From Alaska to India

Locals often claim that Kaktovik is the foggiest place on earth. In the little room that serves as an office for the local airline, some witty fellow has scratched "Barter Island" off the map on the wall and replaced it with "Foggy Island". I believe it. For 5 days the coast was gray and totally socked in, with visibility less than a couple hundred meters; not good conditions to land a small plane on a gravel spit runway. So I fretted in the bunkhouse, getting ever more irritable as my window for reaching India on time narrowed (check out the foggy bunkhouse in the picture). The fog finally cleared on Friday, and when I reached Fairbanks, US Airways told me that if I wanted to get back to Virginia without spending $1400, then I would have to wait until Monday.

So no orientation for me. However I did get to spend an extra couple of days with my parents in Virginia. I finally got to New Delhi on Wednesday night, a full 8 days after my originally scheduled arrival time. After a few days engaged in paperwork and a mini-orientation, I jumped on a plane up to Dehra Dun, the capital of Uttarrakhand state. From there a taxi took me up, up, up into a cloud, to the town of Mussourie, a British-Raj era hill station, where I will be studying Hindi at the Landour Language School for the next three months. After 2 days here, I've concluded that Mussourie is perpetually encased in a cloud. Walking through the busy town center, the blare of horns and chatter of honeymooning couples is muffled by the dense fog hanging between the buildings. Occasionally there's an opening in the white bank, and glorious views down the hillsides are visible. Dense trees cover the slopes, and gray languor monkeys and a whole variety of unidentified birds fill the branches. Rhesus macaques sit on walls along the roads, staring balefully at passersby, hoping to spy some food to snatch. I'll upload some photos as soon as I take some! Classes start tomorrow!

Kaktovic

After two weeks of preperation in Fairbanks, I flew on a commercial flight to Kaktovic, a small community on the northern coast of Alaska on the Arctic Ocean. The town has a population of only about 250 people, mostly of Inupiak Eskimo heritage. Until the 1940's the Inupiak were transient and mobile, moving around the Alaskan coastal plain following seasonal resources. Only with the establishment of the DEW (Distance Early Warning) Line, a network of radar facilities around the coast of Alaska to detect incoming bombers from Russia, did the Inupiak settle near these facilities. We are staying in the Fish and Wildlife bunkhouse, which is one of the nicer buildings in town. All week we've been completing final preparations; today our entire crew went out in boats to set up one of the field camp sites.






I've been learning a number of new skills here in Kaktovic, including how to fix and assemble zodiacs, how to repair and mount boat motors, and how to shoot and clean Remmington 12 gauge pump-action shotguns. The shotguns are for bear protection - both polar and grizzely bears are common here, and all field teams are required to carry guns as a last option in a bear encounter. Rather than shot, we will have shells with us in the field - packs more of a powerful punch, which is desirable if you have a bear charging you at 35 miles an hour. We will likely move out into our field site permenantly in the next day or two.

Caribou flight

I'm going to India on August 14th, but before that, I'm preparing myself for the heat of the subcontinent by spending the summer in the Alaskan arctic. I thought that if I was going to quit my job to go to India, I might as well quit a bit early and do some fun field work before-hand! I'm working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as a seasonal biological technician on a shorebird breeding study on the coastal stretches of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. We have a big field team of about 12, who will be divided into three field camps based at three different river deltas along the arctic ocean. I'm not yet sure what delta I'll be at - those assignments will be made once we get into the field. I've been in Fairbanks, Alaska, where the Arctic Refuge field office is, for about a week now, preparing for the field season. This has mostly involved getting gear together, fixing tents and boat motors, and buying A LOT of food from various grocery stores and mailing it up to Kaktovic, a small village on the Arctic Ocean that we will stage the field camps out of. Ha, on Wednesday we bought $3,500 of food, and then spent another $1,000 to mail it. Seems crazy, but we had to get enough to feed 12 people for 6 weeks in a cold climate. We couldn't buy it in Kaktovic because apparently there's not much in the grocery stores there other than soda pop and doritos, and it's very expensive.



On Saturday Ryan and I got to go on a sweet boondoggle. The chief biologist of the refuge called us on Friday night to tell us that the annual census of the Porcupine caribou herd was taking place on Saturday. Three small planes from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service left from Fairbanks at 6am to fly north up over the Brooks range to the coastal plain, using radio telemetry to locate collared caribou individuals, and then take photos of the herd to get a count.







The pilot, Dave, Ryan and I flew north from Fairbanks in a Cessna 185 (a really small plane, the three of us took up all the seats), passing over the White Mountains, the Yukon Flats Wildlife Refuge, the Brooks Range, and finally to the coastal plain and the Arctic Ocean (a three hour flight). In concert with the other two planes, we then flew back and forth, listening intently to our radio reciever for the characteristic beeps that would indicate the presence of a radio-collar banded caribou. When we heard the beeps, we swooped down in the plane to get an exact GPS reading. All the crazy airmanship was making me ill, but it was an awesome experience with spectacular scenery! The photo of the aircraft here is not a Cessna - this was a beaver flown by the Alaska Fish and Game. They had a WWII-era camera mounted underneath to take photos of the herds to complete the census.