Blog 1

Selected log excerpts:

Day 1

May 27th

This is Amazing.  Leaving Anchorage, from sea level, fields of mountains rise .  Out and expansive.  Going north, an eastern sun checkerboards the slopes white and black.  Sharps ridges and steep slopes provide the contrast.  The sun is just rising.  From 30,000 ft they are nothing but sheep.  Mnt. Mickinley shepards the flock from far above.  May still looks like winter.

The sheep disperse.  Pebbled lakes star the flats, rivers add stripes.  The hand that made these was not concerned with order.  This feels like the frontier.

I am changing my unknown to my discovered.

There are 17 people on my flight to Nome through Kotzebue, 1/10 full.  It’s weighted down with the necessities, food, goods, mail, someone’s new bike.  There’s no other way.

We fly up, over the Yukon River, through the interior, just past Nome and into the arctic circle.  Am I supposed to feel anything other than the novelty of so-far-north?  Above the Seward Peninsula, the Kotzebue sound is still iced and cold.  This is the Arctic Ocean.  The land stretches out brown with frostbite.  Kotzebue lies at the end of the longest coldest finger-no roads to the mainland.  Few depart at the Alaska Airlines hangar, their breaths tell the temperature.  US mail and cargo is unloaded.  Only 11 continue to Nome.This is still winter.

Leaving Kotzebue I see the town’s length, shorter than the runway and only three blocks deep.  I’m told Nome, just 30 minutes south and west, is a fraction larger.  Before we get high above the clouds that have formed in the ‘warming’ of the day, we’re south of the circle and above the Seward Peninsula.  A snow-blanket full of spring holes covers tundra, hills, mountains, and blurs the coastline.  There are no trees, little life.  I will get a second spring.

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Day 2

May 28th

I’ve been here in Nome for 36 hours.  Like any experience that comes with a place it is hard to put to words.  A first description I would give would only be a first impression unto you and thus temper the rest.  Each detail is only part of the whole, and the order they come is no particular indication of importance or significance.  That being said, I like Nome.  The people I have met have been nice.  They smile and say hello, wave from their trucks, shake your hand well.  As a point of reference there are only 3,500 of them, most are native Alaskans.  Children are everywhere, on bikes, playing basketball, walking unaccompanied.  As for the adults, most are busy, walking here or driving there.  Few sit and watch.  There are tourists, not many of them but they come for the birds.  I don’t know much about the birds but I’ve heard there are a lot of them, and there must be because this is a very long way to come.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks has a satellite campus here in Nome, known as the Northwest Campus.  In some regard or another I will be working with their Reindeer Research Program and the BLM, but how is not yet clear.  I’m living in the University Bunkhouse, 208A East Kings Plaza, for the moment alone.  There are three bunk rooms and master bed room with, what I would suspect are, Greg Finstadt’s belongings (more on him after I meet him).  There are maps on the wall, guns in the closet, couches, pots and pans and a fridge with, until today, little more than reindeer medicine in it.  It has been well lived in and as long as there’s kitchen and a bed its good enough for me.I’m excited here.  Now that I’m here there is nothing to lose by being fully here.  Exploring town, discovering all of the new, living everything is fun.  Nothing new is ever dull.  I’m enthusiastic about being here.  This is not just a work experience, it is an Alaksa experience, a too-far-north experience, a new-place-and-people experience, a learning experience, a living experience.  The work I will do will constitute a significant part of my time here, but it is just a fraction.  While I’m tentative to predict anything, I’m certain of this.

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Day 8

June 3rd

And just now, finally, I’m starting to get an idea of what I’m going to be doing.  From what Greg says it’s a terribly daunting task.  Greg’s been here for ages;  there’s no one better to introduce you to the herders, make you understand the place and teach you everything you need to know about the ecosystem than Greg.  He lives this and loves sharing it.  The BLM is responsible for assisting the reindeer herders in generating range management plans and it sounds like they’re having me start it because no one was qualified and felt up to the task.  No one has made one before for this area so I’m walking on new ground, and no one wanted to make one which tells me I need to watch my step and look for all the help I can get.  Laurie (BLM) has asked me to generate three plans for different herds but Greg says he would be more than happy with just one.    With the amount of material that’s accumulated on my desk today alone, piles of pressed plants, Federal handbooks, textbooks, and other reading material that I have to get through and know and understand by the end of the month, I’d say my job is daunting and finishing just one plan would make me very proud.  So, in short, I’ve got a hell of a lot of work cut out for me.

As for Photographs, I know family and friends would like visuals to put their imaginations to rest but they will be posted in some time.