Deadhorse at the End of the Road (Report 9, July 29)



Our muskox

This past weekend five of us at the AIVC drove up the rest of the
Dalton Highway from Coldfoot to Deadhorse, aka Prudhoe Bay, on the
Beaufort Sea on the Arctic Ocean.  Not very far from home and still in
the boreal forest we spotted a lone male muskox on the Dietrich River.
 He was my first live wild muskox!

With Craig, boss guy, at Galbraith Earthcache

Christie at the red rock flour stream at Galbraith.

At Galbraith Lake we had lunch and played in the rain by the swollen
creek turned red by rock flour washed down from the Gates glacier.
Undeterred by the miserable weather we stopped frequently: by Slope
Mountain to look for Dall Sheep unsuccessfully and on the
Sagavanirktok River for fossils, which we all found.  Thirty miles
outside Deadhorse there was a herd of about twenty muskoxen.   Late
afternoon found us limping into town with a punctured but still

functional tire.  The Silverado truck seats six and is a jacked up but
uncomfortable ride on the washboard road.  

Other than the sixteen
wheelers most vehicles are trucks of some kind, usually white and
belonging to the government or Alaska DOT or Alyeska (“No One Gets
Hurt”) or another contractor on the pipeline.  We met three bikers who
had cycled from Argentina, two of whom were legally blind and riding a
tandem.  Throw in a handful of motorcyclists and a few intrepid
vacationers in campers and you have the Dalton travelers.
Deadhorse and the Prudhoe Bay oilfield consist of about four full-time
residents and 3 to 6,000 transient workers who claim elsewhere as
home.  Most switch out of Deadhorse every two weeks by plane.  We ate
at the Aurora and slept at Deadhorse Camp, both of which are one of
the many dormitory/hotels used by the workers.  Christie and I were
among the very few women there.  We  left outdoor shoes at the door
and donned hospital style booties or slippers to keep the endless mud
out of the buildings.  The $20 buffet had something for everyone,
more choices than I’ve seen since leaving Montana.  We tried a bit of
everything, including ice cream and ten different desserts.

After dinner I introduced Christie to geocaching.  Since the sun was
still not setting there, we had all night but only did a couple of
caches.  She saw her first caribou amid the construction rigs and
trucks.  We also saw red-necked phalaropes by the hundreds, cackling
and white-fronted geese, scaups and spectacled eiders.  With the rain
there was mud everywhere which made this unloveliest of locations even
uglier.

Geocaching at Steel Pi

 

Inside Deadhorse

In the morning we did the guided tour to the ocean, the only way to
get there since everyone must be cleared by security before entering
the oilfield area.  For liability reasons we weren’t allowed to swim
in the ocean so the rest of my group ‘fell’ into the water.  Oops!
Not being a cold water person, I resisted.  Deadhorse is a once-in-a
lifetime experience in that no one would want to do it twice.

Charlotte in Beaufort Sea

AIVC group in Arctic Ocean





Plug ins at every parking space in Deadhorse



Typical Arctic housing

G-L-O-R-I-A, Gloria! (Report 7)



Janet and the Data

This past week was the literal and figurative the high point of my summer.  I spent five days in the field with Janet Jorgenson and two other botanist/horticulturists up in the mountains north of Atigun Gorge on the extreme north side of the Brooks Range in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  We worked on the GLORIA project which is an international alpine study based in Vienna:  Global Observation Research Initiative in Alpine Environments.   Scientists from six countries are studying the vegetation on high mountains to see if it changes over time.  Every five years Janet and company climb four mountains, lay out colored cord to transect their summits, record what plants are present and do one meter square sample counts from sixteen areas on each peak.   My role was mostly winding and unwinding the cord, taking photographs, recording data as she called it out.  I also got to dig up and place data loggers which record the soil temperature every two hours for the entire five years.  



Al and Janet



Even on the mountain tops the skeeters were brutal.   They were worse, though, at our lakeside camp site between the peaks.  As we tried to sleep at night in our tents, the bodies of the bugs battering our tents sounded like constant rain.  Janet lent me a bug jacket for the rest of the summer.  Alhumdullilah!!!  I understand now that the Toolik Research station record of 278 mosquitoes killed with one hand slap was NOT an exaggeration.  I’ve decided to write a mystery novel in which the victim is stripped naked and left to die on the tundra.   Estimates put this as a mere 22 hours of exposure until enough blood is sucked out to bring on death by dehydration.  Yuck!  My thoughts are grisly.  In contrast the botanists I worked with are very gentle and kind people.   This is noteworthy in an environment in which one could easy have gone ‘buggy’ and collapsed into a constant ‘whine’.  One of the botanists was smiling constantly because of his delight in the foliage.  Another benefit of hanging out with botanists is that, unlike birders, they sleep in to a reasonable time and stop every five minutes while ascending mountains to exclaim over the plants and share their expertise, giving me time to catch my breath, take photos and exclaim also.  These are my type of people!

Today I am recovering in my cabin.  I’ve been so busy that I haven’t been drawing or playing my guitar.  I’ll have to wait until October to relax.  Happy summer to all!  In a couple of weeks Arctic autumn will arrive with wandering caribou,  bright colors and no bugs.



I love lousewort!



Rocky high road



Chinese lantern







Notice skeeters which are in all our photos.



Sofa Farts and Arctic Cranberries (Report 6)



Bluthroat babies

Last week we took a day trip to the Toolik Research Station at 68 degrees, 38 minutes north on the North Slope of the Brooks Range.  Though the University of Alaska Fairbanks, i.e., UAF, sponsors Toolik, professors and students from around the world come to watch plots of earth, monitor birds and bugs, pluck tundra, measure gases in the air and the water and the earth.  Over lunch I talked with a prof and his student.  She is measuring the flame retardant we used to apply to clothes, curtains and furniture.  The chemicals which ooze off the old sofa on the backyard porch are now being monitored at Toolik.  Though flame retardant as we once knew it is no longer being used, it shows up here not only in the air but in the plants and animals.  Native people eat it in their foods. 

      

Food is great at Toolik!



Seth and Art showed us a pair of yellow-billed loons on Toolik Lake.  Toolik is Inupiat for yellow-billed loon so we suppose the loons have been coming there for centuries.  They also took us to a nest where we saw five bluethroat thrush babies.  We also heard but did not see the yellow wagtail.



On Facebook I placed a note about the Northern Wheatear which I see when I climb high on the rocky ridges.  This songbird flies to northern Africa.  In the July National Geographic there is an article about how the songbirds I see here are being shot, trapped and eaten all around the Mediterranean.  I don’t mind eating chicken so why am I squeamish about songbirds?  Still, I am saddened.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/15/songbird-migration-record-may-go-to-northern-wheatear_n_1278635.html

I also posted a photo of me climbing another shoulder of Coca Cola Mountain, aka Marion Peak.  It’s heights are close, easy and will keep me busy most of the summer.  I discovered a lovely little waterfall along the mining road.

Aufeis on Marion Creek, early July

There’s still aufeis on Marion Creek and sheltered places along the road.



Linda with Marion Creek Griz track



Linda and Ray who also are retired and work at the center spent an afternoon with me.  She gave me a watercolor lesson and the three of made plaster casts of some grizzly bear tracks I found up Marion Creek.

Karen gave us an “Unexpected Party” where we ate cake and saw the Hobbit in the theater.

For the 4^th of July proper I went hiking at Atigun Pass with two Hollanders, Job and Jo, who are taking a year to travel North and South America.  They are both athletic but he loves to get up higher onto the mountain.  Once the talus started sliding under our feet, Jo and I turned around while he went to the top. 

A couple from my home town of Shelby, Ohio showed up at the Visitors Center.  Because I left in 1975, I no longer think of Ohio as home but there was something comforting in this flash from the past.  Judy, nee Roth, had taken her pets to Daddy and she is a cousin to Gloria Worthington, a high school buddy.  She also knows Mark Fry, my first boyfriend. 

 

When I first came here, everything felt exotic.  Now it is feels like home and just the way it should be.  I don’t miss traffic lights nor ice cream stores nor concrete.  I meet more than enough people at the center at Coldfoot.  We are now quite busy at the AIVC where I have difficulty finding time to do all I should.  I bookkeep for the bookstore and Karen checks me. It is cooling off and raining more, the Alaska weather which I was expecting.  I am even finding peace with the mosquitos.  I love the moments when I can sit quietly in the cabin and not feel any nearby.  My daily bike to work is just as joyful as when I started.  I’ve now ridden 400 bike miles.



Valerian









Atigun Pass





The Gol-Darn Bloody Skeeters are Freaking Me Out! (Report 5)





Sukakpak from the NW with wild sweet pea blooming in foreground.

Are the mosquitos driving me out of my mind?  

Geared up to hike in 80 degree weather in the Arctic

No, not really.  Okay, maybe.  Yes, really!!!!!  This is requiring all I’ve learned in a lifetime of practice: focus, positive thinking, self-distraction.  

DEET really does work.  No longer worried about bearing mutant children, I lather up with the repellant.  Unfortunately, I’m still a mouth-breather so I inhale the little buggers as I bike and hike.  They also get up my nose.   The ones I hate the most are the five or six that fly into the safety zone of my cabin on my shirt tails when I come inside.  In the middle of the night they wake me up with the lightest buzz and touch.  The choice is to either ignore them or spend half my night chasing them around with the fly swatter.

Otherwise, life is fantastic.   Tex, aka Jeffery, a server from Coldfoot Camp, and Christie, a Yupik nursing student from Oregon, hiked up the mountain behind camp with me.  It was their first mountain so I got to relive the wonder and power of seeing the whole world from such an elevated perspective.  He has biked 12,000 miles in the past three years and she is a star basketball player so they had no problems other than the slide down the steeper sections of sphagnum moss.

I also got to play hide-and-seek with a snowshoe hare research team.  First we had to find the grid and then the plots and lastly get down on hands and knees and search for the hare pellets.  Since the hare/lynx cycle is at an ebb, my partner and I only found one pellet in two days of searching.  I was ready to capture a hare, hold it over the grids and squeeze the pellets out.  

Jenna hunting for bunny poop.



Not to worry, researchers, it was only a fantasy.  Fantasies become much more elemental in the boreal forest.   

Did I mention we had a 19 year old sharpshooter girl whose job it was to hold the shotgun and protect us from the grizzlies while we concentrated on the ground??  After the seeking, the counting, the sweat and mosquito swarms, we got to relax on the gravel beaches of the Hammond River, wading, splashing, rockhounding.  The mountain ridges and the rivers are places where the wind can blow unimpeded and purify the air of mosquitoes.  I really, truly appreciate a good stiff breeze here.

Another day outside was spent picking up trash along the highway as a team.  Ted won the prize for most trucker pee bottles found. I found the remains of an old car wreck.  We celebrated afterward at Coldfoot Camp.  I will work for root beer floats most any day.

K. likes to keep us happy so Wednesday when there were free seats on the NATC flight to Anaktuvuk Pass, Caylon, Christie and I got to go.  In an eight passenger plane we flew over the Gates of the Arctic National Park and between what Bob Marshall called the Gates:  Boreal Peak and Frigid Crags.   The North Fork of the Koyukuk flows between them. 

Anaktuvuk is a 350+ self-governing Eskimo village within the National Park.  Unlike most villages which are on the coast, it is smack dab in the middle of the mountains, located there because the caribou herd flows through on their way to calve on the coast.  The Numamiuts are Inupiat and until fifty years ago, nomadic.  Harriet, a native and mother of six, escorted us through town and took us to the Simon Paneak Visitors Center.    She didn’t mind being called Eskimo even though the more politically correct term is Native Alaskan.  There are also Athabaskan Indians in Alaska who are not Eskimo in the least.  They live in the Interior or southeastern Alaska.

Because it was a last minute deal I didn’t have time to bike home for my Dramamine. Baaaarf! The paying passengers were not impressed with me. 

The next morning was Summer Solstice so Karen, Chinook the sled dog and I drove up over Atigun Pass to Roche Moutanee, the drainage just south of the famous Atigan Gorge.  The scenery was breathtaking but between the skeeters and the 80 degree heat, we were miserable and only lugged our backpacking gear in a few miles.  Once we had erected the tent, our evening walk was more enjoyable.  We found a complete dall sheep ram’s skull with nearly complete curl.  The wild flowers carpeted the entire drainage and the streams were overflowing, making it hard to cross.  The bugs were so bad we had cold cereal for supper and threw ourselves into the tent.  A storm blew in, cooled us off and swept the bugs into Canada.  The next morning was heaven: stiff wind, cooler temps, no bugs and the space and scenery I needed to fill my soul.

Still lots of aufeis on the Deitrich River.  That's layers of ice still floating above the flowing water.



Happy Solstice, enjoy your bug free moments!



Fragrant Lapland Rosebay



Wintergreen, a pyrola

Every predator's favorite food source: the arctic ground squirrel.

Wooly Lousewort is HERE! (Report 4)

How am I to write a blog?  The weeks fly and I can’t remember what happened yesterday.  With my biking to work and hiking and dog walking, at night I make supper at 11 pm., read a chapter, pull the blackout curtains and fall straight to sleep.  April to October is my time for activity, not rumination.  Now is the time for me to live without thinking.  I’m content with what I have right now:  physical activity out of doors, meaningful tasks and friends everyday for a little conversation. Still I’ll try to dreg something up for this blog.

I started the week with a solo hike up to Marion Falls, the result of a landslide that came down 2,000 feet of mountain and blocked Marion Creek.  As in Denali the BLM corridor along the Dalton Highway has no “official” or maintained trails but occasionally one can find a muddy boot path going back to a specific destination.  The hike to the falls and back would have been two hours but the early flowers are now blooming so it took me much longer; there were cottongrass, heather, bog rosemary, and windflower.  This trip I also “caught” a rainbow. 

Unlike Denali, we have active gold mines throughout the corridor so I stumbled across the dirt road that allows miners to take heavy equipment to and from the mines up Marion Creek.  Miners won’t say how much gold they are bringing out but some of them must be pretty successful to own all that equipment.

The next day I hiked up the hill to the SE of camp which is the equivalent of 1500 feet on the Stairmaster.  It’s straight up through willows and alder over bog and moss and rock. Being on a mountain makes me feel powerful!   On top of the ridge I found wooly lousewort, alpine azalea and mountain avens in bloom.



Glasses to give you an idea of scale.

Returning home, I took a sponge bath and had supper with Linda and Ray at their travel trailer at Marion Campground where they are the hosts.  With their generous meal, the good company of their four dachshunds and a game of Mexican train, I felt nurtured and complete.

Annie and I had a morning off together so we drove down to Grayling Lake.  I planned to wait around for her to catch her first fish so I could take her photo but, since she caught her first grayling in 15 seconds, it was a short plan.  We were there less than two hours and she caught over twenty-five grayling.  Apparently they make good eating if cooked and devoured immediately. She threw all hers back.  Karen told her she needed to “stop playing with her food”.   After I snapped a photo, I walked the shore of the lake where four wigeons were swimming behind a tundra swan, apparently hoping for her to churn up some goodies.  I also found a shrub new to me called leatherleaf which has heather-like belled flowers.  So I was happy to “catch” the widgeons and the leatherleaf.

Our community recently welcomed two new members on the same day:  Christie, a First Alaskans intern, nursing student, Yupik native and Princess of Smiles, plus Chinook, a retired lead Denali sled dog.  Christie brings youthful enthusiasm, intelligence and energy to our group and Chinook brings me a canine companion to walk and hug.

This is the first time I’ve worked for the Federal government.  Karen manages a core of twelve folks, most of them “expenses paid” volunteers like myself.  People come back year after year not only for the job and the community but training and opportunities in the parks and refuges. In addition to us, K. has to deal with researchers, educators, Bureau of Land Management folk, NPS folk, and Fish and Wildlife people.  The Interagency is truly a cooperative effort but somewhat of a bureaucratic nightmare.  The people in the next cabin over might have different rules than we have in our cabin.  And each agency has its own lead person.  Even compared to public schools, the government has a HUGE amount of “Thou Shalt Not” rules.  Being new, I don’t know which ones I can bend, which ones I can break and which ones are inviolate.  It’s uncomfortable being this good.

Happy Get Outside Week!



Koyokuk River Valley, Marion Camp in Center between tree and pond