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.