It was no shock arriving in Kaktovik as we had done our homework on the place. It’s the only town in the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve. It has about 250 people. Kaktovik is 120 miles past the end of the road, which is in Prudhoe Bay. The town is on Barter Island just off the coast but it doesn’t have any bridges so it’s just the island. Kaktovik was the third leg of our main stops on our Arctic adventure.

The first photo is darn near the entire town with just a few buildings outside of the photo on both sides. If you look at the left side of the photo, the lowest house on the bottom of the left side is where we stayed. It’s a relatively large house with two storage units on the lower side.

Pretty much the entire airport is in the second photo. There are no buildings, only some fencing and a wind flag. It’s basically just a large flat gravel area. Our local guide, Don, pulled right up to our plane to pick us up along with our luggage. There wasn’t much wasted effort on transferring our luggage from the plane to the bus. Don remodeled an old school bus into his bear-viewing bus which he calls the “Blue Bird”.

Why are we sitting in the back of the bus in the third photo? Because that’s where the big lounge chairs were. It was like sitting in my living room and watching for bears. Of course, later on we would climb up on top of the bus for better viewing and photos.

Don and Nora Jane, his wife, live in the house in the fourth photo. It was very comfortable and as close to the action as I cared to be. Don did our guiding in his bus and boat and Nora Jane did the cooking for us.

Our view from their house is in the last photo. We saw lots of polar bears come out of the water from their house. But the bears didn’t come out on the near side, but rather the far side on the sand spit. But we could still see them with our naked eyes coming out of the water and walking towards town.

Welcome to Kaktovik,