Luke Goes to Camp

One of the things that attracted me in the job description of the announcement for this internship was the culture camps I may have the opportunity to participate in.  I was finally able to go to one of these camps last week.  Camp Sivu is a camp within the Kobuk River delta aimed at teaching kids traditions that have been passed down from elders to younger generations for thousands of years.  Rural Alaskan life has become increasingly more Westernized throughout the past 40 years.  This camp is a way to get the kids to put away their iPods, cell phones and munchies for a week and learn how to live of the land.  My roommate/co-worker and I were invited as park service representatives to lead some activities.

Well, camp up here in Northwest Alaska is not as... organized as one might be back down in the lower 48.  This was no more apparent than our travel day to the camp.  We showed up to the airport and were put onto a plane and then started heading in the opposite direction of where we needed to go.  Turns out we needed to pick up some kids in another village.  This increased our airtime so I was able to see a lot of the backcountry from the sky.  Once we landed in the village of Noorvik, we waited on the airstrip for about half an hour before I decided to take initiative to find the number of the person who was supposed to come pick us up.  We made it to the village's community center and then into a boat with twenty village kids and their bags.  Along the way I practiced duck calls with the kids and we saw a bull moose and a great horned owl.

And, Oh My Goodness, there were TREES!  I haven't seen a tree taller than me for months.  The camp was situated between a nice bend in the river and Anaq Lake (Poop Lake; don't go into poop lake).  The tundra lay just up the hill.  Fantastic location.

There were about 40 kids there and I packed enough supplies for 30, but we were able to get by.  I actually taught fewer activities than I planned for.  We just kind of played it by ear each day as to what activities would happen.  That takes some getting used to, but it gave me more time to participate in activities the kids were doing.  We skinned a seal, checked fish nets, and made Eskimo yo-yos.  I'm really good at the yo-yos.  Remind me to show you when you see me next.

What's crazier: the stuff I did or the stuff I ate?  I ate salmon eggs both raw, soaked in soy sauce and boiled.  The raw salmon tasted like salmon in juice form packed into tiny nuggets.  The boiled eggs tasted like little beads of meat.  I also ate a boiled salmon head.  I sat next to the skin-sewer and she showed me which parts to eat, which is pretty much everything except for the bones.  I ate the cartilage and skin and sucked the fat off of the bones.  I even ate the eyeball.  You know... it's really not that bad!  The eye has an egg white texture and a creamy taste.  I purposely grabbed the fish head that had only one eye, but at the end of the meal I wish I had the other eye.

I think my willingness to eat everything put in front of me lead to the christening of my Inupiaq name.  Our head cook was a hilarious elder woman who everyone called Aana (grandmother).  She told me my new name was Nukatpiaq (new-cut-PAK), which means "young guy".  It is an honor to receive an Inupiaq name a a white person, but I have a sneaking suspision Aana didn't feel she could remember my name so she gave me a new one.

Aana is one of the funniest women I have ever met.  What was most fun was here relationship with Langford, the retired camp groundskeeper (both are pictured with me).  Langford took on the role of mean, old man, which is an influence most of the kids needed in their life.  He knew everything that happened at camp and the kids feared his discipline.  However, Langford was a funny guy, too.  He and Aana bickered like siblings.  Langford never put away his dishes.  Aana would call him a 'bad boy', pull out a kitchen knife, set it down and let out a big laugh.  One day I ran into the kitchen when I heard a ruckus only to find Aana and Langford in the middle of a flour fight while they were making sticky buns. 

Before I finish here I have to talk about the blueberries.  I have never been to a place where you are able to pick so many wild blueberries that a common dessert is to eat a bowlful of blueberries, like cereal, with milk and sugar.  We went out on the tundra a few times to pick and man, oh man!  Mmmmm-mmm-mmmm! Mmmmmm.  Everywhere you turn there are blueberries!  You can spent 10 minute on one bush, stand up to move to another area, and there are just as many berries right behind you.  Is this heaven? 

Seriously, as I saw along the edge of Anaq Lake, eating blueberries and watching a sow moose on the other side, I thought, 'Alaska is the richest land in the world'.  How much would you pay for king crab, smoked salmon, or blueberries?  I've gotten all of these things for free in they past month. Well, nothing is free.  You have to harvest these things for yourself, but what can be more fun than berrypicking and fishing for salmon?  I can't believe I am living this kind of life.

So now I'm back.  I feel completed.  I've made it outside Kotzebue, ate some great food, met some awesome people, and picked up some village English and mannerisms that I can't seem to shake.  Two weeks until I'm back home.  It will be nice to be in barefeet again, but I here it's hot and humid down there!  I'll relish these final weeks while I can.

My day as a greenhorn

The next chapter in my ongoing mission to do everything that is ever shown on Discovery Channel involved searching for buoys, pulling up heavy object against the ocean current, and handling spiky animals.  That's right!  I went crab fishing!

I was checking tents in the park service warehouse, when I ran into Chip, one of our maintenance guys.  He indirectly asked if I wanted to help him check crab pots the next day.  My mind flipped with excitement at the opportunity.  Scenes from Deadliest Catch was all than ran through my head for the rest of the day.  (Speaking of which, I heard Cpt. Phil of the Cornelia Marie died.  Sad, but he was living a pretty unhealthy life.) I don't now why Chip asked me to come crab fishing with him.  Maybe it's because I give him the head nod every time we have film night and he walks into the room looking to take a bag of popcorn.

After lunch the next day, Chip drove by the Heritage Center towing his boat to pick me up.  He also brought along his 15-year-old and 5-year-old sons.  We headed out into the sound, thirty miles away from Kotzebue.  It was a bumpy ride and there were times we skipped from wave to wave.  I don't know how his sons slept on the way.  My head was hitting the ceiling.  Along the way, Chip told me about all the times e almost died (snow machine accidents, drowning, stranded in the wilderness).  Interesting dude.

Maybe by know you've figured out that this is a large commercial operation.  Chips boat is twenty0four feet long, the crab pots are much smaller than the ones on Deadliest Catch, and we didn't need any special machinery to retrieve the pots.  Chip has a commercial license, but Alaskan King Crab aren't in season right now.  We still fished for the King crab, but Chip fished for them under subsistence rules, which means he can catch them, but not sell them right now.  Any rural Alaskan Native qualifies for subsistence hunting and fishing.  There are basic no regulations on subsistence hunting beside the guidance of native wisdom of  the land.  Many provide for their families with what they gather from the land.  The only reason people have jobs up here is to pay for gasoline and electricity. 

Back to fishing.  Chip was able to track down the pots he set a week before with a GPS.  We were looking for small rings of about five buoys and Chip would maneuver the boat so we could reach over an grab them out of the water.  Sometimes the buoys were under the surface of the water because the ocean currents were so strong.  Then we spent quite some time scanning the sheet of calm water for anything neon yellow.  Those underwater buoys required a stick with a hook on the end to grab them.

On we grab the buoy, the pulling began.  Chip's son and I did sort of synchronized, leap-frog pull, where I took on big pull, then he did.  Once we were able to roll the pot on to the edge of the boat, we opened it pot up.  There's a line that is laced through the opening of the net on the top side that needed to be undone.

Once open, we started grabbing crab.  The spiky little buggers left holes in my hands that are still healing up.  We averaged about 10-15 crab per pot.  Good times!  Not only had we caught king crab, but also and hairy type of crab and a few starfish.  When I asked Chip what type of crab the hairy crabs were, he replied " I don't know.  Hairy Crab".  Every time we caught a starfish, we told Chip's youngest son that we caught a "Patrick" (*Spongebob reference*), and let him through it back into the water.

After collecting the crab, I re-baited the pots and laced them back up and threw them into the water.  In the end we caught about a hundred and fifty fat crabs. When we returned, we unloaded and Chip's family started boiling crab and Chip went all over town, making people's day by deliver the best food on earth.  Chip gave me five crab, but I had to get to work, so I put them in a clean trash can and left them in a cool, shady spot outside. 

When I returned after work, I went at 'em.  First you have to whack the whole body against a rock or something to kill it.  Then you can start harvesting the legs.  You need to boil all of the crab right away, because a) the meat will stick to the shell if you leave freeze it before boiling, and b) apparently it gets toxic over time if you don'tboil it right away.  Luckily the Creed's (family I'm house-sitting for) have a large family and lots of big pots.  I ate a meal of crab later that night and now I have a hundred dollars worth of crab legs sitting in my freezer.  Who knew life could be so good.

Fourth of July!!!

Ten days later, here I type.  I promise I'll blog more, honest (that's probably another lie, but I'll do my best).

I understand the Fourth may have been rainy and nasty for some of you, so much so that some fireworks displays were postponed until the next weekend.  Well, fireworks don't really work here in Kotzebue, or much of Alaska for that matter.  Lighting fireworks under the midnight sun is like writing on a white piece of paper with a yellow marker.  No worries.  We do some fun stuff anyway.

Weather up here was not much better up here.  It was foggy and cold and windy on the third.  The Park Service had a booth space at the fairgrounds that day.  Our booth theme was local medicinal wild plants.  We had a large display board that featured pictures of local plants, where to find them, what the can be used to cure, and recipes for salves, oils, and teas that can be made with them.  We also had a assortment of teas people were able to try and sample of a cough syrup made with honey and coltsfoot (a plant, not an actual horse foot).  The display board kept falling in the wind, so I had to create a wind break by tying a tarp between the two conexes we were in between with some parachute cord (thanks, dad!).

What is a "conex", you ask?  It is a giant shipping crate. Remember that scene in Batman Begins with the nervous henchman with the machine gun?  That whole scene takes place between a bunch of conexes (yes, another Batman reference!).  Many households have them around here and use them like garages.  Some people store there snow machines on top of them in the summer.  I don't know how they get them up there.

We also had our famous buttons as our booth.  Each year that park service does this, they create an easy quiz for visitors to take with questions based on the display.  No one fails the quiz.  After they take the quiz they can search through our button collection and pick one out.  These button are pretty flippin' sweet, too.  We pressed flowers and punched them into the buttons.  They went like hotcakes!

One elder lady needed help taking the quiz, so I read it to her and tried to lead her to the correct answer the best I could.  One of the questions mentioned the National Park Service and she said "Oh, I don't like park service.  They take our land."  I tried making the best of the situation and brought up the fact that rural Alaskans are allowed to hunt on all of our parklands, but to no avail.  We just continued taking the quiz and it was then I realized that this lady didn't actually know she was talking to a park service employee.  She earned her button, which was meticulously chosen from the other pretty buttons as I brought her samples of every tea we had.  I could help but smile as she walked away with her special button pinned to her parkie with the words "National Park Service" written on it.

Other booths sold your standard deep-fried everything and cheap toys.  Temporary colored hairspray was quite popular with the kids and misused.  No kids was safe from aerosol color ambush.  Any other place in America, parents would have scolded their graffitied children, but, eh, it's Kotzebue.

The celebration wasn't without its fun events.  There was a parade I wasn't able to see, a Miss Arctic Circle pageant, a cute baby contest, and an animal call contest.  A muktuk eating contest was postponed because it was too foggy for the plane to land.  I could imagine eating that much muktuk anyway.  Your jaw would bounce loose!

The weather was nicer the next day as the festivities continued.  My roommates and I arrived to the fairgrounds just in time for the foot races.  Kids ages 5-6 lined up and ran to the other side of the crowd.  The winner received some cash money money.  The races were divided between girl and boy races.  The age levels increased for each race, moving onto 7-8 year olds, then 9-10 and in that fashion until they reached 14-19, then 20-29 and all the way up to 60-69 year olds!

After the foot races were the kayak races.  People wen out in waves of three, kayaking around two boats in the lagoon and then back to the start.  You bet I signed up to race.  My wave was probably the most memorable.  We started outside the kayaks and had to push them into the water and jump into the boat, then take off.  Well I got the boat in the water and got into the boat and got into the water myself!  I wasn't able to get my second leg in right away and I was leaning to far forward.  Before I knew it I had a mouthful of salty water.  But I can jump straight out of the water like a ninja and land back into my boat because I'm an adventure racer.  The good part about falling in was that my main competition also dunked right away also.  Soon after I rounded the first boat I passed the girl paddling in front of me.  Then I returned victorious and wet!  I do have video of the start.  It looks like I wasn't even trying to get in he boat correctly, as if I had meant to somersault into the water as soon as I jumped in the boat.

A man from Greenland showed up with his home maid kayak and stick of a paddle and demonstrated some rolls.  He could put his paddle in any position and flip underwater and back up.  Some of the rolls didn't even seem practical.  I'm pretty sure Greenlanders get bored and dare each other to flip there kayaks over with there paddles in any ridiculous position they choose.  I was pretty awesome though.

While Luke was tumbling in the lagoon, some crazies were waterskipping their snowmachines in the lagoon on the other side of the road. Yes, they drove their snowmachines as fast as they could across the surface of the water, seeing how far the could go before they sank!  But I didn't get to see it! Cuz no one told me it was happening! It's alright.  I'm not that bitter.

Flying

Hello blog readers.  It has been a busy week of Fourth of July preparations, so I haven't had the opportunity to tell you what I've been doing.  I'll rewind to the beginning of last week an catch you up on my Fourth of July experiences in a later blog.

I finally was able to use my B-3 aviation safety training last Tuesday, when I was able to go flying over the parks with our backcountry ranger.  Just so you know, I work at the headquarters for 4 different nationally-designated parklands, but we are not actually located within any of the parks.  The closest parkland is 10 miles away from Kotzebue, which sounds close but it is across the sound.  And I don't have a boat.  In fact, every thing is across the sound because I live on a peninsula.  So in the summertime the only way to get to the parks is bey boat or plane (in winter, you can use a snowmachine).  So this was my first opportunity to actually see the parks I'm teaching people about.

Flying in a two-seater bush plane is quite a different experience than flying in a jet.  I was required to where a fireproof flight onesie, a survival vest containing just about everything you'd find on Batman's utility belt, and an uncomfortable helmet.  The plane is made of a strong metal frame with this aircraft fabric stretched out over it and is light enough for one person to pull with a rope.  The 70-gallon gas tanks are located in the wings.  The tires are fat, rubber donuts pumped up to only 9-pounds of pressure and can roll over rocks the size of your head (yes, your head)! 

I sat directly behind the pilot and I was only able to talk to him via the headset install in the helmet.  The plane took of and as soon we were in the air I was reminded of how small Kotzebue is.  In minutes we were over the point I hiked to in my last blog post.  All this helped to give me a perspective of how large our parklands are (11.8 million acres).  On our 2 1/2 hour flight, we saw only a quarter of these park areas.

We started inland after crossing the sound, following winding, braided rivers between loping, treeless hills.  And speaking of trees, I finally saw some along these rivers.  Large, round rocks were completely visible beneath the crystalline blue, frigid water the wound its way across the land down below.  Sections of the tundra broke into sections of patterned polygons, shaped by the interactions of surface water with permafrost.  Caribou trails spread across the vast expanse below, creating a curious net that held the answer as to why caribou can walk across tundra with such ease as I trip over myself with every step.  Only land this wide can support hundreds of thousands of migrating caribou each year. Undeveloped.  Pristine.

The flight turned southwest, toward the coast.  The mountains we flew between became rolling hills we could fly over.  A creek brought us to the coast of Cape Krusenstern National Monument.  Of our four parklands, Krusenstern seemed to have the least scenic features, based on my reading.  I don't know why I thought so.  Though the land is relatively flat, it contains rows of beach ridges that contain evidence of 4,000 years of human use along the coast.  I was able to see ancient dwellings from the sky, along with the archeology camps there to study them.  Glass lagoons and pools dotted the coast, reflecting images of the light and clouds above.

Anytime I sit as a passenger among beautiful country as birds fly across my field of view, I begin to hum the Jurassic Park theme in my head (and often aloud).  There is nothing cooler than seeing ducks take off from the water when you are looking from above and the ripples they leave flaring behind them on the surfaces of the mirror-like lagoons.  Okay, maybe seeing a grizzly running from the coast and onto the tundra is a cooler sight.  Ask me to see a photo of this occurrence, because I have to zoom in a fifty times to see him, but even though he is just as blurry as Bigfoot at that distance.  We then proceeded to fly over a skiddish group of musk oxen and staring along the coast, I noticed a blue seal skirting beneath the surface of the calm ocean.  Wildlife!

As we crossed back over the sound towards Kotzebue, I pondered about how bad I wanted take my helmet off.  Once grounded and free of clothing that contained all I needed to survive a firebombing, I was fully able to reflect on the experience.  For two-and-a-half hours, I was free from dusty, isolated Kotzebue and able to experience the great vastness of the Arctic I'm educating others to protect.

A Morning Hike

Happy belated solstice!  Now it is finally time to see if you figured out the joke in the title of this blog.  Kotzebue lies 30 miles north of the Arctic Circle and since the northern hemisphere of the globe is tilted toward the sun in our summertime, an location north of 66 degrees north receives 24-hour sunlight for some period of time.  In Kotz, the sun came up sometime in the first week of June and has not come down. It will not set for another week or so now.  Thus, I have not seen a single star in the Kotzebue sky yet.

Most people will never make it north of the Arctic Circle in their lifetime, so I decided to take advantage of my situation here.  At 11pm last night, I set off into the tundra to experience the sun-shiny, wee hours of the morning.  As I hiked, I took photos every once in a while to document the position of the sun.

The sun was already fairly low as I reached the bluff out of town where the tundra begins.  Its late orangeglow glared of the surface of the ocean and illuminated tufts of cottongrass and clusters of Labrador tea flowers across the rolling, green tundra.  Quite a contrast to dusty, flat Kotzebue.

Fishing shacks and other private property lay between me and my destination, a point along the coast north of town.  To avoid trespassing, I had to just between the tundra and the coast multiple times.  My muck boots were essential as I needed them to cross streams, wet tundra, and segments along the coast where the shore became lost underneath tangled alder branches.  Along the way I noted patches of flowering plants that I may visit in a couple weeks when they are full of berries.

I eventually came upon a bluff overlooking a large pond around 1:50am.  I took a long break to make an origami sea horse (I found a cool origami sea life book in our library and I'm addicted).  A Pacific loon and a tundra swan paddled across the orange, sunlit pond (the photo to the left is the lowest the sun got at around 2:30am).  During a difficult fold, I looked up to the sight of a female moose on the other side of the pond.  She didn't see me, but I watched her through my binocs (that sounds creepy out of context).  She was almost finished shedding her winter coat as she browsed here and there before disappearing into an alder thicket.  I was told that anything within 10 miles of Kotzebue was shot by subsistence hunters, so I was very suprised to see a moose roaming about.

I continued on past the pond with no intention of trying to get closer to that moose.  I picked plant samples and pressed  them in a book, then headed down to the coast.  After walking along the ocean fr a short distance, I notices a path going back up to the tundra, which brought me to another pond.  On this pond, a Pacific loon paddled back and forth, calling to no one.  I called back with my special loon call that never works and it yielded the typical response: silence. 

The sun had started rising again, sometime around 3:30am, as I sat on the edge of the loon pond.  I put down my binocs, feelingI had seen as much of the lonely loon that could be seen.  Turning to right yo pack up my things, movement beyond the ight edge of the pond caught my eye.  It turned to be a family of caribou, a momma, pop, and baby.  Th mom and dad where shedding and developing velvety antlers (female caribou grow antlers, just like males). 

They came a bit closer to me, trotting through the bumpy, tussock tundra with ease.  A gunshot rang out through the sky. I tucked myself further behind an alder bush.  The caribou just stopped and then kept trotting towards me.  They didn't see me.  They stopped about fifty feet away from me and I tried to take as many poor photos as I could.  They stared at me, aware of my prence, but did not runn straight away.  After a while, they turned tails and headed back across the tundra.  I followed for a ways, not wanting to stress them out.  Eventually, they continued away from me and I would be able to keep up due to my human-shaped feet.

By this time, the mosquitoes were aticvated.  There was no escaping theme on the tundra, so I Bear Gryllsed it down an eroded bluff to sea level. I had found a nice secluded cove. Bank swallows above me snatched mosquitoes out of midair.  It seemed as good a place as any to take a nap, so I covered myself in a tarp and did just that.

It was a little after 8am when I woke up.  I was cold and hungry and I ended up eating all of my granola bars, so I decided to head back home, this time along the coast. The bugs got worse on the tundra (no wind). It was a long, wet, buggy hike back and I really was so tired I didn't do anything for the rest of the day, but seeing moose and caribou was worth it.

Gee-haw!

When I was a kid, some of my favorite books were Call of the Wild by Jack London and Dogsong by Gary Paulsen.  So you can imagine my excitement when I found out that my boss, Linda, has a dogsled team!

In my first ever blog post, I was able to walk some of the dogs.  Well, a few weeks ago, Linda offered my roommate and I the responsibility of running the dog with a scooter! (Wh-what?!)  The dogs need exercise in the summer, when there is no snow.  It is way to difficult an and time-consuming to walk or run eight sled dogs, so what many dog team owners do is run the team in front of their fourwheelers in much the same set up as they would run them in the winter with a sled.  Some owners build custom carts that a few dogs can pull at a time.  Linda searched around the Internet and bought the most hard-core scooter I've ever seen. It has small mountain bike tires that hop up and down curbs and a low center of gravity for excellent control.  And front suspension!  Linda has rigged up a forked leash to this scooter, so you can run two dogs at a time.

We don't run the dogs in town due to fourwheeler traffic and a crazy amount of chained, and a few loose, dogs.  Instead, we take them across the airport runway to an area called "tent city", an area along the coast south of town where locals set up their fish camps and drying racks.  The road is pretty bumpy and gravelly (nothing my front suspension can't handle, heh heh).  The paths are pretty twisty, so I get to practice mushing commands a lot.

Here are a few commands for you to practice:

• "Hike!": Let's go!
• "Whoa!": Stop!  This is a good command because that's my reaction anyway.
• "Gee!": Turn right!
• "Haw!": Turn left!
• "On by!": Go straight, as in "go on by...".  This is my favorite command, because if a dog gets distracted by ground squirrels or garbage or loose dogs chasing us, they immediate pay attention and keep on moving forward.

The tile of this blog post, "Gee-haw", is not an actual command as you can see now, but the words go so well together.  The dogs are all very well-trained.  They are all retired dogs ranging from 8-13 years old.  Linda only uses them recreationally.  They all have their own personalities and I've been getting to know them pretty well.  One of the most fun aspects of running the dogs is figuring out which dogs should run together.  Some dogs are in better shape than others. Some are very work-oriented, while others would rather run into the ocean if you let them ("on by!").

One thing they all have in common (well they have a lot in common; they're dogs) is that they all love to pull.  So much so that running and pulling is their reward. If the aren't following your commands and you want to punish them, all you have to do is stop.

One of the few hazards I've encountered is loose dogs.  There is a man who lives in a shack along the route who has two labs and a beautiful and frightening German shepherd who are never tied up.  It's always a gamble as to whether or not they will see you or not. And if the see you they will chase you, police dog-style.  They are all bark actually and pretty nice dogs, but you can't have any dogs distracting the sled dogs.  Luckily, when that German shepherd comes a-running, they huskies pick up the pace.  Then it's up to my to keep the advancing German shepherd at bay.  I do a good job of sticking a foot out in its face and growling in a Batman voice (not Batman talking voice, which is barely above a whisper, but threatening Batman interrogation voice).  That usually startles her enough. 

I did have an awful run in with a flippin' Jack Russell terrier.  It can zipping across the pavement and slid just under the leash, between the dogs and me.  I could have ran it over (and in all honesty that little yapper deserved it).  The terrier continued to run after the huskies and try to nip at their heels.  It finally got to the dog on the right side, who swung around behind the left side dog, which tangled every thing up and that was a hectic mess for a couple seconds.

Normally, these run-ins don't happen (actually I run into that German shepherd just about every time I go out).  I plan on writing another post to introduce you to all of the dogs because each one is pretty neat.  For now, their names are Dillion, Ivy, Sadie, Zool, Jake, Nala, Dixon, and Gus.  Give yourself a pat on the back if you share a name with one of these dogs (or if you know somebody named Zool).

Long time, no blog

Hey there everybody.  Sorry I haven't blogged in over a week. My blogger account was disabled for some funky reason, but I got it all figured out.  Some of you may have noticed a change in the look of this blog.  Blogger just informed me of anew "design" option, so I've been playing with background pictures for the past hour.  You may be asking, "Why pretzels?"  Well, you see, I love pretzels and I figure I will be more likely to blog if I get to see pretzels every time I make an entry.

So you probably want to know about what I've been doing up here for the past two weeks.  Many things things deserve their own blog post, so I'll leave the out for now (sneak peak: running sled dogs on a scooter!).  For this post, I will focus on my job, because I'm sure many of you are curious what it is I'm actually doing up here, because I'm just starting to figure that out also.

First, I must say that summer has finally hit this week.  Leaves are sprouting.  Flowers are blossoming.  Mosquitoes are buzzing.  On Monday, the wind finally switched directions and started coming from the land instead of the ocean, so the temps have been in the upper 50s, not mid-30s like for the past weeks.  The sea ice has all migrated away.  Actually, I saw a seal swimming near shore last week.  The tundra is also starting to pop with color.

So... my job.  I teach kids about the natural and cultural resources of the area.  We provide 3 different free programs for kids:

1. Story & a movie: For younger kids, I'll read  few story books and show a couple movie clips for an hour.  The stories and videos all relate to a selected topic and it can be difficult and time consuming to find enough media related to one theme.  But I do get to watch Bill Nye the Science Guy.
2. Art class: For all ages of kids (and I was quick to find out that the given age ranges don't necessarily determine who is actually going to show up to your programs).  It is what it is, an art class focusing on a local natural or cultural topic.
3. Jr. Rangers: For school-age kids, this is a two hour program that offers a lot of freedom.  One can set up a game outside and do a science experiment inside or show a movie clip all in the same program.

Our park is unlike many in the national park system.  It is remote (there are no roads, trails, or designated campsites within our parks), so we do not have a lot of families coming through on their vacations.  Back country permits are not required, so we often don't see many of our visitors.  In most national parks, educational programs are intended for the one-or-two-week vacationer, but since our headquarters isn't based in any of the parks, we have lots of regular kids from the community coming to our programs.  This means that we need to keep our topics fresh every week.

The kids here run around unattended.  It is a small town, after all.  Some of them have cell phones, which might be used to keep track of them, but more often they are used for playing the latest Lady Gaga songs (such lewd lyrics).  The kids will jump up in your lap if the feel like it, which is a lot like the daycare and not like a national park, but like I said, our park is different.  Really awesome, funny kids.

And for this blog post's photos, I will tell you about my latest art project I dd with the kids.  Remember that time I bought the cool knife made out of mastodon ivory.  Well, the guy that sold me that knife told me it was a storytelling knife.  Little girls wood use knifes made out of wood, ivory, bone or whatever to illustrate stories to their friends in the sand.

I thought it would be cool to have kids make storytelling knives out of popsicle sticks and create their own symbols and stories to for an art project.  However, all my research (from books and personal contacts) told me that storyknifing was a Yu'pik tradition, from people who don't live in this area of Alaska. I decided to switch projects, but I was encouraged by my boss to do this project later, despite my concerns.

I chose to make baleen scrimshaw.  When the Eskimos go whaling, they use all parts of the whale, and that includes the baleen, the filtering structures analogous to teeth on a bowhead whale.  Etching drawings into pieces of baleen is a common art for around here.  I included a photo of actual baleen (weird-looking stuff).  We made rainbow baleen scrimshaw for my art project, by coloring baleen-shaped pieces of paper with crayons and then coloring a layer of black crayon on top of that.  Taking a toothpick, the kids etched heir own drawings.  Afterwords, they taped segments of yarn to the back of the paper to mimic the dangling baleen hairs (though musk ox hair would have been ideal for this part). 

Whoops, the photo is tilted sideways.  Okay, tired of typing.  More blogging later.

My second time eating whale

Saturday was so awesome, I needed to create this extra blog post to cover it all.  So... yesterday... grand opening... music... okay, here we go:

After the gospel singers finished, a native man played songs that he wrote on his electric guitar, along with his wife and brother.  He was a fabulous guitarist (Hendrix good).  He sang a hilarious song called "Empty Kayak Blues" about how he'd get no lovin' when he came back from a seal hunt without any seal to show for it.  After he sang "Inupiaq Whalers" he told everyone that he had a bunch of black muktuk in his freezer and anyone was invited to his house (he gave us the address over the microphone) if we wanted to try some.  Muktuk is a small slab of whale skin and blubber, black because it was from a bowhead whale (white muktuk is from beluga).  I haven't heard one bad thing about it even though it sounds disgusting.

I try not to pass up an opportunity to try a new food when it is made available to me, so I told him I would be right over after I finished cleaning up after the event. This was a good idea because I was able to give him a gallon bag full of leftover vegetables that I collected after the grand opening.

My roommate/co-worker knocked on his door later that day.  We were invited into the living area, full of the muktuk man's family. For my own blogging ease, his name is Wendell and his white wife is named Mary.  They were expecting me and they gave me the muktuk from the freezer.  They invited me to sit down and try it since I had no idea how to eat it.  You eat it raw with some salt, although I heard it is also good boiled with mustard.  The stuff is extremely tough and chewy.  It has a slight coconutty flavor, which is actually pretty darn good, you just have to get past the texture  The black skin gets kind of stringy after you work at it for a while.  The blubber is just tough to get through.  It's so chewy that if you bite too hard, your jaw will bounce open.

As I ate they told us of the whale hunting parties.  The Kotzebue Sound is quite shallow and the only whale that really comes in this area is beluga.  Really bowhead whale harvests happen in Barrow and villages along the wide ocean coast.

In the winter, the whole village will pick up and move supplies on sleds across the sea ice until they set up camp near the open water.  The whaling crew heads out in the ocean in a large voyageur-sized, sealskin canoe, called an umiaq.  They return to the camp, dragging a harpooned whale and somehow are able to pull in onto the ice.  Families help with butchering it and receive their fair share of the meat.

The whalers are well-fed at the camp, where cooking stations are found everywhere you turn.  Women compete to see who can cook the best food.  There is no squabbling between families or children as games are played.  Everyone gets together to toss lighter individuals up in the air with walrus-skin blankets.  Oftentimes, the one being tossed in the air will carry a paper bag full of goodies, such as pelts and jewelry, that she will rip open while in the air. As the items fall to the ground, little old ladies push past each other to grab the good stuff.  Wendell and Mary said it was the funniest thing in the world.  I think I sounds better than a pinata.

One more thing before I end this: whale and seal oil is very good for you. It is made out of the blubber, but it is unlike any fat you've ever experienced.  The stuff doesn't solidify, even when frozen.  Therefore, it doesn't really build up in your arteries.  It's high in some vitamins, I guess.  It is also a fantastic preservative.  You can put strips of meat into a jar of seal oil and it will keep for a long time in the same state as when you put it in there.  It apparently has a warming effect on the body, so pieces of muktuk are often brought along on winter hunting expeditions.  So there is no reason to send me Clif Bars in the mail, I have muktuk (that's a lie; please send me Clif Bars).

P.S.  My first time eating whale was in Iceland.  The meat is red and tastes like venison.

A day worth blogging about

Yeah.  Really good day!  Let me start from the beginning:

This Saturday began at 11am, when I woke up.  A very refreshing sleep!  I don't have to work on Saturdays, but I went anyway because today is the second GRAND opening of the Heritage Center.  They had their first grand opening in December for the community in -20 degree weather.  The regional director of Alaskan national parks was attending today's event. 

I took a mosey down to the road and saw an elderly lady scooting herself along in a push wheelchair coming upon an intersection.  I asked her if she wanted help crossing the street and she accepted.  She told me she was going to the grocery store which was kind of on the way for me, so I pushed her on over there.  However, I forgot that most of the roads in Kotzebue aren't paved and actually pretty rocky, so it was a little tougher than I expected, but we got there and that was another nice start to the day.

The Heritage wasn't packed, but had a nice, comfortable amount of people to keep the event a fun success.  There was food, cake, a ribbon-cutting ceremony, gospel music, and traditional Inupiaq drumming and dancing full of stories in between songs.

On gospel music:
I want to put this as politely as possible. It is not exactly pleasant sound, the ladies' voices.  The music is reminiscent of the Mennonite worship music we listened on my mission trip to Appalachian Kentucky.  However, these women sing at an incredibly high pitch that does not gel well with the Alaskan Eskimo accent.  Nonetheless, you can tell that their hearts are in the music and that is enough to earn my appreciation.  KOTZ, the local Kotzebue radio station, plays this music every Sunday.  Feel free to stream it to our very own computer from www.kotz.org.

On native drumming and dancing:

I had a blast with this one.  A line of men of all ages sit in a row with there drums, drumming the same beat, while both women and men dance a synchronized dance.  The dance is the same for both sexes except men get to move their feet with the beat (women don't move their feet).  The men's stomping is accentuated during loud beat to the point to the point that the whole dance is performed in a crouched position. This dancing style is actually pretty cool and I suspect it will soon catch on at high school dances and football games.  The dances usually tell a story, like a hula, sometimes about animals or a hunt.  There was one dance called the "walrus dance" in which the dancers even made sounds like a walrus.  Traditional Inupiaq dancing was banned in villages when missionaries came to this area and now these dancers are trying to teach old songs and dances to these communities again.  Oh yeah!  The best part!  I got to dance with them!  Yeah.  Cool beans!

The next part of this excellent day was when the grand opening was over.  There was leftover food!  Arriba!  I now have a gallon Ziploc full of vegetable, half of one full of fruit, and a bunch of provolone and cheddar cheese.  There is also the equivalent of 3/4 a cake in the fridge at work, so I have that to look forward next week.

I have more to write, but I will save it for my next post.  I have video of both the singing and dancing that I can't attach to the blog.  I'll see if I can get them on Facebook.  Blogging again real soon.

A little scenery for ya

Kotzebue is blessed with fantastic view of the treeless mountains of Cape Krusenstern National Monument and Noatak National Preserve.  A week ago, people were still ice fishing a little ways from shore.  In a week this ice will be gone and the sun won't set for 38 days.  Photo taken at 11pm, temps in the high 30s.

Tundra walking and my love/hate relationship with the lowbush cranberry

Hey blog.  It's been a while.  Let me tell you about what I did this weekend.

My roommate/co-worker Holly and I decided to go backpacking this Memorial Day weekend.  There are no formal trails to follow outside of Kotzebue.  There is an 8-mile road that loops out into the tundra and back, but that's about it.  Walking across the tundra is generally discouraged because the terrain is so difficult to cross.  More on tundra walking later.

We decided to hike south of town, down the coast.  Not even walking on the beach is easy.  The sand and loose rock gives way under your feet and you can't move as fast as you want.  We found what I believe to be seal and beluga vertebrae, which seems so common place up here.  The coast is a major pathway out of town for snowmachines and four-wheelers.  We met a few people on four-wheelers and they warned us about Sadie Creek not far away down the coast.  We came upon the creek ourselves.  It was flooded from all the spring snowmelt.  Though I was wearing tall rubber boots, the water at its shallowest point was just I little to high for me to walk through and still remain dry.

So that was a road block for us.  We decided to stop for the night and set up came.  By that time it was about 9pm with the sun still high in the sky.  We made a fire out of driftwood and melted snow for water for our dehydrated soup.  However, it took about an hour to boil the water.  Anyone who thinks I'm an outdoorsy guy should watch me try to cook outside (that includes charcoal grilling). 

As we waited for water to boil, we watched and listened to Pacific loons floating in the openings in the sea ice.  Pacific loons sound much from our friend, the Common Loon (best state bird ever!).  Pacific loons sound tone-deaf compared to the Common Loon.  When a bunch of them wail at the same time, it's kind o scary-sounding. (Note: the photo above was taken around midnight)

After waking up the next day, we spent some time around the camp since we really couldn't go any further down the coast.  I climbed the coastal bluff p to the tundra and found a moose skeleton.  It looked like someone went hunting, cut off all the meat (including the brain), and carried it down to the coast to be carried away on snowmachine.  I sat down to sketch the skeleton.  A word of caution to anyone who wants to sit down on the ground in the tundra:  there are berries everywhere!  And they will stain your pants!

We decided to head back home that afternoon, but instead of walking back along the coast, we walked across the tundra.  The tundra is covered with a mat of spongy mosses, grassy tussocks, and nets of short woody plants. It is like walking across a field of mattresses with small foot-sized potholes hidden throughout.  There are tussocks about six-inches high that are solid when your step on them but you can never quite step on them right because they are covered with grass and your foot slips off of them.  In addition, there are often soggy pools across the tundra, so it pays to wear rubber boots.  Crossing the tundra consists of a lot of high-stepping, ground-staring, and ankle-twisting.  Tundra walking may not be as terrible as I made it sound, but it's slow-going and you'll be glad once you get out of it.  You'll also sleep like a dog when you get home.

I bought a knife!

Today during training, we visited the Sulianich Art Center right across the street from the Northwest Arctic Heritage Center where I work.  This art center is a non-profit where local artists can send their work, which in turn is sold across the country and all the profits are returned to the artist.  Not only does this process support the arts economically, it also supports the continuation of Inupiaq tradition.

Some of the owners were traditional dancers and drummers.  They shared with us how the drums are traditionally constructed out of walrus stomach and wood from an ash tree (there are trees around here if you move inland).  Nowadays drums are made of non-traditional material, like vinyl.

They showed us a very fancy parkie (they say that instead of 'parka') made out of ground squirrel pelts.  One of the owners shared a story with us of summer days in his childhood spent waiting outside ground squirrel burrows to snare the little guys with fishing line.  They would skin the squirrel in such a fashion that they didn't have to cut the pelt. Then he would roast the rest of the squirrel over a fire right there on the hill.

He recalled the transition he was required to make as a boy from traditional furs to JC Penny clothes in order to attend school in Kotzebue in the early 70s.  He used to stuff his boots with grass for padding until they were replaced with store-bought felt insoles.

We were able to visit with local carvers in the back of the shop, where artist chisel wood and scrimshaw whale baleen.  Baleen is the comb-like structures analogous to teeth on whales, used for filtering water and catching krill.  A basket woven out of baleen will sell for $400.

One of the local carvers sold me a knife for $75.  The handle is made out of caribou antler with the image of a seal carved into the side and the face of a hunter carved into the butt.  Th eyes of the sea and the hunter are inlaid baleen.  The blade is made of mastodon ivory.  Yes, mastodon ivory! The petrified tusk of a long extinct relative of the woolly mammoth!  How cool is that!!!  Apparently the ivory shards can be found along the beaches of the peninsula, but you must look carefully because it looks like wood.

So that's pretty cool.  I guess the art center will offer workshops about making traditional knives.  I look forward to visiting with them throughout my stay here.

Here I am in Kotz

Hello, folks.  Welcome to my new blog.  This will be a new experience for me as I am not quite so computer savvy and my ex-roommate computer guru can't help me because he's in Africa at the moment.  So I figured out Blogger on my own and I'll try to keep up with it.  Let's get started.

This has been my second full day in Kotzebue.  It is currently 11:45pm here and the sun is just thinking about going down.  It will probably set around 2am tonight and rise again around 4:30am.  I'm sleeping soundly in the dark corner of the loft in the house that I'm staying in.  Another seasonal interpreter and I are basically house-sitting for the summer for two professors of the local community college who spend their summers in Fairbanks.  It's awesome because we have a fully-stocked kitchen and a laundry machine.

I'm getting off-track, so I'll give you a brief background of Kotzebue.  Kotzebue is a town of about 3,000 that exists on a flat peninsula in the Chukchi Sea in northwest Alaska.  The town is about 25 miles north of the Arctic Circle, hence the late sunset and the current temperature in the 30s and the ice covered sea surround the town right now.  The population in around 85% Inupiat, the native people of the region.  The people up here still participate in centuries-old subsistence practices such as hunting and fishing, which is allowed on federal parklands for natives only.  The elders here have a supreme knowledge of the land and I hope to learn a lot from them this summer.

Today was my first day of training at the Northwest Alaska Heritage Center, here in Kotz.  This building is the headquarters for the four parklands that compose the Western Arctic National Parklands.  I may talk about them in later posts.  The goal of today was to lean about the reason these parklands had been established and how much of a role the natives played in claiming and securing their own lands in this region.

After training was over today, Holly, my roommate and colleague, at two interp staff members from Nome who are also in training with us took a few of my boss' sled dogs out for a walk.  Awesome!  I get to play with dogs all summer!  One thing about sled dogs is that they are trained to pull, so its really quite a tiring process to take them out.  I also had to carry one of the dogs part of the way back because she was having respiratory problems, so that was also pretty tiring. 

Needless to say, I'm kind of falling asleep here, so I'm going to end this post soon.

It is of my understanding that blog posts are somewhat short and not as scattered as I've organized this entry.  I've experienced so much in these past three days that I want to tell you everything, but I realize that telling you about my in-flight movie is a little too much detail (it was Invictus; very good!).  I'm meeting a lot of cool people and I will tell you more in future blog posts as I start figuring this place out.  For now, peace to you all.