Chapter 58 - Fairbanks and Barrow
August 24, 2000
8/10 It's past time to leave Anchorage and the Kenai Peninsula. Because Anchorage was the only practical base for visits by three separate pairs of friends and relatives, we've been in the area for seven weeks. It's an area rich with things to see and do, and we haven't come close to seeing it all. But the summer is short (nearly gone, in fact), and new vistas beckon.
The drive from Anchorage east on the Glen Highway and then north through Wasila on the Parks Highway feels very familiar and very crowded. We stopped for a short hike at Thunderbird Falls, 25 miles northeast of Anchorage off the Glenn Highway. It's an easy, pleasant, 1-mi hike thru mature forest to viewpoints of the gorge and the falls. The falls would be impressive if there were a better view, but the trail stops at a substantial distance away, and the falls are partly obscured by trees and canyon walls. The trail was an interesting identification exercise in red berries: red devil's club, red highbush cranberries, red ground dogwood fruits, and red elderberries. Devil's club, a 10" club of glistening red berries above a 5' whorl of giant maple-shaped leaves on a thorny 4 to 6' stem, is a gorgeous plant until you snag something on those irritating thorns. It seems to be uniquely northern, since we haven't seen it anywhere but Alaska. It densely covers mountainsides, and is just the right height to grab when climbing uphill thru the brush.
At Willow, we left the trailer in a wide spot beside the highway and drove east on Willow Fishhook Road to Hatcher Pass, and down the other side a couple of miles to Independence Mine State Park (which is closed this year for reconstruction). We drove up to this point from the east in early July and found the road over the pass closed then, presumably still snow covered.
This time the snow was mostly gone and the tundra, well above the tree line, was covered with early summer flowers. The views from the pass back down the valleys to the west are impressive and make the 25 miles of dirt road very much worth while. There are nice places to camp along the way, but take a tent and leave your RV behind - the road is unmaintained, narrow, and rutted.
The early part of the road generally parallels a pretty mountain stream, and has occasional houses, each set well back from the road in many acres of forest, generally out of view and often with an entrance trail bristling with large "No Trespassing" and "Beware of the Dog" signs. Gradually, the houses thin out and the last few miles of road leave the stream and climb steeply, with abrupt switchbacks, toward Hatcher Pass. The terrain in this last few miles is alpine - very low ground-hugging mats of green among the rocks. Summit Lake is a pretty little gem, hiding in a pocket near the summit, backed with snow fields and steep rocky slopes. The return trip was back the same road.
After re-attaching the trailer at Willow, we continued on north, spending the night at Denali View North Campground in Denali State Park - a paved parking lot with a spectacular view of the Alaska Range and (rarely) Mt. McKinley. We arrived about 7 p.m., in time to cook dinner and enjoy the view for a few hours before bedtime. The clouds were quite high and allowed a nice view of the first two ranks of mountains, with just a hint of the lower slopes of McKinley.
8/11 The morning started with a wildflower hike - a short interpretive trail at the south end of the park. Labels helped us confirm our identification of several of the local plants and flowers.
We had hoped that as we passed over the high barrier of the Alaska Range we'd find different weather on the other side. It was indeed different, but unexpectedly and uncharacteristically, it was wetter. Generally, Fairbanks will be somewhat drier and sunnier than Anchorage. But as we came out of the high mountains, the weather deteriorated, the clouds became darker and lower, and rain began. As we climbed into the hills again in the last hour before Fairbanks, driving along a high ridge north of the Tanana River, we found ourselves often driving in fairly dense fog, with rain falling through the fog. So we saw little scenery.
In Fairbanks, we chose Chena Marina RV Park because of its location close to town, large campsites, and available modem port. The "Marina" is a long skinny pond that is an active float plane base, with a busy gravel airstrip on the opposite side. We're right on the shore of the lake, so it's occasionally noisy - but an interesting sort of noise (and the planes stop flying well before bedtime). On many days, the planes didn't fly at all because of the bad weather. The RV Park buildings - office, manager's residence, bathrooms, and laundry - are recycled modular buildings used during the construction of the Alaska Pipeline. The summer tourist rush is over. This park, as well as the one we left in Anchorage, has many empty spaces. (It did fill again just before we left, when a 14-rig caravan arrived.)
The Public Lands Information Center was our first stop in town. As in Anchorage, this is a wonderful spot to spend an hour. It's part museum, with photos, interpretive material, and stuffed animals representing each of the major public land areas in Alaska. It's part library and bookstore - with a good selection of books and also loose-leaf notebooks of informal resource material for planning backcountry trips. And there are knowledgeable people available to answer questions and give advice. Next stop was the Visitor's Center, which is quite different - concentrating on tourist attractions rather than backcountry. The walls are covered with hundreds of brochures about things to see and do in the Fairbanks area. The attendant was knowledgeable, and helped us make decisions about a trip to Barrow.
8/12 Fairbanks is an odd city, sprawling seemingly randomly along the Chena River for many miles, with sporadic roads extending back to small suburbs in the surrounding hills. The downtown area is somewhat ramshackle - the occasional modern building standing next to rundown buildings housing a mixture of blue-collar bars, upscale tourist boutiques, and pawn shops. Near the center of the city, there are rutted dead-end streets ending at abandoned industrial sites and gravel pits.
8/15 The museum at the University of Alaska - Fairbanks (UAF) is a must-see for anyone visiting the area. Although not large, it is jam-packed with all sorts of well-presented information. Unlike any other museum we've visited, this one is organized by geographical region of Alaska rather than by subject. For each region, there is a sampling of geology, history, anthropology, biology and botany, ecology, and art, all mixed up together. It's really weird to find modern paintings hung next to Eskimo skin boats, or mineral displays hung next to an interpretive exhibit of native costumes. We attended a lecture/slide show on the Northern Lights - one of several different presentations offered daily. It was well done - we already knew quite a bit about this phenomenon, but learned some new things as well as being entertained. The speaker was a moonlighting high school science teacher who did a Master's thesis on Northern Lights while at UAF.
Did you know that researchers in Alaska aimed an electron beam up into the sky along the direction of the magnetic field lines, and created a small visible Aurora near the South Magnetic Pole? Even more surprising, a mirror-image Aurora appeared near the North Magnetic Pole, a few seconds later. Since then, research teams have taken simultaneous photos at the North and South Magnetic Poles and found that the Auroras are often mirror images of each other, doing their slow dance across the sky in exact synchrony as electrons slosh back and forth between the two poles along the lines of the Earth's magnetic field.
Fairbanks has plenty of tourist attractions, but they didn't particularly attract us. Except for a few drives through the surrounding area (Chena Ridge Road, Farmers Loop Road, etc), we spent our time here mostly relaxing at the trailer, catching up on reading and chores, organizing photos from the last two months, etc. Five consecutive days of rain helped to keep us at home.
8/16 The Botanic Garden at UAF has one fairly small floral display area, which was well-maintained and beautiful. But most of it is a working research facility, where a great many plants are tested for performance in the severe climate. This includes decorative flowers, shrubs, and trees as well as a large collection of fruits and vegetables. We enjoyed a spectacular display of Asiatic Lilies, huge cabbages (50 pounds isn't unusual), and generally seeing what does well up here and what doesn't. Only two or three tree species seemed to be thriving. We skipped the UAF Large Animal Research Facility, since we had already had already visited the Musk Ox Farm near Palmer, and had seen plenty of caribou in the wild.
8/17 We flew from Fairbanks to Barrow early this morning, having scheduled an overnight tour. The flight was dull - a solid overcast concealed the ground for the entire trip.
We initially planned to simply fly to Barrow, book a hotel room, and see the area on our own. But then we found that the tour package was cheaper than just the plane fare and hotel room. Several Anchorage and Fairbanks vendors offer such a tour. Conversation with various people in Fairbanks disclosed that they are all marketing exactly the same product - Alaska Airlines is the only travel option, Top of The World Hotel is the only respectable overnight accommodation (perhaps the *only* overnight accommodation), and there is only one tour operator in Barrow.
As it turns out, the several hours of bus travel around the Barrow area, narrated by an interesting and well-informed native, were very much worthwhile. The hour of Eskimo traditional song and dance at the community center was, as expected, a complete waste of time. The participants were unskilled amateurs, badly and incompletely costumed; the "songs" were simply dissonant gang shouting with no noticeable elements of melody or harmony; the dances were simple, poorly rehearsed, and uninteresting. (Judging by the expressions on their faces, the participants were bored too).
We ate both lunch and dinner at Pepe's, which advertises itself at the world's northernmost Mexican restaurant (there are other restaurants, but they didn't look promising.) Although the outside was the usual plain, utilitarian,weatherbeaten, slightly ugly wooden building, the interior was attractively furnished with typical Mexican décor. The food was well prepared but not memorable - a rather standard menu typical of American "Mexican" restaurants.
8/18 As I scribble these notes, I'm sitting in our motel room in Barrow looking out over the Arctic Ocean. The surf is breaking noisily, about 100 feet from us. One of the room's triple-pane insulated windows faces Northwest, where the nearest land, across the Chukchi Sea, is Siberia. On another wall, the window faces Northeast. In this direction, we look along the shore, across a few blocks of town, and down a barren 10-mile sandspit - the northernmost point of Alaska.
Through either window we can look due North. There's nothing between us and the North Pole except about 1200 miles of mostly-ice-covered ocean. At the moment, the pack ice has been blown offshore about 60 miles, out of our view except for occasional scattered ice floes, a few quite close to shore. Straight out beyond the Pole, across the Barents Sea, is the North Cape of Norway. Somewhere, just about there, rescuers are still trying frantically to get trapped sailors out of a damaged Russian submarine.
I'm viewing this from inside since it's rather unpleasant outside - light rain, threatening to turn to snow, and a cold damp wind blowing in off the water. Last evening, I walked the shoreline, watching a parade of big trucks and bulldozers rebuild the shore road after a major storm last week. The entire shoreline was eroded by about three feet, threatening some of the buildings and washing out several sections of road.
This shoreline has been the site of an Inupiat (Eskimo) village for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. A few years ago, wave erosion exposed an old sod house, including the almost perfectly preserved bodies of the occupants, with their last meal still spread out in front of them. They apparently were trapped and killed by a severe winter storm about 400 years ago. After study by archeologists, the bodies were re-buried in the town cemetery, further inland. These old houses are sunk in the ground about six feet, with the floor directly on the permafrost, forming a deepfreeze which preserves everything within. There are remains of many such houses along the bluff, marked by slight mounds and by the preserved tips of whale ribs protruding from the ground. These were used as strengthening ribs in the sides and roof of the old houses, supporting the layers of sod on top. The literature describes these as "winter houses", but our guide insisted that they were occupied year-round.
The current town of Barrow is predominantly Inupiat, but with a substantial minority of outsiders - who are likely to be employees of the technology-based companies - mostly airlines and electronic communications firms. Our fellow flying passengers were an interesting mix of Inupiat people (including a local boy's softball team flying to a game), tourists, and service and support technicians flying in to work on the many types of high-tech equipment in Barrow (e.g. the Xerox copiers and printers).
Memorable sights during the bus tour, and during an evening walk included:
The world's northernmost Airstream travel trailer: It would be interesting to know how (and why) it got here. It hadn't moved for many years, and had wooden lean-to sheds constructed against both sides.
Traditional umiaks in the yards of several homes: The umiak is a fairly large boat (perhaps 20' long, with substantial beam and freeboard), paddled by four or more people, made of stitched-together animal skins stretched over a wood skeleton. These are still used for whale hunting - partly for the sake of tradition and partly because they are very quiet in the water. There are also quite a few modern aluminum outboard-powered boats.
Racks of meat curing and drying outside: Hunting and fishing is still a very important part of life here - for cultural as well as economic reasons. Some yard had substantial quantities of caribou, ducks, and unrecognizable pieces. Uncooked meat and whale blubber is still a common and preferred food. Animal skins on stretching frames were hanging on the walls of some homes.
Relative affluence: Compared to other native villages we've seen, this one clearly has money to spend - and much of it is spent on public services and infrastructure. The elaborate public utility system and several impressive modern buildings (e.g. school, cultural center, elder's residence) are, we presume, the result of oil royalties from the drilling on native land in this borough.
As the capital city of the 91,000 square mile borough (a borough in Alaska is equivalent to a county or parish in other states), Barrow gets economic benefit from being a commercial and governmental center, and probably also is viewed as a showpiece, getting an extra share of the revenue for that reason. It should be noted that North Slope Borough is larger than many states, and includes the Prudhoe Bay oil field. We don't really understand the economic and legal relationships between the native corporations and the borough government, both of which get oil revenue. But we assume that both are contributing to the economic well-being of Barrow.
A high-tech city bus system: The town is quite spread out along the ocean shore and split by two large ponds, so that walking distances are quite long. Two or more busses circulate continuously, on defined routes. Each carries a GPS receiver and a radio transmitter, continuously informing a central computer as to its location. Channel 57 on the local television system continuously displays a map of the town, showing the actual location and direction of motion of each bus. Nobody needs to stand outside to wait for a bus (a wind chill index of minus 100 degrees is quite common in the winter). People wait inside, watching the TV display until the bus is almost to their location, then spend only a moment outside while boarding.
The longest road is a rutted track leading out to the natural gas wells, ending about 14 miles from town. Another road extends 6 miles northeast along the shore. Except for the short gravel streets, that's the entire extent of the road system. A few ATV tracks extend out into the tundra. In winter, snowmobile trails extend much further. Considering the low economic status of most of the population and the few roads, there are a surprising number of automobiles and trucks. Most of the cars and trucks have no license plates - the state does not require plates for use in Barrow.
There is one traffic light in town, in front of the central school. It doesn't work. Originally, it would turn red under manual control to allow school children to cross the street. But drivers were so unused to the idea that they didn't know what it was for and didn't stop. A few years ago, it stopped working and was continuously green for a couple of years before going completely dead. Nobody seems much interested in fixing it.
The city streets are gravel. Over the years, they've been re-graveled so often that they are several feet above the neighboring yards. The older houses thus sit in depressions, below street level, so the yards are a muddy mess, often with a moat of standing water surrounding the house. Improvised platforms of scrap wood, old pallets, and junk are used to create a walkway to the door and to support a few valued possessions (primarily one or more ATV's and snowmobiles and perhaps a boat) above the mud and water.
Yards are generally full of junk. Our guide said that Eskimos are pack rats, unwilling to throw anything away because it might be useful someday. I don't believe that explanation, or at least I don't believe it is unique to Eskimos - we've found that remote subsistence communities all over North America are full of junk regardless of the ethnicity of the occupants, and it's generally scattered around randomly, not organized. It appears to me that getting rid of junk is viewed simply as an unnecessary expense of time and money. A neat and attractive yard is meaningless - simply not a part of the culture in such places. (However, we've seen exceptions to the above blanket statement. For example, much of Newfoundland is very poor, and yet the rural homes were generally very neat and well maintained, often with flower gardens and neatly-clipped grass.)
Polar bear wander around town: The school has a fence around the playground - to keep the polar bears away from the small children. There is also an indoor playground - for use when it's too cold to play outside - which we were told means below about minus forty degrees. School hasn't been canceled due to bad weather in the past three years.
We had hoped to see some polar bears - but the seals, and therefore the bears, are currently many miles out to sea on the pack ice. We did see interesting birds - several huge Snowy Owls, a Tundra Swan, and a pair of Jaegers.
The entire town is heated with natural gas: An extensive field of gas wells was drilled by the Navy, many years ago when a substantial Navy base was located here. The Navy is gone, but they gave the gas wells and the buildings to the town. Some of the old Navy buildings now house a community college.
Utility tunnels: The water, sewage, electricity, and gas pipes in the town are all routed through an insulated tunnel below the streets. Hot water is continuously circulated through small pipes adjacent to the water supply and sewage pipes to keep them above freezing. All of these utilities pass from the tunnel into a house through a single large, insulated conduit, which enters the house above ground level and is a conspicuous feature of most buildings along the main streets in town. Houses which are not near enough to the utility system have storage tanks and a delivery service - trucks which bring fresh water and take away the sewage.
The town has only one local radio station, but this station achieves diversity by having a different disk jockey and different music genre each day of the week. On the other hand, there is an elaborate, many-channel, cable TV system, fed by an impressive array of huge satellite receiving dishes.
Softball and hockey seem to be the major competitive sports. The town softball field is smoothly graded gravel - not a blade of grass to be seen.
There are two trees in town - artificial palm trees. The trunk is large-diameter pipe; realistic-looking leaves are made from whale baleen strips. A real coconut hangs from one tree.
Whale skulls in front of several of the major buildings in town, as well as a row of bowhead whale skulls bleaching in the sun on the beach, just outside of town. Our guide explained that the whale plays a major role in traditional Inupiat culture, and the skulls are there to remind both residents and visitors of this heritage.
Occasional big white footballs, balanced on their tips out on the tundra, turned out to be snowy owls, sitting quietly on a hummock watching for lemmings.
Overall, our memory of the Arctic is dominated by the vast flat expanse of tundra. Even though precipitation is rare, qualifying this area almost as desert, everything is perpetually wet (except when frozen solid) for hundreds of miles in all directions. The underlying permafrost, the lack of drainage, and the cool temperatures, combine to keep water at or near the surface everywhere. Pools of open water are frequent, between low hummocks of arctic foliage. It's almost impossible to travel across this stuff in summer, except in specially equipped vehicles with huge low-pressure tires.
The plane got us back to Fairbanks about noon on August 18th. Again, we flew above a solid overcast, seeing almost nothing of the country we flew over.
8/21 Last night at 1 AM may have been the defining moment of our Alaska experience, as the Aurora Borealis finally made its appearance in Fairbanks. During the long autumn evening, the air became still, cold, and crisp, the temperature dropped almost to freezing, and the skies gradually cleared, giving another long, lingering sunset - with occasional fluffy little clouds painted in delicate shades of pink and yellow all over the sky. Then, around midnight, with sunglow still visible in the northwest and a half moon beginning to rise in the East, faint, slowly undulating, greenish wraiths began to materialize all over the sky. I thought at first these were clouds or wisps of fog, extension of the rapidly thickening wisps of ground fog rising from the lake in front of us.
But the diffuse glow gradually solidified and brightened into recognizable structures, radiating out across the sky. At one time, a series of sharply defined rays spread across the sky from the east, imitating a premature sunrise. A few minutes later, a giant curtain materialized in the west, hanging in loose smoothly undulating, folds. About 1:00 AM, a giant green curtain coalesced straight overhead, and gradually extended across the entire sky, from east horizon to west. This one was quite active, pulsating fairly rapidly, twisting back on itself, and slowly writhing back and forth across a large segment of the sky. It was bright enough to obscure the stars, with its reflection in the mirror-smooth lake seeming almost as bright as the real thing overhead. Even with the sunglow and the substantial light from a (partially cloud-covered) moon low in the East, this display stood out sharply.
We watched until our necks were sore, then got out our reclining lawn chairs and lay back flat on our backs, still twisting our heads back and forth to so as not to miss any of the events happening across almost the entire sky. It was like trying to follow all the action in a three-ring circus.
Finally at 2 AM, the cold drove us inside where we cranked up the thermostat and thawed out our toes while reflecting on what we'd seen. In an earlier lecture about the Aurora Borealis, we'd been told that the maximum intensity was along the circumference of a large circle centered on the North Magnetic Pole (*not* the North Pole). The diameter of the circle is variable, depending on the strength of the solar wind. On this night, the strongest display was straight overhead at Fairbanks, which is about 1300 miles from the Magnetic Pole.
This year is the peak of the 11-year solar cycle, so that very strong and frequent Auroral displays can be expected, and they will occasionally be pushed fairly far south - perhaps too far south to be seen from Fairbanks. We'll be looking for more viewing opportunities in the Pacific Northwest, as the skies become darker in September. Even those of you wintering in the deserts of the Southwest should have occasional opportunities to see this phenomenon during the coming autumn and winter.
The same strong magnetic fields which form the Aurora can disrupt various man-made electronic utilities. Circuit breakers on long-distance power lines can be tripped out; Radio transmission can become impossible at some frequencies; electronics in communications satellites can be damaged beyond repair.
8/22 Another brief drive - up the Steese Highway to an Alyeska Pipeline Visitor's Center. Somehow, we thought this was a pumping station with Pipeline staff on hand to answer questions. It turned out to be a tourist kiosk, with one not-very-knowledgeable public relations employee whose main activity was selling Pipeline T-shirts. Oh well! Later, we drove to Creamer's Field - originally a dairy farm which spread feed for migrating birds across a large field. It's now a National Wildlife Sanctuary, and the tradition of feeding the migrants is continuing. While we were there, the area was dominated by Canada Geese and Sandhill Cranes, with small numbers of a couple of kinds of ducks also represented.
8/23 After hanging out around the trailer for a few more mostly cloudy, rainy, days, we packed up and headed south this morning. There's a frosty feeling in the air. It's snowing in Barrow, and we can see the snowline beginning to creep down the sides of the high peaks. Next stop, Skagway.