Home Folks (Report 10)

Frannie at Atigun Pass

Lianne at

 Roche Montanee

One of the reasons I haven’t blogged for a month is I was blessed with visits from a number of friends.  Frannie Christensen, a friend from last year at Denali, came for a couple of nights.  We drove up and over Atigun Pass, stopping to walk in a few places, and enjoying the sunshine on the hills.

Les on the Deitrich

My niece, Lianne, and her friend, Les, from Texas also fearlessly drove the ancient Subaru from Fairbanks.  It was a memory trip for Les because he had come up to be a welder’s help with the Oklahoma 798 Union in the mid 70s.  He pointed out many interesting places:  where he found a whole truck load of stolen frozen steaks (pilfering was endemic) and where the an alligator was buried by a full entourage from Galbraith camp after they managed to overdose it on pot and coke.  The three of us drove the pipeline from Coldfoot to Deadhorse.  Discouraged by a wandering grizzly from camping outside Deadhorse,  we stayed at the Prudhoe Bay Hotel, another set of quiet, double-wide trailers designed for oil workers:   tons of washing machines, mandatory booties, enough food for threshers, an elaborate exercise room but otherwise very unpretentious.  Buildings in Deadhorse either need to be elevated to prevent the permafrost from melting or have ground freezers to keep it from thawing.  

Frost polygons

Pingo

Rock on the Sag

Sagavanurktok River

Caribou season just opened so there was more traffic than usual on the road, i.e., another vehicle every ten miles with hunting camps at every turnoff.  We watched as three different groups of  bow hunters all went after the same cow.  She was moving fast!  The Sagavanirktok River had white-caps and there was still aufeis on Franklin Bluffs.

Becky at Marion Creek

Becky on ridge above Marion Creek

L & L left and Becky and Paul, neighbors from Helena and their friend, Robert from Anchorage, appeared at Marion Camp.  The table laughter with them the first night had me laughing harder than I had all summer.  They are such witty storytellers!  Paul and Robert took off north while Becky and I spent a day exploring Coldfoot and biking home to Marion Creek together in full daylight at 10:30 pm.  Her second day we hiked up Marion Creek and climbed the side of one of the ridges, up past a pretty waterfall and over the lacey, white reindeer lichen.  The blueberries, crowberries and cranberries begged to be picked so we took pity and accommodated them.  While hiking home we found the Marion Creek crossing to be very cool and clean and refreshing to our feet which were not as bouncy as when we started.

Gary, Meadow and Charlotte at Wiseman

Gary and Meadow at Coldfoot Airport

The day Becky and Paul left, Gary and Meadow flew in to Coldfoot for an evening’s jaunt to Wiseman. 

Odds, Ends and Oddities (Report 8)

Wiseman 4th of July

I haven’t blogged for a whole month due to company, working, rafting and computer difficulties.  This blog is a hodgepodge of unrelated bits of the summer:

 Every 4^th of July Clutch, Eightball and the other members of the furthest north American Legion have a celebration with BBQ, a keg, and potluck.  The population of Wiseman goes from thirteen to eighty. There’s a bug tent for the musicians but the BBQ smoke does a good job of keeping the pests away.  Plus everyone wears deet. Many of those attending were miners. One well tanned woman explained to me how she and her husband mined.  When she described how it is an addiction, I totally understood.   Ever since I found my amazing crystal, I have been obsessively scanning the ground for another one.

Church in Wiseman

I went to the Kalakbuk Chapel for church one Sunday morning.  Walking in the door I smelled incense and thought “Catholic” until I realized it was Pic, the mosquito incense coils we all use.  The sixteen of us sang without accompaniment.  June Reakoff, 78, gave a lovely sermon on thinking positively and thanking God for helping us in things great and small.  Jack Reakoff, sitting next to me, led us in many of the songs, nonchalantly waving his mosquito death racket as he did so.  Since June he has had that contraption with him whenever I’ve seen him.  Most of us carry them with us, too.  The zap as they fry the mosquitoes is quite satisfying although I hate the incinerator smell when the juicier ones are electrocuted.



More lousewort

Lichen on stream

Dall sheep skull

Drying out the tents

Blooming fireweed

Soap berries

Cloud berry



Old Wiseman store



Coldfoot Post Office:  no guns or knives, except  troopers

Sunset at Marion Camp

Trucks at Coldfoot

Xavier who biked from Argentina

Coldfoot Sled Dog Yard

First week in Coldfoot, Alaska (Report 1)

Preamble:

Meadow and I got off to a good start from Seattle but the engine developed a few loose parts and was no longer safe to drive by the middle of BC at Fraser Lake.   I was angry at myself for my own culpability, i.e., not checking the oil (What was I thinking!!!).  We spent five days in Fraser Lake, most of it in an agony of indecision:  try to fix the old car?  fly to Alaska?  buy a Windstar van?  bus a hundred miles into Prince George and buy a car there? I ended up I buying a used Subaru from someone who replaced the good tires and battery while I went to the bank.  Of course, I had no proof as I hadn’t noted the brand of tires or taken any pictures before leaving.  Otherwise trip up Stuart-Cassiar and Alaska Highway was pretty uneventful except for grizzly, caribou and bird sightings.  Meadow is settled into her job at Princess.

May 16,  The Arctic Interagency gang and I left Fairbanks and convoyed up to Coldfoot, stopping at the trophy signs of Dalton Highway and Arctic Circle.  We walked out on the still frozen Yukon River and froze ourselves in the wind and snow at Finger Mountain.  The Hot Spot hadn’t opened for the season so Dotty quickly and graciously made a fire and presented us with hot sausage sandwiches at her place at 5/7 mile where she will spend the summer alone, manning the Yukon River Station.  I rather wish I were her because I’m still feeling shy around these people.  I have to battle my tongue to keep from talking too much.  This is, of course, no surprise to any of you.  The people I am with are all smarter than I am and so much more knowledgeable about everything.  I want to be known and accepted, a process that will take all summer but makes me miss all my friends here and now.

May 17.   This day after training I walked from the Arctic Interagency Visitors Center to our cabin at Marion Camp where Annie and I share the Fish and Wildlife Kanuti cabin.  Without dawdling or taking photos I can make it home in one and a half hours.  On the way I saw my first Lapland Larkspur, a group of who kept just ahead of me on the road, eating seeds next to the road where the snow had thawed, and working their way north to the tundra for breeding season.  Lots of birds have been stuck further south, waiting for the snow to melt.  The grizzlies are hungry because there is no food for them with all the snow.  It’s a hard time all around for most of the animals and birds.  Their four months of non-snow has been shrunk this year by a good month.

May 18^th. We woke to 12 degree weather and no heat or electicity.  Through necessity I now know five times more about inverters and generators.   At training today  we learned about interpretation vs. environmental education.  Interpretation is a means of using our knowledge but adding an emotional/intellectual tie that pulls our awareness to the intangible values we have regarding natural processes.  After work I biked up the Dalton (one truck in seven miles) and joined the others at a potluck at the Castle, the NPS cabin which has hot and cold running water and indoor toilets.

May 19^th, 8 degrees at 7:30.  Today at the AIVC I worked on my orientation talk on caribou headgear, attempting to add an emotional, intangible (values) component to what  I have given before as  mostly an outdoor education lecture.  We also learned about powerpoint do’s and don’t’s and brainstormed ways to deal with various problems in our audiences, e.g., kids, know-it-alls, etc.  We walked to the pipeline and the DOT site and the airport and saw the dry cabins sin electricity where Craig and James live.  The hardest, craziest, most fun of the day was our Rock Star presentations in which we surveyed the rock display in front of the AIVC, choose a rock, and added some of its characteristics to a popular ‘rock’ song.  Dotty and I were the Granite Grannies and we mangled Simon and Garfunkel’s “I Am a Rock, I Am Red Chert” in our song ‘Kanayuk Conglomerate’.  Also, this evening we were again without heat so Karen showed us how to switch out our propane tanks.

May 20^th.  We were supposed to drive up to Galbraith Lake and Toolik Research Station on the tundra but Atigan Pass was snowed in so we will go in August.  Instead, Jack Reakoff, long time resident of Wiseman and new father, gave us a historical tour of Wiseman, a mining town about thirteen miles up from Coldfoot.  The Wiseman River had just gone out at 8 in that morning.  The snow around the cabins was quickly turning to mud.  What I feel most when I hear the stories of the people who live here year round is the question, “Could I do it, too?”   Am I strong enough to survive, tough it out and enjoy it??  Only seventy five plus miles north of the Arctic Circle, Wiseman does get a fair amount of ‘civil twilight”.  Cross country skiing and snowmachines would be a fun way to get around if I could stand the cold and dark.  If I only had ten to thirteen neighbors, how friendly would I be?

 

May 21^st.  Warmer weather with much mud.  We drove in a two truck, seven-person convoy up to Atigan Pass where the road crests the Brooks Range.  We stood on frozen mounds called pulsas, oo-awed as a group over Sukapak Mountain, competed in First Person, i.e., first person to see an animal over 100 pounds, first person to see a mosquito, first person to find a wildflower (ha-ha).  We saw two golden eagles, three bear hunters, a Christmas tree inside an outhouse (guess!), the last spruce tree between here and the North Pole, eight caribou, a Northern pintail duck, and, to everyone’s surprise and pleasure, a lone grizzly on top of the Pass.

 

May 22^nd.  It must have gotten into the 60s today.  Marion Creek is running and the ditches are all full.  This is the first day I rode the 5 ½ miles to work from the Marion Creek complex of BLM, NPS and Fish & Wildlife cabins.  We tidied up the store, adding price labels.  Ted saw two moose around the campground.  Annie and I found the two geocaches over by Coldfoot Camp.  We both spent a relaxing evening doing little besides, uh, relaxing.  I’m starting to draw again, play my guitar and am reading a Nevada Barr novel set in Big Bend National Park.  After spending a great part of the day learning little gadgets like label and price makers and being frustrated by the inability to get on the DAR or Internet with my BLM computer and being frustrated by the FAX machine,  I found hanging up my laundry on our screened in porch was the most I could handle.

Down the Koyukuk with Jackie and Karen (Report 11)

Jackie, postmistress from Coldfoot Camp, Karen, my supervisor, and I borrowed a raft from Coyote Air and put in at Coldfoot for a three day float down to Bettles, a town on the Koyukuk River.  Bettles is only accessible by air, by river or in the winter by ice road.  The week before we left, it rained.  On our return ten minutes before our plane landed back at Coldfoot, it started to rain.  In between when we were on the river, the weather was perfect, not too hot nor too cold.  The river was low but it still moved along at a good clip.  Before the Middle Fork  joined the North Fork at the Gates of the Arctic National Park, we only had a few gravel bars to drag over or phalarope*   We were so blessed!

In one smooth section we drifted and watched a Pacific loon.  We passed one of the tors where Mardie Murie poised in 1924 on her dog sled ride up to Wiseman.  Shortly afterward, we met two second-season grizzly bear cubs. We stopped on the other side of the river to give them room. When we made ourselves known with our “hey, bears” routine, they huffed at us.  Their mom huffed back from the dense willows and then immediately responded to their pleas by rushing down to the beach, too.  I was relieved when they left because I didn’t want any close encounters involving either bear spray or Jackie’s 44 revolver.  

Despite the way the river threw us on the cutbanks into a tremendous number of sweeps which had fallen into the river during the unusually late breakup, the float was mostly relaxing, involving little hard core paddling and almost no wind.  Because the river was down from a dry summer, we worried about getting to Bettles in time on the fourth day to catch our 3:00 pm chartered ‘tweener’ flight home.  Fortunately, the river still moved us along between 3 and 5 mph as gauged by the GPS.  

By the 2^nd night we were at the confluence with the North Fork.  We did the usual check for grizzly bear tracks and scat.  We found only old tracks so pitched our tents and were starting on supper when a young grizzly came curiously out of the bushes across the river.  She tested the water as if trying to decide to cross and casually walked toward us along the river bank.  Obviously she was interested in who and what we might be and didn’t seem to think our shouts of “hey, bear, time to go away” were worth her notice.  Jackie and I were uncomfortable and I knew I wouldn’t sleep well with her snuffling around trying to figure us out so we decamped in five minutes and went along down the river in the beauty of the waning light.  After another two river miles we found a satisfactory sandbar with only old bear sign.  In the morning there we found recent wolf tracks.

To our surprise we made Bettles by supper time on Day Three.  Our choice in the restaurant was lasagna and salad or nothing.  I made the right choice as it was good home cooking.   For dessert I had a warm shower.  We stayed in the bunkhouse, i.e., the ubiquitous double-wide trailer, and hung out in the lodge watching planes land.  Two other guests flew in: a Japanese couple who had been stuck in the Brooks Range at Itkillik Lake for four days waiting for weather good enough for a float plane to find them.  It would have been a loooong walk out for them in the snow if the plane hadn’t been able to fly in.  

In the morning we visited the dog sled yard, the Gates of the Arctic National Park/ Kanuti Refuge Visitors Center and admired the few homes in Evansville.  Steve from NATC arrived on time in his Navaho to fly us out.  We loaded and jumped in quickly since we were paying by the hour for just the three of us.  I was amazed at the many hidey holes in the plane for stuffing in gear. The flight home following the river was uneventful and oh, so quick in comparison to the float.  We saw another grizzly on the banks.  When I was biking home the next day I saw a black bear on the road.  To carry bear spray everywhere I go has been a comfort for me.

*Phalarope are hyperactive water birds who circle manically to stir up snack plankton from bottom of shallow ponds.  A way to get off of sandbars without wading is to let the water swirl the unstuck end around and free you.