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.