July 27, 2004
Heat wave in Barrow, Alaska
I stand in front of the Barrow welcome sign, between two jawbones taken from bowhead whales.
I am incredibly behind on filing my experiences in Alaska in Denali and Anchorage, and now I have been in Barrow, the northernmost point in the United States, for five days, and I am behind on describing this remarkable place, too!
So I will try to file 2 photos quickly, and post a story I wrote for this week's Arctic Sounder, the local paper. It follows below.
Barrow basks in ‘heat wave’
Friday sets record of 70 degrees
By Jeannette Belliveau
Arctic Sounder
A sailboat bobs at anchor, “coconut palms” sway under a limitless azure sky and families in shorts and T-shirts hold beach barbeques and wade in crystalline water.
The images may conjure up the French Riviera.
But this was the remarkable scene in Barrow -- where the “palm trees” are actually made of Arctic driftwood with baleen fronds -- as a heat wave of sorts began Thursday, July 22, when the mercury hit 60 degrees, and continued through the weekend.
Friday was hotter still, setting an all-time mark of 70 degrees. For once, Barrow set a record for heat rather than cold.
It was the warmest July 23 since 1920, when the Department of Agriculture meteorologists began keeping records for Barrow. The previous record of 69 was set in 1981.
Saturday reached 61, and Sunday’s 66 degrees brought droves of families to the beach for wading. Monday, the mercury hit 67.
The average monthly high for July is 46.5 degrees, according to Dave Stricklan of the National Weather Service office in Barrow. Prior to the heat wave, most daily highs in July had ranged from the mid-40s to the mid-50s.
Stricklan personally fielded nearly 10 calls an hour during the fine weather as local boaters called him directly. The meteorologist answered their questions about the forecast, the wind (a gentle five- to 10-knot easterly) and visibility (unlimited on Saturday).
“People call for info,” Stricklan said. “I don’t think they’d appreciate a recording up here, and it’s nice to talk to them. People are going out in boats hunting. If we have good weather, they want to know when it’s going to change.”
Many residents fired up their outboards and set off for seal and walrus on the ice floes about two miles offshore, passing a small white yacht bearing a couple from Australia en route to Nome. Other folks strapped on rifles and hopped into their four-wheelers to seek duck and caribou on the tundra.
Two students from Ipalook Elementary School, Faith Tyson, 9, and Taryn McKenzie, 10, clambered in T-shirts on the struts supporting the bridge between Tasigarook and Isatkoak lagoons.
“It’s over 60 degrees, and I’m burning up,” Taryn said. “When it’s really nice, we don’t wear sweaters.”
Tourists who had traveled hundreds of miles to experience the Arctic North seem both perplexed and delighted. It was the kind of weather for which most people travel to Florida in the winter, except more comfortable, with low humidity.
“I thought we’d have snow on the ground,” said Dorothy Manns of Airville, Pa., Thursday, waiting beside the Tundra Tours bus outside the Top of the World Hotel.
“We picked the best day,” added Glady Miller of Lakewood, Wash. “It”s just gorgeous now.”
At the Inupiat Heritage Center, the next stop for the tourists, the faces of the performers in the Barrow Native Dance Club shone lightly with perspiration. “Whew, it’s hot,” one commented after enacting a walrus kill and other routines.
By day three of the heat wave, Saturday, most of the town was talking about the weather.
“I love it,” said Alice Brower, born and raised in Barrow and an assistant logistics coordinator at the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium. “When I was a little kid, the weather used to be good. I’d go out and play every day and didn’t know when to go home because it was always lit. For the last four or five years, it’s been dark and cruddy” in the summer.
“Everyone in town has been enjoying it, going out and boating,” Brower added. “A lot of people got their fishnets out and are going rod-and-reeling.”
Residents who had moved to the northernmost point in Alaska precisely because it was cold held a different view.
“It’s horrible,” said Helen Barton, who has been coming to Barrow for 11 summers to house sit and pet sit, leaving behind Binghamton, N.Y. “I wish it was cold with 20 feet of ice. The colder the better. I can’t stand hot weather.”
“It’s too hot,” agreed Dottie Riquier, originally from Massachusetts, as she stood outside the Tuzzy Library. “You don’t move here unless you like it cold -- cold and windy.”
As Mike Stotts, born and raised in Barrow, pumped gas into his truck, he chatted to an acquaintance. “It’s beautiful, I feel like doing nothing. It’s hard to believe that in 120 days it’ll be pitch black and 50 below zero. This is unbelievable.”
On day four of the heat wave, Sarah Nicely, strolling on the beach Sunday afternoon with her family, said, “I’ve lived here since ’83, and it’s amazing. It’s wonderful, beautiful weather.”
On a bluff near the airport runway, Bunna Edwardson of Arctic Adventures led a group of tourists in spotting a quartet of gray whales, spouting and sounding offshore.
“It’s too hot,” he said. “I’m gonna jump in (the sea) later. It’s a scorcher.”
Meteorologist Stricklan confirmed that some previous years have been quite a bit danker. In July 2000, it rained almost every day. In July 2003, “only two days was it not overcast.”
The reason for the beautiful days this July? “We’ve got a weak high pressure system over us,” Stricklan said ... in other words, the “lack of a weather system” brought wonderful weather.
Or “a scorcher,” depending on your point of view.
- posted by jbelliveau at 11:17 PM in Alaska
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July 14, 2004
Iditarod Headquarters
Photo by Jeannette Belliveau
Sled dogs at the Iditarod Headquarters crane their heads to see if a run of the tourist sled is imminent.
On the weekend of July 9-11, my hosts Darrell and Rose and I began the trip up to Talkeetna for a flight-seeing trip to Denali.
On the way we stopped in Wasilla to visit the Iditarod Headquarters. Here are its sled dogs waiting to give a $5 ride to tourists on a wheeled wagon, it being summertime the option of a sled with runners is not practical.
The dogs slumber quite out of it until four tourists are loaded on the sled and a ride appears imminent. Then they scramble to their feet, some so thrilled they stand on their hind legs and pirouette. The ride is over in a heartbeat, as the dogs race at what feels like 20 mph on a circular path at the headquarters.
Inside the main building are stuffed past Iditarod champions, framed photographs and a room where a video contains aerial shots of the race. One segment captured the grandeur of the scenery as the mushers pass alone through towering mountains with no sign of human development.
- posted by jbelliveau at 9:13 PM in Alaska
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Flight-seeing on Denali
Photo by Jeannette Belliveau
Shown above: The icefall of the Ruth Glacier emerging from Denali, North America's highest peak. The glacier turns into a jumble as it crosses a rapidly descending slope.
On July 9 at 8:30 a.m., I took a flight-seeing tour with K2 Aviation in Talkeetna. I signed up for the cheapest, simplest tour, the "blue" McKinley experience tour, for $120 for a one-hour flight (normally $140, but I found a $20 off coupon on their flier picked up at the Visitor Information Center in Anchorage.
Three retirees from Pennsylvania and myself got ready to board our Piper Cherokee with pilot Rick Hortsmann, "pilot / musher," of Willow, who with his thick bush beard and Southern California manner of speaking seems like a cross between a mountain man and a latter version of Beach Boy Dennis Wilson. "I was a Navy pilot for 27 years," he announced. Trying to set us at ease, he added, "I'm a cautious, old pilot."
"No barrel rolls, then," said a white-haired passenger, one of the retirees.
"No," Rick confirmed.
As did my missionary pilot, Emile Borne, in Borneo (described in An Amateur's Guide to the Planet), Rick showed us where the first aid kit and emergency transponder were located. I was as usual very nervous about going up in a small plane, but successfully kept my emotions in check so as to enjoy the experience. We loaded up, myself beside Rick in front, the retirees in the second and third rows of the Cherokee.
We took off and immediately found ourselves above a tangle of three wide, shallow rivers, the Talkeetna, meaning (according to Rick) "river of plenty," the Susitna, appropriately "river of islands," and the Chulitna, "river of sticks."
I had a brief moment of panic after takeoff. "I hate mountains," I thought to myself. They look dark and dangerous to a flat-lander such as myself, happier with hills and greenery than vertical granite. I said a quick prayer and then settled down.
Rick made a running commentary over his headset, and the passengers also wore headsets to listen and to ask questions. This worked well given the high level of engine noise.
"Talkeetna is a large airport by Alaska standards," Rick noted, as we left the airplane parking strip and turned into the top of a T junction, where the main runway lay. "Two Kilo Tango," he reported to the "tower," as we taxied into position for takeoff.
The Cherokee took off and slowly gained altitude. "We're 60 miles from the Summit, and 22 miles from the foothills," Rick said, and a dark brooding range appeared to our northwest. Below, we could see the Parks Highway, the road, two lanes in this stretch, linking Anchorage and Fairbanks. The jumble of rivers ran in swooping serpentines (just like in lowland Borneo), and lakes, some with a single home or lodge on the bank, dotted the landscape.
"It's 5,500 miles west, to [St.] Petersburg, Russia, until you hit the next road system to the Parks Highway," Rick said. "We're at 4,000 feet of altitude now. The glaciers that carved this valley were 4,000 feet deep," he added, inviting us to imagine the colossal depth of the rivers of ice that created much of our view.
We passed into the mountain range above the toe of the Ruth Glacier, 3-1/2 miles wide. "When I came up here, I expected to see a white, snowy glacier," Rick noted, as we gazed upon dirt and debris that makes the bottom of the glacier an ugly mess compared to the top.
The Ruth Glacier, he said, is 35 miles long, 1.2 to 3.5 miles wide, and moves 4 feet a day at the top. Rick stated that it had carved a gorge 9,000 feet deep out of "solid granite," creating the deepest land depression on the Earth's surface (although some ocean trenches are deeper).
In winter, the glacier lies under 30 to 40 feet of snow, according to the pilot. We moved along to the Backside Glacier.
Rick put "Tribute" by Yanni onto the airline CD player. "Anyone doesn't like the music?" he asked. Yuck, I thought silently. "I think it adds to the Imax theater effect," Rick added, to a resounding silence from our group. I thought about the frequent and trite observation, often derided by literary travel writers, that most anything dramatic or interesting "is like a movie," when obviously it is movies that should be imitating real life, not the other way around.
Underneath the dirty lower sections of a glacier, Rick said, is 500 feet of ice, with water (the beginnings of the rivers born of many a glacier) running underneath the ice. "It's the water running underneath that makes sinkholes," he said.
Sinkholes hundreds of feet deep appeared toward the very bottom of the sinkhole, and then a boil looking like Scylla churned mud dramatically skyward.
A cloud ceiling of 9,000 feet prevented us from taking the advertised route up the Ruth Glacier, through the Great Gorge and the Don Sheldon Amphitheater on the flanks of Denali, and back the Tokostina Glacier, so we turned from the Ruth Glacier back to Talkeenta.
Photo by Jeannette Belliveau
A view of the Tokosha Mountains, a small range arising from the foothills south of Denali.
On less sunny days, the flight-seeing trip is shorter, but still arguably worthwhile for the unique view even of part of the range. That is a debatable point, however, as the mountain is hidden two days out of three, making safe flying on the advertised routes not about to happen.
Rick told us flying back to the sirport that he had been in Alaska for 10 years and runs a company called Wings and Paws, offering flight-seeing and dogsled rides with his 22 furry "children." He has entered the famous Iditarod sled race.
How did he do? "I finished," he said, pausing for dramatic effect ... "alive."
- posted by jbelliveau at 9:12 PM in Alaska
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July 6, 2004
Alaska Native Heritage Center
Well, after a near-lifetime of avoiding using the word "native" in respect to indigenous people, I am learning that this is the preferred term up here in Alaska.
Yesterday, my colleague Rose and I visited the Alaska Native Heritage Center here in Anchorage. Anyone with a bit of amateur anthropologist (or geographer) in them will love the center. Outdoor replicas of living quarters appear for Alaska's Indians, the Athabascans; for its Eskimo peoples, the Yup'ik and Cup'ik, Inupiaq, and Aleut and Alitiiq; and the Tlingit and related tribes who share the Northwest Coast culture of the Seattle area Indians.
Eskimos apparently entered their half-buried timber homes via tunnels about four feet high, with chambers leading off for food. The tunnels prevented the cold from entering the structure. In Alaska, they did not build igloos (this was a feature of Canadian natives).
The Tlingit structures of cedar are gorgeous and smell wondeful, and the center features a nearby totem pole. The planking of the outside walls is gappy during the summer, allowing ventilation, and swells shut so the sides of the planks shut during winter, keeping the heat in.
Two aspects of our visit stood out. First, native Alaskan teens serve as guides to the structure, and may be the most charming young people in the 50 states. They really made the visit for me. A young girl named Lisa, with a sweet smile, showed us a tunic her grand-mother made her. Others showed us otter skins, steps to the roof made of notched logs, grass baskets and similar paraphernalia.
Second, I wonder again, as I did in my book An Amateur's Guide to the Planet, about the links of Indonesian Borneo to the rest of the world. In Amateur, I wrote of the links between Borneo and Polynesia to the east and Madagascar to the west. Looking at native Alaskan tribal artifacts, I saw a lot of similarity between baskets, notched log ladders, and communal houses to aspects of Borneo.
Is Borneo the cultural template for most of the Pacific rim? If so, what an incredible sphere of influence for these highland island people.
- posted by jbelliveau at 12:30 AM in Alaska
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July 1, 2004
Entering moose country
I find myself quite abruptly in Anchorage, Alaska, helping my friend and former Baltimore Sun colleague Rose Ragsdale with design and editing a chain of community newspapers. She is short of staff and called me in to help, and I found myself on an airplane nine days later.
Rose picked me up at the airport on Monday and we went straight from the airport to work, laying out a small newspaper called the Tundra Drums, which serves a community near where the Yukon River enters the ocean, along the western edge of the state. Everyone I met at the office, and talked to on the phone, was extremely nice.
There was a buzz at the office and everyone rushed to the windows, not three hours after I arrived. There was a moose trotting up the street! You have to picture this happening in a large-ish city, very sprawling like Virginia Beach, and the newspaper offices are in an industrial park (kind of like where Army Times is, Lamont) near the city's largest mall.
Today is my fourth day here and I just saw another moose. Rose lent me her Huffy bicycle, and I rode from her house into downtown, and then along the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail. About four miles along, I heard a loud crashing in the trees beside the trail, and came to a halt. It was another cow moose, eating leaves. She walked up a slope and starting eating right beside the trail. If I can figure out the technology, I will try to add a digital picture of her to this blog.
As I stopped and watched and photographed her, other bicyclists came upon the area and took pictures as well. Either we are all tourists, or even the locals like seeing moose. Giant mosquitos do tend to settle all over your hands if you keep still, so I eventually headed along.
It feels like it is in the low 60s today. Have not seen the snowcapped mountains that encircle the city yet, because there is a cloud system firmly in place, but it doesn't matter. So far I like getting to know this area based on diving in at the deep end and being here as a worker, much as I was when I lived in England and knew the place in a different way to a tourist.
- posted by jbelliveau at 9:25 PM in Alaska
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What is O'Malley thinking?
I am sitting now in the Anchorage, Alaska, public library, reading online the Baltimore Sun. I am wondering if Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley really said:
I remember after the attacks of September 11, as mayor of the city, I was very, very worried about al-Qaida and still am. But I'm even more worried about the actions and inactions of the Bush administration.
Given my current distance from Baltimore, it seems almost like a parody of life to read that these remarks landed WBAL jockey Chip Franklin on Bill O'Reilly's show, but I supposed it all really happened. Figures I would miss all this political excitement in Baltimore!
This is just another example of mayoral meltdown in the city, as our once tough-on-crime candidate that filled many city residents with hope descends like a freefalling elevator into kneejerk liberalism and perhaps even the Hard Left.
- posted by jbelliveau at 9:13 PM in The Neighborhood
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