We headed out for the top of Alaska
about 11:00. When Don had made the
reservations our flight was a couple of hours.
With changes in scheduling, it ended up being about 6 ½! We flew on a Boeing 737 Combi, the front half
of the plane was containerized freight and the back was passengers. We walked out on the tarmac and entered the
plane through the rear door. Hadn’t done
that in a long time.
Flying down to Anchorage we flew over
Denali and Mt. McKinley. When we got to
Anchorage, we picked up our first load of oil patch workers. Sharon had the middle seat. They were heading in for their time up
north. On my left was a 71 year old
gentleman from Loren?? TX going up for his 3 week on, 3 week off stint. He’d been raised in Sitka, AK and moved to TX
to commute back up here. Never really
did get a good answer for that. The
“boy” on my right from Tulsa, OK was summer help and would be working 6 weeks
and then done for the summer. There was
a LOT of drinking on that flight as the oil patch is “dry.” When we got up to Dead Horse, Pruedoe Bay all
but 7 of us got off and then loaded up with the workers heading down for their
time off. The guy I road with from Pruedoe
to Barrow, shared a lot about life on “the island.” As we passed over it, he pointed out the
caribou along the runway and his work area.
He showed me pictures of the polar bears and arctic wolves right near
their area. They were beautiful. He said there are guys whose only job is to
watch for bears to keep the workers safe.
If they fall asleep, it’s immediate dismissal. He did 2 on, 2 off and had moved his family
to southern Alaska so he doesn’t have so long a commute. The guy we road back with commuted all the
way to Charleston, SC and it would take 2 days to get home for his 2 week on, 2
week off!!!
You just don’t happen upon Barrow, you
have to want to arrive there. It is the
furthest town in the north of Alaska. Remember the map from the last blog? The only way there is by boat or plane. What
arrives in Barrow stays in Barrow. When
you arrive at the airport it like stepping back 40 years in time. When you step
out of the airport take another 50 years off the calendar. Initially we did not
know what to really expect. We soon
discovered Barrow is really the last frontier. We will let the pictures speak
for themselves.
The weather when arrived was perfect,
blue skies in the mid fifties, and hungry mosquitoes. Our hotel was within
walking distance from the airport, across the street. When
you enter the hotel there is a sign at the front entry way asking that you
remove your shoes. There are no paved
roads in Barrow and they have a water truck that sprays water on the dirt roads
to keep the dust down, so then you have mud. I was checking out all the different
kinds of shoes laying all around on the floor, maybe I could trade up to a
better pair. I decided not to pursue that idea due to the fact that there is no
place to hide in Barrow. You would just go around in circles trying to escape.
After unloading our things, we decided
it was time for dinner. We found this restaurant nearby the hotel, didn’t look
like much but then again most of the town did not look like much, so we debated
momentarily if we should give it a try. Let me tell you it was some of the best Asian
foods I have eaten in all of my travel throughout the world. Only thing that would have made the dinner
better was a cold beer. You cannot buy alcohol in Barrow. You have to apply for a permit to purchase
alcohol. So there in no alcohol for sale
in Barrow, nothing for us visitors. Now
once you have been deemed worthy (which required a background check by the
police department and a $100 permit fee) you can have shipped in 5 bottles of
whisky, 20 bottles of your favorite wine and 5 cases of beer, per month. For a couple, it’s twice that amount. Remember the days are long in the summers and
the nights are longer in the winter. Bootlegging is one of the part-time jobs.
After devouring our dinner, we still had
plenty of light it was 7 pm. We walked down to the monument that was dedicated
to Wiley Post and Will Rogers. Their plane crashed about 15 miles south of the
airport on an expedition flight to find an air route to Siberia.
After that, Sharon and I decided to walk to
the Presbyterian Church. We could not
find it right away. The Presbyterians were some of the very first missionaries
to arrive in Barrow.
We decided to see if we could arrange for a tour guide to
show us the sights with a little history thrown in. The hotel clerk hooked us
up with a gentleman named Mike Shults. That’s a good Alaskan name isn’t it?
Mike picked us up at 8:30 pm and proceeded to give us the first class tour. See
Mike had been there for 40 years so he was nearly a native. There are two parts
to Barrow, there’s Barrow and then there is Browerville. I would estimate that
the whole city is about 2 miles square. There are 4800 inhabitants of Barrow.
When Mike moved there 40 years ago there was 2400.
As you drive around Barrow you begin to
notice that nothing ever leaves Barrow once it has arrived. So there are a lot of discarded things all
over everywhere. There are no zoning
laws or building codes. We saw seal pelts and caribou meat hanging out to cure.
Many of the houses are not painted and
do not have running water, which means they do not have toilets. They collect their waste in a 5 gallon buckets
and the waste dept picks it up and discards it for them.
One of the things on the girls’ bucket
list was to put their foot in the Arctic Ocean. So Mike took us to the farthest
point that he was allowed to go. Point
Barrow is native burial grounds, so you have to be native or have a permit to
go beyond where we were, plus a heavy duty 4 wheel drive would be advised. So the girls took off their shoes and
reluctantly stepped in the waters of the Arctic Ocean. Needless to say it was very refreshing and
cold as ice. (See the ice floating behind us?) They were troopers and accomplished the goal. Oh yeah, they also
had their Key West sweat shirts on as well. We had traveled to Key West Florida about 18
months ago when the girls turned?? (not allowed to tell ladies age publicly),
so they decided that the sweats shirts would symbolize the journey from the
southernmost point of the US to the farthest northern point. The reason we had
sweat shirts in Key West is that it got so cold we needed something warm to
wear. Little did we know at the time how they would play a role in our trip to Alaska.
As we continued our journey around
Barrow, Mike explained that whaling season had been a wash for the natives this
year due to the fact that the ice was so bad this spring. They had not caught a
whale all spring. They normally catch 12 to 14 whales in the spring and another
12 to 14 in the fall when the whales are migrating south for the winter. There are 52 whaling crews in Barrow. Although there is a ban on commercial whaling,
the natives are allowed to hunt with very generous limits. They can hunt seals, walruses, salmon, caribou,
whales and any other wild game that is available.
Many of the houses do not have electricity;
they may have gas plumbed to it for heating. They dig deep ice cellars beneath their house
where they store their food. See, the
permafrost is only a few inches below the surface. They have difficulty burying
their deceased as well. Every few years
the caskets are pushed up by the ice and they have to go back out and put
grandma back in the ground. It’s a very
different way of life in Barrow.
The price of food and gas up here is
very, very high as you would expect. Gas
is $6.20 per gal. and milk is $10.00 per gal.
The barge that brings the gas to Barrow comes once a year. It will arrive in August. There is not a port for the barge to tie to so
they push it on shore and offload the fuels by hose to each of the large tanks.
Anyway back to whaling. When one of the
whaling crews does harpoon a whale all of the other crews pitch in to assist
getting the whale back to shore. Each of
the crews will get a portion of the whale for helping. This is actually seal
season for the natives. When we were
standing on the shore we heard that they had spotted a whale when they were
seal hunting. Didn’t think much of at the time but little
did we know that they would get their first whale of the season while we were
there. The buzz around the town was electrifying.
The excitement kept building as people
heard the news. Everyone began to gather
at the beach. As we were about to leave the beach, the news
had been confirmed that they did in fact get one.
There was one of the village people standing
on this mound of dirt looking out across the ocean. 
I was taking pictures of the gang under this
archway of a Bowhead Whale when he said “mister, they are bringing in the whale.”
I climbed up on top of the mound and he showed me the convoy of boats bringing
the whale to the shore. They were quite
a ways out. He said that it would take
about 2 hours to pull the whale in. They would have to find a break in the ice.
There were 5 or 6 boats each having 8 to
10 people aboard. They hook each boat in
a chain to develop enough power to pull the whale through the water. There is one boat attached to the tail of the
whale with a float in the middle to keep the whale floating so it doesn’t sink.
Mike told us there would be about 1000
villagers that would be waiting on shore for the arrival of the whale. Now mind you it was about 11 pm. So the whale was not going to be ashore until
after 1 am. It was very exciting to observe
this event. We did not stay to see the
arrival of the whale, but we did by the luck of the Irish, get to see the whale
in the morning!!!
See the 6 boats in the lead, a space with the float, and the last boat guiding the tail.
We had decided to walk to a Sam &
Lee’s for breakfast. It was a little
ways from the hotel. It was raining but
the walk was good (someone once told me that when you are on vacation you walk
in the rain) so off we went. This was to our good fortune, because when we
arrived at Sam & Lee’s our tour guide was just coming out of the
restaurant. He was the one that
recommended the restaurant to us the night before. He was stopping in to see if we had taken his
advice. He was delighted to see us and
offered to take us to the whale site. We
decided to defer breakfast until later.
Off to the whale site we went. What an
experience! There were locals all over
the place still working on adrenalin from the night before. The pictures that we have included in the blog
maybe distasteful to some of you, but this is the way of life up here. This is
how they have lived for many centuries. This
is the process that they live by. To us
it may appear very savage like, but to them it’s normal. They “eat off the land and sea.” As you can see, they are dividing up the
shares of the whale and it will be distributed throughout the village. They share their good fortune with all. On Friday, the captain of the whaling crew
that caught the whale will have a big celebration and cook out at his house for
the entire community. This event takes place after every whale is caught.
The baleen, which is what the whales strain the water through to get their food, is almost like a black, hairy curved piece of plexiglass.
There are 600 sections of this in the whale.
(talked to a man last night, said baleen in Fairbanks is $150-200 a piece, in Barrow it was $20)
We were so excited to have been on hand
for the event. When we were coming back from our evening tour the manager of
the hotel had closed down the check in desk so that he could take his family to
watch them bring in the whale. When I
was checking out of the hotel the next morning I asked how the evening had
gone. He had taken a few pictures and
some video. I asked if he would mind sharing them with us and a few other
guests. He was happy to do so.
Here are a few details on the whale that
was caught.
54 ft long, estimated to be approx
150-200 years old! They would prefer
that the whale be 30 to 35 ft long like the one we saw in the museum. They say the meat is much more tender. But
for this late in the season, they will take what God has provided because
before long winter will be setting in.
After they have harvested the whale, the
jaw bones will be left on the beach to dry.
The rest will be taken up the beach to collection areas to keep the
polar bears away from town. Another fact of life in Barrow, dogs have learned
that if there is a polar bear in the areas they do not bark. Polar bears like to eat dogs. So when you get up in the morning and there
are no dogs barking, beware the polar bears may be close at hand. This is the truth!
It was really hard to leave the
beach! But, Mike dropped us up at the
Inupiat Heritage Center. It really made an impression and helped us get the perspective
when we learned the whale in the museum was 35 feet long and the one on the
beach was 54 feet long!!!
Our first impression when arriving to Barrow,
“what are we doing here?” Our lasting
impression is “we are very happy that we came to meet the wonder people of
Barrow and to briefly get a view of their daily life.” All the people we talked to would not trade
their life in Barrow with any other place in the world.
We hope that you enjoy the article as much as we enjoyed writing about our experience in Barrow!
A short distance up the road from our
first sighting, we found another moose along side of the road that seemed to be
quite content having his picture taken while eating. When we departed the hot springs on our way
back to Fairbanks, this moose darted across the road in front of us, so we
drove up to see where he was. Low and
behold, it was the same moose from earlier that day. He must have recognized the car and wanted his
picture taken again. Sharon said “I
think that’s the same moose we saw earlier” (she is so observant). When we
review the pictures, sure enough it was the same one.
There was even a moose on the grounds enjoying a visit.
Bob's 4some.
