Short Alaska trip

[Jim]

I spent 10 days working in Alaska a couple weeks ago and got to see some great country. Big country!

 

Started in Juneau with a day of meetings but I was able to get in ealy and meet some friends and scramble up a peak adjacent to the Mendenhall Glacier. What a monster to have right in your backyard. Saw some goats, got back to town and had dinner with an interesting group.

 

Business on Monday then flew to Nome on Monday afternoon. Now there's a frontier town. Reminds me a lot of some small towns in southern Patagonia. Windswept, by the sea, dogs, ATVs, and a bit of bailing wire to keep things together. And no trees for 100 miles!

 

Meet with staff of the Alaska Fish and Game in the morning - they had some great muskox skulls and bear hides. The to talk to the Sinasauk tribe; we were going to conduct some plant and wildlife surveys some of their paracels the next day. First thing that Pat - our tribal contact asks is "Did you guys bring you guns?" (Hey Greg - help). We said no - with raised eyebrows and she says - "that's ok, Melvin always carrys his and he'll come tomorrow - bears y'know".

 

Next day at dawn (9:30) we hop on our ATVs and tear outta town. It's hard to keep up with these folks ripping about 45 mph on the dirt road leading east along the Bearing Sea. It's about 40 deg with a slight drizzle. We get to a faint track along a drainge and head north, but stop soon to warm our hands, and so Pat and Melvin can have a smoke. The weather starts to clear and the low clear light gives a great warm color to the tundra expanse. Only in the draws or along major rivers do any shrubs get higher than your waist, in most of the tundra shrubs are no higher than your ankle, but the diversity of lichens, moss, herbs, and low shubs is stunning for such a harsh place. We hop on the quads and head 6 miles north on a bearing for Army Peak.

 

It's late in the season so most of the birds are gone but we get some great looks at several golden eagles and one almost tame gyrfalcon - a white phase one that is beautiful - the largest NA falcon. A small herd of reindeer tromp by, seeminly oblivious to us. Pat and Melvin are drinking some coffee, I have a bit, and then go on my way collecting plant species.

 

I'm focused on a square meter of ground when I hear Melvin yell "Bear!!". I stand up and there he is, lumbering up out of a narrow drainge about 75 yrds away, my camera dangles from my neck but I forget it's there. Melvin nods to stay put, and the bear moves on. Melvin immediately goes back to drinking coffee and talking to Pat, I warily go back to my task.

 

After a day of checking out various sites we head back and decide to take a more direct route back to the coast road. The tundra is a varied terrain, sometimes very flat but often tussocked with peat mounds, frost heaves and wedges, and a lot of it wet. We get stuck a couple of times, which requires some rocking of the ATV while you're off it and giving it the throttle, and then running beside it to get it to higher ground. My arms had a workout by the end of the day.

 

Next day while surveying some river bottom I ran across two muskox. We had seen them earlier in the week but they were across a big river I couldn't cross. This time I got within 25 feet, just on one side of a braided channel. Got some great photos (office slide scanner is down - new one on order - I'll post later). These critters look prehistoric. They're kinda clumsy, dragging they short legs around, and don't handle deep snow well. So they climb atop the wind-blown ridges in the winter, face into the wind, and kinda hang out in the -30 deg weather. Apparently they don't view humans as predators and if you're quiet you can get quite close.

 

Later in the week we flew to Port Clarence, about 80 mi NW of Nome, just below the Bearing Strait. It's a spit of land with a small coast guard station. Found a great walrus skull I took home in a 5 gal bucket, and it barely fit. When the pack ice solidifies the natives from across the bay travel via snow machine to the station and their kids use the small swimming pool in the station. The natives try and sell their carvings and hunt seal and walrus around the spit. We stopped in the village of Brevig Mission on the way back to Nome, very isolated, no roads, winter gives them more travel options with the sea ice and snow on the land.

 

Back in Nome at the end of the week we had a free day to bop around a bit. There's 3 roads out of Nome, each about 75 miles long that dead end. Saw more moose, muskox, reindeer, a couple of bears far away, and some interesting raptors. Walked a couple of ridgelines and got up on some 3,000 ft peaks for the view, which is a long way up there.

 

Not much climbing up there but you could do some interesting wilderness walks and some cool ridge walks. There's some scattered stone pinacles on the ridges, I think they call them Toks.

 

If you ever get up there the place to stay in Nome is the Aurora Inn, though we were on per diem and it's pricey. But everything is up there. It's a cool place to explore and if you're into birding the spring is supposed to be amazing, with quite a few asian migrants. Ask around Nome for local ivory carvers and avoid the tourist shops. We stopped by one native carver's house and had a wonderful conversation with him and bought a couple of nice pieces. Go for the eggs and reindeer sausage for breakfast at Fat Freddies.

 

Very cool work trip.

[j_b]

sounds awful but someone has to do it!

 

what's the purpose of the study?

[Jim]

Kinda odd. The Coast Guard station at Port Clarence needs 25 folks to keep it running - a sewage treatment plan, water treatment, a fuel farm for diesel for the generators, keeping the runway clear all year as there are no roads. All for keeping the LORAN signal going from the 1,350 ft tower there (it's big). So if they move it to outside Nome they can get an electrical line out to it, use solid state, and have only a few guys to keep it up - thus saving $1.5 million a year.

 

So we were trying to help them find the best place for it, and from our perspective the site with the least environmental issues. So it's a big alternative siting study.

 

One Coastie told me he climbed the tower and tossed off a balsa wood airplane. It took him 3 hrs to climb it (all the clip-ins). His buddies on ATVs with radios gave up tracking the plane after an hour. It would dive 200 ft then swoop back up. It was headed across the bay at 1,000 ft when last seen.