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.