More Kaktovik

We walked around Kaktovik each day that we were there.  We were warned to watch out for polar bears which we tried to do.  Barter Island is perhaps a mile square and the town much smaller than that.  It took us about an hour and fifteen minutes to walk the whole town but we would stop along the way.  I have to say that for being 120 miles past the end of the road, they really have quite a town.

The first photo is the Kaktovik Power Plant.  It provides electricity for the town.  They also have piped water service from a large natural lake and sewer service as well as trash pick-up service.  The roads are all gravel but in good shape.  All of this is payed for by the North Slope Borough (NSB) which is the oil money for this area.

I included the house in the second photo largely because of the piles of wood.  We saw piles of wood all over town.  Our guide said that most large installations in town were shipped by barge and that they were crated in extremely large wooden containers made up of huge pieces of lumber.  The town has wood piles all over and people have built houses, barns, stores, and outbuildings from all the shipping wood, despite of course, not having any wood of their own growing locally.

The entire town of Kaktovik is now in its third location.  Each move came with short notice and happened quite quickly, according to our local guide.  The third photo was not atypical and it made me think that this house is ready to move on a moment’s notice.  It’s really like a mobile home or rather a sled home.

We did see some relatively new houses in town, like you can see in the fourth photo.  You can also notice that the houses are elevated.  That’s not for flooding but rather to avoid heating up the permafrost and thereby sinking your house.  The large structures, like utilities and the school are built upon many feet of gravel which apparently avoids this issue.

The last photo is the Community Center/City Hall building.  That was probably the most happening place in town.  It had a large room for gatherings, a big bingo setup, a store with native artistic creations, and of course, a city business office.  Our host, Nora Jane, was the previous Mayor of Kaktovik.

Bowhead Whales

Bowhead whales are one of the few whales and the only baleen whale that reside exclusively in the Arctic and subarctic waters.  They are highly adapted to the icy waters.  Bowheads have insulating blubber up to 20 inches thick.  Their heads are triangular shaped and hard which allows them to break through ice, even up to two feet thick.  Bowhead whale numbers were once maybe 50,000 including about 10,000 to 23,000 in the Western Arctic.  Those numbers were depleted down to below 3,000 in the 1920’s.  The taking of whales was banned by the International Whaling Commission in 1986 but an allowance was made for indigenous peoples to take some with a harvest quota which gets predetermined every five years.  Today, the number of Bowhead whales is probably between 11,000 and 16,000 in the Western Arctic.  Bowhead whales reproduce at a rate of 3 percent annually and the indigenous people’s harvest represents between .1 and .5 percent.  In the case of Kaktovik, their current quota is three whales per year.

Bowhead whales are harvested between mid-August and mid-September each year.  By the time that we got to Kaktovik, they had already harvested two whales this year.  We had super weather, so they were out each day hunting for their third whale.  We had hopes to see a whale get harvested and the whole process but no luck.  The entire town gets involved in the whale harvest.  The Inupiat Eskimos and other Native Alaskans have been harvesting whales for thousands of years.  Bowhead whales can grow to 60 feet long and as much as 100 tons.  That’s a lot of food for a subsistence culture.

On our first walk around town, it was obvious that we were in a whale harvesting area as you can see in the first photo.  Whale bones were even in people’s yards, but only if they were really old whale bones.

We never got to see a whale harvest but I took a photo of a photo in the hotel.  You can see this in the second picture.  The whole process can take many days to complete.

People were not supposed to leave meat outside their homes to prevent the attraction of polar bears into town.  I saw this notice (law) posted in the community center.  Several people ignored this however.  You can see this in the third and fourth photo.  This is called muktuk which is the chewy outer skin and the succulent inner fat.  I asked and our local guide said that at least one woman was very elderly and that she stuck with the old traditions of how things were done.  The community seems to have some tolerance for such cases.  This did, however, attract the bears.  On our last day in Kaktovik, our guide and I visited the community center and then walked around town on the way home.  Our host’s daughter came in later to tell us that we had walked right past a polar bear that had come into town and had snatched a piece of muktuk.  I was only upset because I had missed the photo opportunity but it was probably for the best.

Once the whale harvest is finished and all the meat that can be removed has been removed, the carcass gets hauled to the “bone pile”.  This is out at the far end of town on the end of the spit where the original military runway was built.  You can see the bone pile in the last photo.  The polar bears of course, finish off any meat or edible parts that get left on the carcass.  Some people believe that this is one of the saving graces for the polar bears in Kaktovik.  Since the sea ice is now melting away and the bears can’t as soon and as easily get out to it to hunt seals, this gives them some good food to fill the gap.  Our local guide suggested that this is actually successful since so many of the bears in Kaktovik are having two or three cubs a year.

Polar Bear Viewing

I know that people are curious about just how close we got to the polar bears.  We never got closer than 30 yards and most of the time, we were much further away.  Often times we were over 100 yards away from the bears.  We mainly searched for the bears by boat which means that we were in the boat and they were on land.  Sometimes we saw them swimming but we always stayed well away from the bears and out of their path. We did our best not to bother them beyond trying to enjoy watching them.

Still, I thought I would devote a post to give you a better idea of what it was like.  You can see Vicky in the first photo.  We were probably 40 – 50 yards from this bear at the time but only about 30 yards as he walked in front of us.  We got plenty of photos and videos of this bear.

Many people have questioned just “how” we got such great photos.  It was mostly due to good cameras and mostly due to my son Andrew’s great camera and his great photography skills.  To give you a better idea, I have paired some photos of Andrew taking photos and then the photos that Andrew took.  I hope this will best explain what we did and how we did it.  Also, my photo of Andrew and his photo might not coincide exactly.  We got closer to those bears during the time that we watched them, so his photos might have been from a time when we were closer, but you get the idea.

In the second photo, I was focused on Andrew so the bear is out of focus.  But Andrew was focused on the bear as you can see in the next photo.

Again in the fourth photo, I was focused on Andrew but you can see the twin cubs up on the ledge of the hillside.  Andrew got some great photos of these guys, like the last photo. 

So rest assured, we were being safe and keeping a safe distance from these bears.  As cute as they look, these are truly wild and dangerous animals and we respected their space.

Q & A on Kaktovik

I’ve been asked most of these questions more than once about Kaktovik, so I will answer them with a post.

1.     Why was Kaktovik moved three times on short notice?

Answer: Because of Barter Island being chosen as a radar site for the DEW System, Distant Early Warning line, as in our Military, which extended across the Alaskan and Canadian Arctic.

The original town was right on the banks of the eastern sandspit, right next to the lagoon.  That’s on the right end of the sandspit in the first photo.  In 1947, the Air Force converted that space to a landing strip and the town had to move 1,650 yards to the west.  I don’t know about the discs in the second photo or the red roofed building but they might be part of the DEW system.

The whole Kaktovik area was made into a military reserve in 1951 and in 1953, DEW Line road construction caused the town to be moved a second time, slightly farther west and back from the water.

In 1964, the DEW Line station expanded again and the town had to be moved again but this time the people seemed to approve for health and other reasons and they also got title to the village site.

On a side note: with even a few inches of sea level rise, the town’s first and second locations would probably have necessitated a town move anyway, so it may have all been for the best.

2.     What do people do for a living in Kaktovik?

Answer: by Jobs: Education is about 27%; Public Administration is about 21%, and Construction about 8% and so on.

BY Employers: North Slope Borough hires about 67%, School District about 25% and most of the rest is private but that is mostly the native corporations and affiliates.  You can see the sheriff’s car in the third photo and see who is paying him.  We met the sheriff and he was a pretty nice guy.  He checks planes and boats coming in to Kaktovik to be sure that people have no alcohol or drugs.  We didn’t.  Also, Barter Island was named that because the Inupiat tribes used to trade and barter there for thousands of years.  We saw locally made from locally produced items for sale in the community center, like in the fourth photo.  They were not cheap but then again, this is clear on the top of Alaska.

We saw many federal government branch buildings but were told that the people that work at them don’t live in Kaktovik, they just come occasionally to do research, etc.  You can see the sign in the last photo which was in the community center/city hall.

3.     How did they keep the polar bears out of the town of Kaktovik?

Answer: the North Slope Borough hires a guy in a red truck with a shotgun and he seemed to be working 24 hours a day; just to intercept them, shoot the gun, and scare them out of town.  We saw him morning, noon, and at midnight as we were out looking for the Northern Lights.  It’s a full time job when the bears are in town.

4.     Were the locals out walking around town?

Answer: No, we only saw a few kids walking around who were obviously not old enough to drive.

5.     Were there flies and mosquitoes in Kaktovik?

Answer: Nope, none.

6.     Did we still have our bear spray with us in Kaktovik.

Answer: No.  We gave our bear spray back when we left the national parks.  I don’t think our guide anticipated us walking around Kaktovik very much, if at all, but we did. I liked Kaktovik and all the people that we met on our walks seemed very friendly.

Northern Lights

We knew that seeing the Aurora Borealis or Northern lights was a possibility on this trip, but never an assurance.  We watched for them night after night on this trip.  As luck would have it, most nights we had rain.  We were finally in Kaktovik with only two nights left on the trip and things were not looking so good.  This particular night was not that dark and Don, our local guide, suggested that we go out about midnight.  I was not very hopeful but Don was such a great guide that I was all for it.

We went out to the edge of town on the old original landing strip that the Air Force put in back in the 1940’s.  We went up on top of Don’s bus, the Blue Bird. 

 The first five photos are Andrew’s photos.  The first photo shows the lights over Kaktovik.

The next three are looking out over the lagoons.

The fifth photo was aimed at the end of the peninsula which is where the whale bone pile is located.  Two trucks came out past us and hit their high beams on the bone pile.  If you look on the left side of the spit, you can see at least one polar bear.  There were actually three bears out there that night.  I added the last photo which I took zoomed in on one of the bears.

Main Bears

While we had 105 polar bear sightings in Kaktovik, we spent much more time with just a few of the bears.  Sometimes it was because we only had a bear or two to follow.  Other times it was because they would start running or swimming and we wanted to follow and watch them.  Other times a certain bear would just do something very interesting and we stayed with it and watched for an extended time.  Cuteness may have also played into it as some bears were just more worth watching.  At any rate, these are some of the bears that we spent extended time watching.  Extended time usually meant something like 45 minutes to well over an hour or even two hours.

“Scar” was a bear that we saw in the morning on our second day in Kaktovik.  He was just sitting around at first, but then he stuck his nose up in the air (first photo) and started off walking at an extremely fast pace.  We followed him along the sand spit for quite a while and we were sure that he was up to something.  Scar eventually went over the crest of the sandspit to the back side bordering the Beaufort Sea.  We could tell that he was eating something and our guide felt certain that he had found a dead seal on the beach.  He ate for quite a while and he eventually came back over the crest of the sandspit to the lagoon side where we got more photos of him including the second photo.  Another bear followed him and also ate some of the seal.  We stayed with these bears and enjoyed watching them chase the seagulls away from the seal and enjoy a big meal. The bears looked quite satisfied after their meal.

We saw “Queen”, a mama bear, and her two one-year old cubs, “Statler and Waldorf” walking down the beach near us.  The twins seemed to spend more time fighting with each other than with anything else.  Soon, Mama went into the lagoon and started to swim and the twins followed.  This was our first experience seeing the bears swimming.  We followed this family on two swims.  First they swam across the first lagoon.  They rested a short while and then swam across the next lagoon to the bone yard.  It was fun to watch the bears swim.  Polar bears fur is hollow and so they float like an air mattress.  They paddle with their front paws and steer with their back paws.  It looks like someone on an air mattress just paddling along.  They would rest and float and then start swimming again.  The twins spent as much time fighting each other as they spent swimming, much to their mom’s consternation.  She would stop and bark at them to start swimming again, which they did, but not for very long before they would start fighting again.

The three bears in the last photo, I named “Loretta, Moe, and Curly”.  We saw them in the afternoon on our third day in Kaktovik.  Momma is in front and her two two-year old or three-year old cubs are behind her.  This was a good example of what we originally determined was one big sleeping bear.  Eventually, we had to change our determination as we saw the second bear appear from the pile of fur.  And yes, we had to change that determination again as the second cub woke up.  We watched them wake up and eventually get up.  Momma became aware of us at some point and didn’t seem to like our intrusion.  We backed off in the boat but these three continued to entertain us for quite some time.  They were just so cuddly.

More Polar Bears

I will wind up my polar bear posts with this posting.  It was really a lot of fun to watch the bears and despite seeing so many, we never tired of watching them.  The thing about watching specific bears for longer periods of time was that we got to see more behaviors and more interesting interactions.  Let’s face it, watching the bears nap, which we did a lot of, was not all that exciting.

The guy in the first photo evidently needed to scratch his nose.  There are a lot of ways for a bear to scratch his nose, but this was the most fun way that we saw in Kaktovik.

Some bears were really just sacked out and didn’t wake up while we were watching them.  I will contrast the second and third bear photos.  Our local guide would often call a bear a male or female and I would have no idea how he could tell.  I eventually asked him how he could tell and be so sure.  His answer was that the males are usually the whitest because they just lay down on top of the ground, like in the second photo.  He said that the females tended to dig a hole in the dirt or sand and to lay down in the hole, usually with her cubs.  Due to her digging and laying down in the dirt, the females generally had dirtier fur like in the third photo.  The bears fur was actually all the same color.

I’m not sure why the bear in the fourth photo was hanging its tongue out but it made for a slightly different look for the bear. That may have been his opinion of us bothering him.

The one-year old twins that we followed a lot fought each other much of the time.  It didn’t matter if they were on land or in the water, they never quit fighting for very long.  Mom, occasionally, would stop swimming and bark at them to quit fighting and start swimming again.  But their fight-breaks never lasted long. We spent an inordinate amount of time watching these two fight each other.

 You can see a bear heading into town in the last photo.  It happened frequently and we watched this from our house often.

Leaving Kaktovik

This was the end of our time above the Arctic Circle.  Don, our guide, drove us out to the airport to meet our plane.  The Sheriff was there to check the incoming passengers to make sure that no one had any alcohol or drugs, which are illegal in Kaktovik.  I had a long talk with the sheriff and learned a lot about the town and how it functions.  Then we just had to wait for our pilot to do “everything” that needed doing for our flight to Fairbanks.

The pilot had to spend a substantial amount of time to load all of our luggage.  He put a substantial amount of luggage in the nose of the airplane, especially large suitcases and packs.  He carefully filled the compartments right behind the engines.  You can see one of those compartments in the first photo.  We also still had all of our gear from our camping trip to the parks, all of which had to be taken back to Fairbanks.  Next, our pilot had to fill the gas tanks for his return trip, in the second photo.

Our plane only had five seats and there were five of us, so it was a full flight.  The pilot suggested that we use the restroom as this was a 2.5 hour, no bathroom flight.  I commented about the fact that there was no terminal or anything else at this airport.  The pilot just smiled and pointed me the way to the restroom.  Talk about a restroom with a view, which you can see in the third photo.  That’s the back side of Barter Island, by the way.

I got a much better photo of Kaktovik as we were leaving which you can see in the fourth photo. 

We got some great views of the Brooks Range mountains on our flight to Fairbanks.  I included one photo.

Fairbanks

We had a short stayover in Fairbanks, Alaska before flying home.  This was our first time in Fairbanks and we enjoyed ourselves.  I would not call Fairbanks a typical Alaskan town but it was a nice transition back to home for us.

Like many towns in the world, Fairbanks is along a river, in this case the Chena River, as you can see in the first photo.  The colors were beautiful and it was a great couple of days weather-wise.  The surrounding mountains are mostly deciduous trees and they had all changed color, mostly to yellow or gold, like in the second photo. 

The third photo seems to me to be a typical Alaskan photo.  We were on our way to the Alaskan Public Lands Information Center, which you can see in the fourth photo.  We spent over an hour inside looking at displays and reading up on the parks and Alaska.

Our last dinner was a fun one for us.  We ate at Lavelle’s Bistro.  Since none of us had had anything to drink lately, we had it all: cocktails, wine, and the works.  It was a celebration of a great trip.

Glaciers by Air

These are just some photos from our flight back home to San Francisco from Fairbanks.  I’m not sure that I’ve ever viewed glaciers like this before on a flight.  We were able to see Denali and many other great mountains on this flight but it was the glaciers that impressed me the most.  I’m guessing that these were mostly over the Yukon Territory in Canada but I’m not certain.  I don’t have any comments except to say that there were a lot of them and I was very impressed by them.

That’s the END of our Arctic Alaska Adventure.