Day 3 - Sep 2, 2000 Last updated: 9/3/00 8:00pm AKDT
Today was our side trip to Barrow. It was a long day, but very interesting. We dropped off the rental car in the morning at the airport before our flight to Barrow, the northern most village in North America. Weather in Barrow was mostly cloudy and 40 degrees.
Flying in looked very desolate. Mud and quite a few ponds of water. The water never seeps into the ground because the ground is frozen (permafrost). Mud everywhere. No green anywhere. The nearest tree is 250 miles south. Extremely flat landscape, no hills. Officially it is a desert. They only get about 6 inches of snow a year. The problem is the drifting. Since there are no trees, mountains, hills or gullies, there is nothing to stop the wind from blowing the snow into town. They installed snow fences around the town and can get drifts up to 20 feet high.
About 4500 people live here. About 1500 are children. Evidence points to civilizations living here for 25,000 years. Past civilizations lived in “mounds” or sod houses, homes semi-below ground. They used whale bones to support walls and ceilings. Here you can see some old whale bones sticking out of the ground.
Modern buildings are built on stilts. This is to avoid melting the permafrost (frozen ground a few feet below the top layer of mud) from the heat of the house. If the permafrost melted, the houses would sink. All houses have unique numbers, so it doesn’t matter what street you live on, no two houses in the village have the same house number.
We spent an hour or so at the Native Heritage Center. The local Inupiat people put on a dance and craft demonstration. Here is a little girl being catapulted during the blanket toss. In the lower left corner of the first picture you can see the back of Denise’s head.
Here we are at the Arctic Ocean, which is frozen all but 3 months a year. No icebergs today, but the water was EXTREMELY cold.
They get an occasional polar bear, but we did not see any today. School buses have had police escorts in the past when the polar bears are in town. Here is the sign at the end of the northern most dead-end in North America. You could hike about a mile (or pay someone $80 to take you out) to the very tip, but this was close enough. It was raining at this point in the day, windy and about 40 degrees.
Native Alaskan’s (Inupiat) hunt twice a year for bowhead whales. They caught a 67 foot bowhead whale earlier this year. All public buildings have skull bones from bowhead whales in front of them. Not sure how old this one is, but this is the jaw bone of a bowhead whale, these are not tusks.
Other useless facts: Gas was about $2.80, 12 pack of Pepsi was $7 on sale, eggs 2.50. Not sure how, but they are tricking a lot of teachers to move here. They can’t possibly pay that much to make up the difference in the cost of living. 1 bedroom apartments cost 1200-1500. And judging by the outside, the apartments probably aren’t that nice on the inside either. Our tour bus driver is a teacher, driving a tour bus on weekends and in summer. Do you think he makes enough to live on? Maybe there’s just nothing else to do for fun around here. 🙂 Other jobs are mostly government.
No need for license plates on cars. The police don’t even have them. No roads lead here, so if someone steals your car, you’re bound to find it.
Our tour guide explained something that I mentioned earlier about people accumulating junk cars in their yards. At least in Barrow, it’s hard to get parts for things, so when one car breaks, they save it for parts.
Last week they received their last supply of oil until next summer when the ice breaks.
Igloo means house, doesn’t necessarily mean the stereotypical ice structure. The ice structures are used only in emergencies when out hunting and get caught in a storm.
Lunch at Pepe’s. Not great Mexican food, but that’s where the tour bus stopped.
Arnold Schwarzenagger was here two days before us.
Here I am standing in front of the Barrow sign that shows how far away from home I am. The other picture is of the black sand beaches here in sunny Barrow. Notice no one out in lawn chairs sunning themselves. This is NOT Hawaii.
Then we returned to the Super 8 for one last night. Flight time between Fairbanks and Barrow is a little over an hour. Tomorrow it’s off to Denali.