Summer in Alaska 2013: memories on film

I just realized I never posted this film I created of my last summer in Northwest Alaska. It seems rather fitting now, as I prepare to begin a new chapter on the Last Frontier, to look back and see everything I've done and anticipate all the wonderful things to come.

Back to Alaska!

Time to dust off the old blog, shake it out, and open it up to a fresh new page, because I'm headed back to Alaska. Just as I'd hoped for this summer, I have been hired to work as a park ranger again, this time for Sitka National Historic Site.

Located on Baranof Island in southeast Alaska, Sitka is a fishing town of about 9,000 people steeped in a rich background of Tlingit culture and historical Russian rule. This history is precisely what my new national park unit commemorates, so I can't wait to start learning more and teaching others about this area.

As for my new job, I will have many of the same duties I had in Bering Land Bridge, such as leading ranger walks, developing programs, contributing media work, and running the visitor center, but this time with a focus on the Tlingit and Russian history of Alaska. I'm especially looking forward to doing all this in a brand new place with new people and new (epic) environments to explore.

So, in the next month or so, keep an eye out for regular updates on my new adventures in Alaska!

Allons-y! A Summer in Review

It is with mixed emotions that I am here to report that I now know where I'm going. For the short term, anyway. After much hemming and hawing and budgeting on scrap pieces of paper, I bought myself a ticket back to Florida until the end of October. It turned out to be about $500 cheaper than my other travel schemes, and I need to see my family anyway. From there, the plan is to head to Spokane, WA, to seek out a new life, yet again. 

I guess it goes to show once more that most of the time, things don't go the way you want them to. But if you make the best of it, you'll have a lot of good times to look back on. 

Last night, I took a moment to do just that. Dreading going outside in the chilly wind, I bundled up in my layers, and strolled down to the beach for one last walk to commemorate the summer. It was a gorgeous evening, and not even as cold as I had anticipated. 

It was that magic hour of this time of year when the Arctic reverses the colors of earth and sky. It was as if it threw the oranges and pinks of the autumn tundra into the evening air, as the sky cast down her pastel cerulean and sapphire into the shadows and the water. The cliffs hung pale purple in the distance, a surreal backdrop beyond the glassy ocean. The air smelled of campfires. 

Snow in June!

When I arrived in June, I saw the very last snowfall of spring, and now as I leave, I have seen the first snowfall of autumn. How apropos!

Taking in the epic vista

As I had anticipated, coming back to Northwest Alaska a second time brought with it new perspectives. It now all seems so familiar. In some ways, I am no longer as awed by the environment as I was last year, but I have a different appreciation for it, a feeling of belonging within it and being a part of it.

The classic "Ranger Pointing at Things" pose

Becoming a Park Ranger came with its own joys and challenges. Working as a uniformed civil servant surprisingly did a lot for my self-confidence, along with the responsibilities of being a leader, teacher, and guide for the hundreds of people of all ages and walks of life that I worked with over the summer.

Interpreting a reindeer antler on the tundra

My favorite memories of work this summer were of guiding hikes, and unfortunately my least favorite were of teaching two gigantic groups of summer campers.

My ginormous summer camp group

Despite the chaos of teaching so many kids, it was a good experience to learn how to work with large groups in outdoor settings (and know that it's something I'd like to avoid in the future!).

Leaving White Mountain with my colleagues

And of course, village trips were always eye-opening. White Mountain was definitely the most fun, but even traveling to Teller was rewarding, as many of the kids recognized us from last year and were excited to learn what we came to teach.

Outside of work, the summer was filled with near-weekly bonfires, Sunday family dinners with the roommates (a different cuisine attempted every week!), walks on the beach, hikes on the tundra, fishing, berry picking, lots of cooking, and lots of card games.

After a whirlwind trip to the top of Alaska, September was my month of solitude, as the last interp ranger standing. Fortunately, I was able to make myself super busy at work, by creating 3 new exhibit posters (one of which was a 6-panel spread), reorganizing the office, giving community programs, and a ton of other end-of-season tasks. After work, I busied myself with a new watercolor project, job searching, cooking, writing, and working out. Fortunately, the month flew by.

Seems that all the extra work paid off, too -- I had my performance evaluation yesterday, and scored in the highest category possible! I knew I had done well, but it felt amazing to be described as a "natural interpreter" and "exceptional" media specialist. Wow. Talk about an ego-booster!

So now it's October 1st. Tomorrow I head to Anchorage from Nome, for probably the last time, via Unalakleet (might as well see one more village on my way out!). Unlike last time I left, I feel like my experience is complete, it's time to go. As they say, my work here is done. I feel satisfied, fulfilled, and ready to move on to the next adventure. See you there!

Where am I going?

I love Nome, AK. I really do. It will always have a special place in my heart. But last week, upon purchasing my final ticket out of here for October, I was flooded with a feeling of relief that seemed to wash a great burden off my chest unexpectedly. Along with this relief has come a new sense of hope for the future, rather than the grinding stress I've been feeling for months over where I'm going from here. It seems that the simple fact that I have a ticket out of Nome was just what I needed to spark my wanderlust again.

Blowing in the winds of early summer

So here's the scoop: I just bought a ticket to Anchorage via bush flight (it was cheap!). Where I'm going from Anchorage however, still remains to be determined with just 10 days to go. What the hell am I doing??

At this point, it's looking like I might end up in Spokane, WA to room with some old friends. It's a cheaper place to be jobless than Alaska, and I think it'll be a good place to adjust to normal life again. Sure, it would be cheapest to go straight back to Florida, but part of me really wants to break this cycle of going home every time I finish a job. I want to experience being a young adult on my own in a new place again, and see what I can do this time.

I feel so incredibly inspired and empowered right now to just travel and just be. It's possible that I might end up with a new job right away -- I just found out yesterday that the NPS office in Anchorage might be hiring, so I could very well end up there. Or perhaps I'll come to the conclusion that I really do just need to go home and get my sh** together like a intelligent human being.

Either way, I'm so ready to get out of Nome. I'm so ready for new faces, new community, new responsibilities, new challenges, new scenery. I love bush Alaska, but my future beckons greater horizons. Just thinking of moving to a new place has me giddy with excitement, wherever it may be.

So for all of you wondering where I'm going next, the plain and simple answer is: I don't know. And I don't have much time to figure it out (but it's going to be great!).

The seasons are changing again, into the brilliant hues of fall on the tundra. We had our first snow in town 3 nights ago, and I can already see new snow clouds gathering in from the east as I type this, looking dramatically dark against the evening sunlight. I sure am going to miss Northwest Alaska, but I can't wait to see where this winter's winds will take me next.

Adventures at the Top of the World

A steady snowfall of big, fat clumps of flakes descends from the gray, mid-afternoon sky, mixed with cold rain, and illuminated by an industrial floodlight on an adjacent building. The ground is muddy with puddles the size of small ponds outside. A faint aroma of gasoline and burning fuel wafts in through the slightly opened window pane, an ironic contrast to the soft touch of the Arctic ice crystals floating down from the heavens.

I am in Deadhorse, AK, sitting in a shipping container-turned-bedroom at an oil company work camp. I came here originally to visit someone for a few days, but that stay has turned into over a week, thanks to my flight getting canceled for foggy weather. I don't mind too much. It's been an interesting soul searching sort of experience here at the top of the world, I suppose.

Deadhorse: almost as far north as you can get in AK

To be honest, I'm a little intimidated by Deadhorse. It's all oil companies, industrial work sites, and man camps full of grizzled Alaskan men working 12-18 hour days on the pipeline, roads, and airport. I've seriously only seen about a dozen other women, and probably hundreds of men since I've been here. I feel so out of place.

Yes, their sign on the general store has a dead horse on it.

The landscape is flatter than Florida Everglades, if that's even possible. It's brown and marshy with the patterned frost heaves I've seen in the coastal areas around the Seward Penninsula, yet so much flatter. I keep thinking its foggy outside, but then I realize I'm looking all the way to the horizon under a flat, dark gray sky that gives absolutely no depth perception. Technically we still get 15 hours of daylight here, but it still seems dark and cold and gray all the time.

Pump station for the Alaska Pipeline

This entire town seems like one big construction site. If you're not wearing a reflective vest and hard hat, you probably shouldn't be here. Nonetheless, I got to see a little of what these guys get paid $30/hr to do, for a couple days. I spent some time in a rock lab, where I learned how to sort and weigh dry samples of rock material, and how to wash said rocks for further drying and weighing. It takes a really long time, and seems like there could easily be machines to get the same results.

Everything everywhere is just mud and dust and rocks and dirt. They even make you wear little blue coverings over your shoes in every building you walk into, just to keep the floors minimally clean. Fascinating.


Road Trippin'

The Long and Winding Pipeline

On Labor Day, we were able to take a road trip down the Dalton Highway, which starts a little north of Fairbanks and ends in Prudhoe Bay, cutting through the Brooks Range and in between Gates of the Arctic NWR to the west and the Arctic NWR to the east. Our destination was Coldfoot, but we never made it that far. Nevertheless, the drive was drop-dead gorgeous. The terrain transitioned from its flat, brown marshiness to a spectacular rise of the mountains. The whole length of the several hundred mile highway is paralleled by the Alaska pipeline.

Gorgeous rock formations

Well, as luck would have it, about 2 hours into the trip, the gas light came on with a cheerful 'ding!' Being the Dalton Highway there are no gas stations. Also being the Dalton Highway, however, there are lots of work camps, and fortunately, private fuel stations at some of these for their private rigs. Our best hope was to press on, my dear friend having some inside knowledge that there was a fuel station closer ahead of us than behind us, and we could possibly perhaps win enough sympathies of some of the workers that they'd help us out.

Well, we drove and drove and drove through increasingly gorgeous mountains, ascending in altitude as our fuel gauge descended its needle down past the E for Empty. Expecting the engine to die out at any second, we pressed on through the snowy spires of dramatic peaks and shining ridges smoothed by recent avalanches. Somehow, the engine held out for over an hour, with the needle well below empty.

Just before Atigun Pass

We were driving carefully up the last, and particularly treacherous incline, known as Atigun Pass, before the fuel station, when suddenly the engine tuckered out as we slowed to let giant semi truck by on the narrow pass. The roar of the passing vehicle faded away into silence. The poor car sputtered a couple times with a last attempt to turn the key, before sighing into a resigned slumber.

Time to start walking. We loaded my backpack up with 6 bottles of water, and began the 3 mile trek to the work camp to get to the fuel station. Thank goodness it was such a breathtakingly gorgeous place and with such good company! I couldn't ask for a better adventure. Uphill, downhill, uphill again, passed by speeding semis. We could have hitchhiked, but the weather was perfect, chilly and sunny, we were enjoying the walk way too much and figured it would be easier to hitch on the way back carrying a fuel can and with more cars coming from that direction.

Eventually we made it to camp, found some friendly acquaintances, and got fuel and a ride back to our truck. We drove back to fill it up all the way and hung out with the workers a bit, as they all ranted about their boss and long work hours, using such colorful language I haven't heard since college.

The drive back was much less harrowing in terms of fearing the car was going to die, but this time challenging because we were so exhausted. I took the wheel on the way back, traversing the potholed road with such skill as one can only glean from driving in Nome for the last year. ;) Despite the mishaps, it was a better day than I could have ever dreamed of.

On one of my last days, we took a hike out on the tundra near camp before the fog began to roll in thick and heavy again. We tromped around for a while looking at birds and animal tracks, and on our way back, noticed a man standing in front of one of the buildings, smoking and staring pointedly at us.

"Y'all are brave to be walking around out there!" he called as we clambered back up to the parking lot. He had kind of a New York mafia vibe about him. "There was a family of bears here last night!"

We got to talking, and he showed us photos and videos on his phone of two adult grizzlies and a cub climbing around the dumpster just below the building the night before. He remarked they had run off right into the tundra where we were hiking.

He then showed us a picture of a polar bear -- "I seen this guy just a few days ago, 30 minutes from here!" he said, scrolling through relatively close-up pictures of a polar bear off the side of the road. No way! Although I didn't get to see one myself, I somehow derived great satisfaction from the fact that it had been spotted so close to where we were during the same week I was there. :-)

In the following days I was stuck in Deadhorse, I enjoyed a much needed vacation from Nome, regardless of not liking the town that much and missing so many days of work. It was a good eye opener to yet another part of lesser-known Alaska and the inner workings of the industries that make the rest of our world go round, so to speak.

I came up to the top of the world for many reasons, but as with all great journeys, I have discovered more that I didn't expect, than things I anticipated. Life has a funny way of working out, and the more we see and experience, the more we grow in so many ways.

Though now tired and horrendously behind on work, I feel refreshed, fulfilled, and ready for more adventures to come, quite in spite of the near future's uncertainty.

A taste of culture

First, I want to share the video I made from the footage on my lost GoPro. It's basically a shortened version of everything I said in my last post. Enjoy!

In other news, yesterday I got to go shoot photography for a local cultural fall festival in the community. Almost as soon as I walked in, I was handed an Eskimo yo-yo made out of duct tape that said "I ♥ bacon" on it (SO random, right??). The woman tried to show me how to do it, but I was pretty hopeless at first. 

The Eskimo yo-yo has two weighted balls, one on each end of the string (the duct tape ones they were making were filled with rice). You hold it in the middle and start swinging one ball in one direction. Then you spin the other ball in the opposite direction, and ideally they should be counterweights and keep spinning with the up-down rhythm of your hand. Let me tell you: easier said than done. 

It was really cool to see everyone playing with them though, from kids to elders. One elder came over after watching me fail miserably at it, and tied a handle on mine and explained how he'd learned to do it growing up. Some people started by laying the yo-yo flat on a table and lifting it up quickly, getting the balls spinning right away; others would hold one ball steady, and start one spinning, and then flip the other ball to get them both going. That's how I eventually got it to work. 

Demo of the one-hand reach

The other interesting part of the event was the Eskimo games. Two young men from the community demonstrated a few of them. Above is the one-hand reach, a game where one person holds a ball on a string at a steady height and the other balances on one hand while reaching up with the other to hit the ball.

Two-foot high kick

Above are photos of the two-foot high-kick. Similar to the one-hand reach, this game's object is to hit the ball with both feet with a small running start. The highest one this man was able to kick was as tall as the top of his head, about 6 feet in the air.

Alaskan high kick

In the Alaskan high kick, the athlete starts from a sitting position on the ground, then balances on one hand, holds his opposite foot with the other hand, and kicks the ball with the remain foot. How the heck do they come up with these things?? It was very impressive.

I think this one was the Eskimo high kick, where the goal is to kick the ball and land on the same foot used for the kicking.

Kids making Eskimo yo-yos

In addition to the game demonstrations, there were also tables for beading, Eskimo yo-yo making, and tons of different kinds of salmon dips.

Traditional Eskimo yo-yo

There was also a table where men and elders were making traditional Eskimo yo-yos with skins and furs.

It was really fun to see some new aspects of the local culture like that, and to see kids actively learning from the elders and multiple generations taking part in Inupiaq games, crafts, and dancing. It was also nice especially because it was a simple community event -- not set up for tourists or outsiders, but just for the people who live here to get together, share their traditions, and encourage kids to embrace their culture.

It was a lot of fun, and I now have a commemorative "I ♥ Bacon" Eskimo yo-yo to keep me occupied for the rest of the season. ;-)

Paying it Forward, GoPro Style

This morning as I was getting ready for work, I was casually perusing the community Facebook group, Nome Post, to see what sort of things were going on. Something caught my eye:

My father-in-law found a GoPro Hero 2 camera on Dexter Creek (behind Anvil Mtn.) with winter outdoor footage from January of 2011. If it's yours or you know whose it is, post or call [Name and number]. We hope to reunite it with its owner! Thanks!

My heart stopped. Could it be? I had a flashback to this past winter when I devastatingly lost my GoPro Hero2 while snowshoeing in that same area. I had felt horrible about it for days, having saved up for months and had just bought it for myself. 

I felt even guiltier when I received a package in the mail a few weeks later containing a new GoPro Hero3: my grandmother had heard about what happened and got me a new one as a gift. I know she had loving intentions, but the guilt has weighed me down ever sense. I didn't deserve it at all, though I was eternally grateful. I have guarded that Hero3 with my life, and as you can probably see from my blog, it gets a lot of use. 

Well, I immediately messaged the person who put up the post, and called her on my lunch break. 

"Yes, it must be yours!" she agreed, "it had footage of a young girl in a turquoise jacket with 3 friends snowshoeing!" 

I could hardly keep my voice calm and steady through my excitement. That camera had been sitting on the tundra for 7 months through 3 seasons, and her father-in-law just happened to find it while berry picking. 

She asked what I planned to do with the camera.

"Um, probably keep it?" I said lamely. I hadn't even thought about that yet.

"Okay. Well if you'd consider selling it later maybe, my son was kind of eyeing it if no one claimed it, since he goes fishing a lot and has been wanting one to take on trips."

After I hung up, I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and what I could do to thank this family for finding my camera, and taking the time to identify who it belonged to, and even coming by my office to drop it off.

When she arrived in late afternoon, I thanked her deeply and told her to keep it. First she kind of freaked out, but I was already taking out the SD card with my footage on it (that's really all I wanted) and handing it back. Because my grandmother had been so incredibly generous to me, and this woman had been so gratuitously kind, I had the opportunity to pay it forward to her. And it felt amazing.

After trying to refuse a couple times, she finally gave me a big hug and said her 12-year-old son would be thrilled. Heck, I was thrilled! I still can't believe it was found.

It's not every day you have the opportunity to give back in a big way, but in this case, it was because of the kindness and generosity of others that I felt I could truly convey my gratitude and pass on the good karma. It was one of those things that you always hear about happening to other people, but I guess it can happen to me, too. 

My faith in humanity has been restored. 

Really bad picture of me from the SD card, the day the camera
was lost :-P