against the wind, but it was so cold and icy with blowing snow that I didn't want to risk taking the camera out.

Abandoned tour bus

The next day conditions were worse, so we took a lower-key excursion out closer to town. One of our friends knew of this abandoned tourist trap that hasn't been used in probably the last 5-10 years or so. There were broken down tour buses, gold panning troughs, a tourist train, and other such kitschy things

Abandoned building

Tourist trains

You know you live on the tundra when...

This weekend we're in yet another winter storm warning so I'm not sure if we'll make it out. The wind has been nearly constant all week, driving at a good 25ish mph -- so steadily that the icicles on buildings have frozen sideways!

Doodles of Summer Past

And finally to finish off, I thought I would include a little doodle I did the other day of the summer... Certainly not a masterpiece, but it was fun to reminisce and try to tie everything together in one picture.

Until next time, happy adventuring!