To the Artic and Back

Yes, this is a job, my job!

Hello family and friends!  It has been a very busy couple of months since I last wrote.  In the meantime I have been hiking, climbing, and rappelling in Alaska followed by a trip south to get my library, visit my family and watch my friend get married.  Upon returning to Alaska, I hosted  a friend who was stuck here due to car trouble and just this morning my put  studded tires on my bike as the snow stuck yesterday. (it melted this morning though).

In the second week of June, I left Anchorage to make a site visit to the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve (http://www.nps.gov/bela/index.htm ) for work.  Essentially I became a photo journalist as my task included hiking around a hot springs and taking photographs to record the scenery and structures.  Those photos will become part of a National Register of Historic Places nomination. I got a window seat on the flight out of Anchorage and made good use of the zoom lens.

This picture shows where I spend most of my time in Anchorage.  (Open the picture in a new window to get a good idea of where I live and work).  Start with the yellow building in the picture, then move down through the white tents to the red tent.  From that red tent, trace the line of the tent right until you have moved across the street to the second building (the middle of the three buildings before you hit the parking deck).  That’s my building, Turnagain Arms.  The picture is a bit fuzzy, but one of the windows closest to the parking lot with the tents is me.  I live across the street from the Hilton with a wonderful  alley view of a beautiful green dumpster (hey, at least it’s not pink!)  Go back to the yellow building, now move just left to the blue building and then kitty-cornered (left/up) to the large parking deck.  Top/left of the parking deck is a medium size building with blue windows, the regional office of the Alaska NPS, where I work.  I have a five block walk, which is quite nice. Also note the mudflats on the far right and the bike trail, which is the road barely visible and just left of the mud.

On June 10^th and the Kotzebue Sound was still iced in.  The ice was flowing north of Kotzebue, but the sound still had ice on my departure and probably didn’t clear out until the last week of the month.  “Summer” is very short in the arctic.

Although this picture is hazy, I think you can make out the runway which is  ¾ normal length.  I was on a 737 and as you can see the runway is surrounded by water, no room for errors here!

Upon landing in Kotzebue, I got a ride about a mile over to my dorm and then spent the afternoon exploring Kotz, which has 4 long streets (about 1.5 miles).  I found a church for an evening service and it turned out they were having a cookout on the beach.  Yes, I got to have church on the beach in the arctic!

Fire suppression, arctic style!

 This is a map of the northwest parklands in Alaska.  Kotz, is in the circle in the middle of the map and serves as the headquarters for these parks except for the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve whose headquarters are down in Nome (lower left hand corner).  The arctic circle (66’ 30”) runs across the very top of the Seward Peninsula (piece on lower pointing directly toward Russia, only about 60 miles away).  So, I spent most of the week just south of the arctic circle, but still well within the 10C isotherm, which is a more meaningful climate measurement.  (Avg summer high reaches 10C/50F – meaning that only a top parts of the soil actually thaw).

This is one of the two prop planes that we took from Kotz down to Serpentine Hot Springs, about an hour long flight.

This is another shot of the Kotzebue Sound, near the cape.  Note the village of Deering.  Some of these residents will travel south, generally in the middle of the winter, to the hot springs.

Runway approach at Serpentine Hot Springs.  The 1000 foot runway was bladed  in near the end of World War II.  The bunkhouse and bathhouse are visible on the left along with Hot Springs Creek.  This view shows the northwest end of the territory that I hiked across Monday through Friday.  

This is the bathhouse at Serpentine Hot Springs, which was built in the 1970s.  The boiling temperatures of the water produce steam which is easily visible for a few miles in various directions.  The tors, diabase sill outcroppings, are visible in the background.  The hot springs, tors and general landscape (but not the buildings) combine to form a place called Iyat (pronounced Eye-yacht), which has been and still is sacred to the native Inupiat peoples.

This picture, looking southwest gives a good indication of part of Iyat which is being nominated as a Traditional Cultural Property (TCP).  A TCP is a place to which a group of people ascribes important rituals, practices or traditions that continues to hold that importance whether the rituals, practices or traditions still occur today.  While  historic preservationists tend to associate TCP’s with ethnic minorities, this need not be the case.  A neighborhood swimming pool, ballpark or just about any community space could qualify.

If you have ever wondered where your remote weather data comes from, here is one example on the Bering Land Bridge.  The closest settlements of people are almost 100 miles away.

Arctic tundra is a bit different than alpine tundra, which is what I am most familiar with growing up in the Rocky Mountains (for those of you on the other side of the Mississippi, you don’t have any local tundra).  While alpine tundra is typically flat and firm, arctic tundra is not.  It is comprised of layers of mosses and muskeg.  This picture shows a muskeg.  Imagine a giant mushroom like object with grass growing out of it.  Now consider what would happen if you attempted to step on top of this.  I found the the muskeg would frequently roll, while a couple of my lighter companions had an easier time walking across it.

 

If you choose not to walk on the muskeg, then you get to deal with the squishy mosses.  I quickly learned to walk with my toes pointed down so that when the mosses sucked my foot in, my heel was not planted.  The moss/muskeg combination seems to be most prevalent at altitudes under 800 feet.  Yes, you read that correctly, arctic tundra is found at an altitude less than 1000 feet.  However, I have learned that high latitude mimics high altitude.  It is my opinion that in the Anchorage area, 3,000 feet  feels a lot like 10,000 feet in the Rockies.  I am not quite so sure of an approximation on the Seward Peninsula, because my elevation never exceeded 1400 feet (except in an airplane).

Breathtaking, just breathtaking.

 Our team!  Naturally, you are familiar with dashing mountain man historian on the left.  To right is Mike, who is the archaeologist for the WEAR parks, Tina who was on internship through the Student Conservation Association (and a fellow Penn Stater – yup, we have such an alumni network that we cross paths in northwest Alaska) and Hannah, who is currently a student-archaeologist and will join the NPS full time after graduation.  In addition to my documentary work, Mike and Hannah preformed archaeology field work and site checks.

A final shot of Iyat from the air as we left.  Over five days, we hiked about 30 miles over the ridge lines to the left and right of the hot springs as well as the first line of tors in the distant background and a series of bluffs just below the foreground.  Yes, this is a job!

Here is a clearer picture of the Kotz runway taken from the front seat of a cessna.

Welcome to main street Kotzebue, Alaska.  I think this was third street.  Kotz does not appear different from small rural towns, except that all of the houses are elevated three-five feet above the ground because of the permafrost.  That, and an occasional polar bear might stop by to visit.

The Alaskan Range from on high.  My flight back, the segment from Nome to Anchorage, over the mountains was amazing.  These peaks are a part of the range that includes Denali, elevation 20,320.  The large patches of snow are most certainly glaciers. Although there were two and a half months of melting still to come, most of these peaks will never be snow free.