Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

My recent Alaska reading list:  Drop City by T.C. Boyle.  Coming Back Alive by Spike Walker.  The former, a novel, is highly recommended if you want to understand just how demented a person would have to be to want to live in interior Alaska (hot and buggy in the summer; unbelievably cold in the winter).  T.C. Boyle, familiar to New Yorker magazine readers for his short stories, writes about a commune of hippies who get pushed out of California in 1970 and move up to a little wilderness cabin near Fairbanks.  Coming Back Alive is about people who risk their lives every day trying to pull fish in from the Alaska coastal waters and/or pulling fishermen into Coast Guard helicopters, centering on a 1998 rescue of the crew from F/V La Conte..  This is a must-read for helicopter pilots and it will certainly make you stop whining about the difficulty of doing slope landings in an R22 with a gusty tailwind.

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My last day in Anchorage was spent at the Merrill Field 75th anniversary party.  I ran into about 10 people whom I knew so it seems that after three weeks I was becoming a local.  On Sunday morning Alex and I departed for Whitehorse and beyond.  The coast was saturated with moisture as usual.  The inland route, through mountain passes above the highway, was supposed to be getting gradually better as the day wore on.  The trip to Gulkana through Tahneta Pass was easy; low scud and some rain showers but basically the clouds were just slightly higher than the mountain peaks and well above the pass.  A conversation with Flight Service revealed that the next pass was IFR as was Northway and the section of the Alaska Highway at the Canadian border.  They had no observations or pilot reports for the alternative route up the Nabesna River.  The clouds seemed kind of thin and I could see blue sky to the north.  I was above a wide flat valley with about 7000′ of above-freezing air on top of a long runway.  I decided to get an IFR clearance and climb up to to the minimum enroute altitude (MEA) of 11,000′.  This necessarily entailed some risk of airframe icing because I was in a cloud and it was below freezing.  No ice was forecast and none had been reported but on the other hand hardly anyone flies IFR in Alaska except in big jets and the jets don’t spend much time in the clouds and certainly don’t linger at 11,000′.  As it happened the clouds were fairly light and the plane did not start to ice so I proceeded over the mountains and towards Northway, requesting a climb to 13,000′ in hopes of breaking out on top.  The outside air temperature was -10C.  I did not get above that layer but I did break out on top at Northway and continued over the clouds to Whitehorse, doing an instrument approach through the mountains there.

Once on the ground I talked to the Canadian Flight Service folks and they assured me that the next morning would be much more favorable for proceeding down the Alaska Highway than that afternoon.  So I rented a car, booked a motel room, and settled in.  The next day (Monday) turned out to be thoroughly miserable with rain coming down by the bucketload and horrible weather all the way up and down the Highway.  If I’d had de-icing gear and a turbocharger it would have been easy enough to depart Whitehorse IFR and climb above everything but the Cirrus SR20 is restricted to plowing through weather systems rather than flying over them.  I spent the morning hanging out in the pilot’s lounge with the other stranding folks.  A guy from Colorado and his two teenage sons were just coming back from three weeks in Alaska in their Murphy Moose, a home-built taildragger suitable for short and rough runways.  A trim grandmotherly figure clutching a Yorkshire Terrier came into the room.  I assumed she was the long-suffering wife of a Cessna pilot.  As it turned out Vicky was flying her 1961 Piper Colt back from Alaska to her home in Minnesota.  She had been in Seward to run the Mount Marathon race, which she does almost every year.  This is a race straight up to the top of a mountain and then back down.  Most folks can’t do it, regardless of their age, due to some extremely steep sections.

In the afternoon I went to the 25-meter Whitehorse city swimming pool.  Like most of these small Canadian towns they’ve built their pool with a massive Jacuzzi and water slide attached.  Vicky and I went to dinner together and afterwards encountered a group of classic car enthusiasts driving their 1920s and 1930s Packards, Cords, and Bentleys up to Alaska.  They were on the first leg of their trip, having shipped their cards up via the Marine Highway to Skagway.  A tractor trailer followed the group with spare parts and mechanics.  Some of these cars were as nice as any that you would see in a museum.

Tuesday started out with low clouds and some rain and mist reported to the east.  Flight Service advised waiting until mid-day.  I let Alex chase prairie dogs in the field just above the airport.  It turns out that a priarie dog colony is almost ideal for exercising a canine dog.  One pops up out of a hole and chirps.  The Samoyed runs insanely after that chirping rodent who retreats underground.  As soon as the Samoyed gets to the now-empty hole another priarie dog pops up 50 yards away and starts to chirp.

We eventually managed to take off by 2:00 pm.  The lakes and mountains around Whitehorse are incredibly beautiful even if one has just been through Alaska.  During a somewhat bumpy ride to the Liard River the scenery flattens out a bit and is lushly forested.  East of Watson Lake we let the Highway go up into the higher mountains and followed the Liard and Fort Nelson rivers into Ft. Nelson.  At this point we were basically out of the mountains and into the flat Midwest.  I expected it to be the easiest part of the flight.  I didn’t count on the smoke from various forest fires.  Visibility dropped to about 2 miles; solid Instrument Meteorological Conditions (IMC).  I would have called Edmonton Center to ask for a clearance but this is uncontrolled airspace so there is nobody from whom to receive a clearance.   You just fly through the clouds following your instruments, checking the chart to make sure that you aren’t going to run into a mountain and crossing your fingers in hopes that no other airplanes are coming the other way in the smoke.

The flight from Fort Nelson to Calgary was similarly plagued by smoke until the last hour.  It turns out that flying with smoke is unnerving because it is tough to see clouds and rain showers that one wants to avoid.  We landed in Calgary after dark (dark! a novel experience!) and taxiied up to the Esso/Avitat around 11:00 pm.  The line guys said apologetically that all the hotels in town were full.  They did have a “snooze room” though if Alex and I wanted to use it.  The snooze rooms turn out to be private with single beds.  There is a shared area with satellite TV and a pool table as well as reading chairs.  There are showers with soap and shampoo.  Right next to the shower is a sauna.  There is a restaurant downstairs that serves breakfast starting at 7:00 a.m.  And there is a high-speed Internet connection that I’m using right now…

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Alex and I arrived back in Anchorage today after a great week in Homer and a couple of fun helicopter lessons out of Girdwood (not too many other helicopter schools where you see moose and glaciers on the way to practicing autorotations).

First stop was downtown where a lawyer friend had just returned from finalizing a divorce.  As it happens divorces are finalized in the same building where civil marriages are performed.  She and her client walked by a happy set of families all dressed up for the big ceremony.  A moment later they were alone in the elevator.  The just-divorced man said “I should really tell that groom to go into his bedroom and put his nut-sack into the dresser and then slam the drawer 10 times if he wants to know what it will feel like 13 years from now.”

So when it came to choosing a movie for the evening it had to be “Wedding Crashers” at the Regal Fireweed.  Marion and I laughed until we cried.  Highly recommended if you’re an Owen Wilson fan.

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Here’s a chronological list of folks whom I talked to in Homer yesterday…

• Mike, the Buddhist from New Hampshire who runs the Good Karma Inn dog-friendly bed and breakfast, an expert on the Vietnam War in which he served
  
• the guy down the street who was packing up his venerable Volvo station wagon for a drive north to the Kenai River where he, his girlfriend, and their 13-year-old Husky would dip-net all night for salmon (limit of six per Alaska resident per day) on which they would subsist; he works all winter on the Alaska Marine Highway ferries that ply the sometimes horrifically rough water between Homer, Kodiak, etc.
  
• the folks in line at the Post Office who were complaining about how beastly hot it was down in Seattle last week when they were visiting
  
• the young folks who had been working at a hotel at the entrance to Denali National Park but hated the manager so they’d all quit four days ago and had come down to Homer and set up a tent city on the Spit; all had instantly become gainfully employed in various hotels and restaurants
  
• a nice guy from Mexico City who was here working illegally; he had hoped to get a job on a crab boat but couldn’t find one.  Fortunately the U.S. Air Force had hired him, indirectly one supposes, for a $32/hour job doing some construction at a base near Fairbanks.  He was planning to move to Hawaii in October and get a job.  “I have lost a lot of jobs because I don’t have papers but there is always work.”
  
• Arlee (sp?), a massage therapist working on the Spit who had majored in massage at University of Alaska Anchorage and plans to return to medical school.  She fed Alex and me homemade cookies, peaches, and water.
  
• Chelsea, a cute 10-year-old girl from Anchorage who is a mixture of Indian, Eskimo, Mexican, and some general European.  Her mom, half Indian and half Eskimo, comes to the Spit every summer to run a native crafts shop.  During the school year she teaches native crafts in the Anchorage schools.  I asked Chelsea what she wanted to be when she grew up.  “A teacher.”  We agreed that this was ideal.  A union job.  A government job.  Summers off.  Admonished to read lots of books and study hard Chelsea said “No.  I only want to watch TV.”
  
• A young kayak guide and her boyfriend who were soon moving to the Olympic Peninsula so that he could attend a school for building wooden boats (not too far from where Ahmed Ressam entered the U.S. with his trunk full of explosives intended for LAX).
  
• Vince, a pilot for the big cargo ships that sail up the Cook Inlet and dock in Anchorage.  During his off days he has managed to build a couple of kit airplanes, the latest of which is an almost finished Glasair Sportsman 2+2. 
  
• Some folks at Maritime Helicopters who had just ferried a brand new Bell 407 helicopter back from the factory in Montreal.  “Be careful taking tourists up and landing them on glaciers; they tend to fall into crevasses.”
  
• Brad Feld and his wife Amy, a traditional MIT/Wellesley couple who come up here from Boulder, Colorado every summer.  Our dinner table was probably the only one in Homer that contained no hunters or fishermen/women.
  
• Doug Epps, bush pilot and his wife and inlaws.  Brad and Amy had flown with Doug last season.  I had flown with Doug on Monday morning in his Cessna 172 on floats.  We flew across the bay, landed in some pristine lakes, flew down a glacier, and then spotted a humpback whale swimming in the middle of the bay on the way back to Homer’s downtown float plane lake.
  
• A guy at the Petro who was paying $260 to fill up his motorhome and boat at the same time.  “Goddamn Bush.  He isn’t doing a single thing for us.  He should have bombed all of those people in Iraq and gotten out.”

Today:  biking, drive to Girdwood, and a helicopter lesson.  Saturday:  the Merrill Field 75th anniversary party.

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The July/August issue of Atlantic Monthly has a small story on “top ten deadbeat Congress members”:

“According to federal statute, if a lawmaker misses a day of work while Congress is in session, he or she must forfeit that day’s pay.”

Senator John Kerry apparently wasn’t following the law.  He missed 146 days of work in 2003 and 2004 but pocketed the $90,933 in salary to which he was not entitled.

Today’s Anchorage Daily News carries a story from my home state of Maryland.  The story is about a 625-lb. gentleman named John Keitz who has not gotten out of bed since 1998.  [Note to men who’ve been divorced or dumped by their mates: Mr. Keitz’s wife Gina has stuck by him throughout his difficulties in getting up.]  My favorite part of the story…

“Every time Keitz must be moved, a major public drama ensues. … Two months ago, it took a whale sling from the National Aquarium in Baltimore and a flatbed truck to haul him out of his house.  A television news chopper monitored from above.”

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I just finished Big Bang; The Origin of the Universe by Simon Singh.  As with Singh’s books on crypto and Fermat’s Last Theorem this is just about as good as science writing for a general audience gets.  Singh is British and assumes that an intelligent reader can handle a fair amount of real physics (he himself has a Ph.D. in physics) and does not try to spice things up with an excessive focus on the personalities of the scientists (most of whom don’t actually have much personality, of course, or none that would be recognized by Paris Hilton).

One of the interesting tidbits in the book for me was about Ralph Alpher, who provided the mathematical and theoretical basis for the Big Bang theory, notably for the formation of hydrogen and helium out of a soup of protons, neutrons, and electrons.

“Alpher’s academic career had started promisingly in 1937, when, as a sixteen-year-old prodigy, he received a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Unfortunately, while chatting to one of the institute’s alumni, he casually mentioned that his family was Jewish — and the scholarship was promptly withdrawn.  … The only way that Alpher could get back on the academic track was by holding down a day job and attending evening classes at George Washington University, where he eventually completed his bachelor’s degree.”

Back in 1978 I was holding down a day job (Fortran programming for some scientists; a job that is probably still available today!) and attending G.W.U. at night.  Then in 1979 I transferred to M.I.T., precisely the reverse of Alpher’s path.

[Due to a lack of good experimental data, e.g., an observation of the cosmic microwave background radiation predicted by Alpher and his collaborators Gamow and Herman, their Big Bang theory was ignored and all three guys abandoned cosmology.  Alpher went to work at G.E. and Herman went to work at G.M.  Gamow was a tenured professor at G.W.U. and drifted into seemingly more promising areas.]

Another fun part of the book is the recounting of Pope Pius XII’s 1951 endorsement of the Big Bang theory against the Steady State model, many decades ahead of the average physicist.

I finished the book at the Beluga Lake Lodge in Homer, Alaska while Jewel’s brother Nikos was setting up to play some of his songs.  The weather here seems to be reliably sunny and 65-70 degrees.  Almost everyone in Homer has a beautiful view to the south across Kachemak Bay and to a range of mountains that climb to about 7000′ high and are dotted with snow and glaciers.

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For friends and family…  here’s my schedule for returning from Alaska:

• July 16: Merrill Field 75th anniversary party


• July 17: Anchorage to Whitehorse


• July 18: Whitehorse to Ft. St. John or somewhere else down the Alaska Highway


• July 19-22: Jackson, Wyoming; Julian flies in to join us for the trip home


• July 23: Minneapolis


• July 24 or 25: return to Boston with stop in Chicago for lunch with Marcia

That’s the plan anyway.  If there is a freak high-pressure system guaranteeing clear weather over the coast it is possible that I’ll fly Anchorage-Juneau-Vancouver (this is actually completely out of the way compared to a Great Circle route from Anchorage).  Any bad weather over the interior might close off the mountain passes and force some extra days on the ground at various points.

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Today’s Anchorage Daily News is typical for the summer tourism season.  The top story on the front page is headlined “As things went wrong, hike became a deadly adventure” and recounts the death of 20-year-old Hezekiah Kelley, who lived in the Anchorage exurb of Wasilla.  Mr. Kelley and his cousin Richard went off on a quick hike on Saturday afternoon and got lost.  It was cloudy and rainy enough to induce hypothermia.  Hezekiah died on Monday morning.  Shortly afterwards a ranger in a helicopter spotted Richard.

The front page of the Alaska section starts off with “3 bodies are found in Cessna”, a story about three very experienced pilots from South Carolina who rented a 1973 Cessna 207 in Anchorage and disappeared after departing the Homer airport on Friday afternoon.  The weather was reasonably good so it is unclear how they ended up crashing into “a steep mountainside of a tiny island near the mouth of the Cook Inlet.”  The Alaska section also has continued coverage of “Bear that killed 2 was healthy male”, noting that “The Huffmans’ campsite was clean, with food in bear-proof containers and an unused firearm in the tent.  The [Anchorage] couple had been on a rafting trip and was in the tent when the attack occurred.”  The Huffmans were in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that has been the subject of controversy over whether to permit oil extraction.

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We managed to make it out of Nunavut and broke out of the clouds over Great Bear Lake.  We stopped for fuel at Normal Wells, an oil and gas town on the mighty Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories (no road access).  We proceeded to Dawson City, Yukon, famous for its party atmosphere.  Dawson City is marvelously endowed with government funds in the best Canadian wilderness tradition.  The buildings are restored, Parks Canada is everywhere and in period costume, there is a school and a health clinic and an indoor swimming pool.  This was my first tourist town of the trip.  In Kugluktuk the last tourist had been through in April and he wasn’t there to sightsee, unless you count the sights that can be seen through a rifle scope.

Tourism in the far north is nice because it brings together young and old.  Mostly the youngest North Americans, notably Quebecers, are drawn to a life in the Yukon, either year-round or for a summer service-industry job.  Mostly the oldest North Americans are the ones with enough time to take a drive that far away (Dawson City is a two-day drive from Anchorage and probably a three-day drive from any large city towards the south).  The cruise ship companies have built hotels in Dawson City and offer it as a side excursion via bus and river boat from Anchorage or Juneau.  Instead of a paddlewheel steamer they’ve brought in an Australian-made catamaran that blasts from Dawson City down the Yukon to Eagle, Alaska every morning and then returns against the current in the afternoon.  Dawson City is also the starting point of the Dempster Highway, a gravel road that crosses the Arctic Circle on its way to Inuvik and supplies windshield cracks to nearly every vehicle in town, including my rental car.

I left “the Bunkhouse”, Dawson City’s one dog-friendly downtown hotel, around noon in my rental car for the drive to Dredge #4, one of the world’s largest wooden bucket dredges, now preserved by the Canadian national park service.  In the U.S. there would have been a big “no dogs” sign at the site.  In Canada the rangers in the ticket trailer offered to dogsit while I took the one-hour tour.  Basically what happened in Dawson is what happens everywhere that there is gold in the streams.  The big nuggets are mined out within a few years by guys using hand tools, including the famous standard gold pan, and then only small bits remain (early 1900s in the case of Dawson).  The Canadian government didn’t want to lose population and sovereignty over the Yukon so it accelerated the process of granting vast concessions and bringing in industrial dredges that can efficiently sift for the oatmeal-size pieces of gold.  The dredges scarred the creekbeds but they kept Dawson City alive at a town for about 70 years until its economy could be rescued by senior citizens in motorhomes.  This dredge is a fabulous piece of machinery with massive electric motors and steel-on-steel rotating surfaces (grease causes gold to float out the back of the dredge so it isn’t used in some of the most critical locations).

After my tour the rangers suggested that I continue driving the “unmaintained gravel” loop road to King Solomon’s Dome, which turned out to be quite passable in a standard car.  Coming down from the scenery I stopped for a soda at the Goldbottom Creek family mine, which offers electricity-free cabins and tourist goldpanning.  A guy from Quebec demonstrated the technique of shoveling some creekbed into a pan and then swishing the lighter pieces out until all that remained was some sand among which he found a few flecks of gold.

The coolest people that I met in Dawson were a young couple who were camped out by the Yukon River waiting for some friends.  They had a silky Border Collie and were planning to take two canoes, four people, and two dogs up the Dempster Highway to the Porcupine River then paddle down to the Yukon and pull out on the Alaska Pipeline haul road about a month later.  There they planned to hitchhike with their two canoes and two dogs down to Fairbanks.  Unfortunately I met them late Saturday night as they were applying first aid to a puncture wound on Alex’s back and my finger inflicted by a Pit Bull (visiting from New Jersey so once again the U.S. proves to be the source of all violence in the world).  The unleashed Pit Bull, owned by an aging hippie driving back to New Jersey in his white van, was initially friendly but as soon as he got excited decided it was time to kill and was not easily discouraged.  It had been so long since I had witnessed a real dog fight that I forgot not to try to pull the Pit Bull off with my hands so I got bit as well.  Eventually some hard kicks to the (small) Pit Bull’s back and stomach convinced him to let go.  Alex stopped bleeding pretty quickly but 36 hours later he is still sore (as is my finger).  I picked up hydrogen peroxide and Neosporin in Eagle, Alaska about 12 hours later.

Eagle is right on the Yukon and has 120 people, several churches, and two airports.  This is the town where Roald Amundsen, in the winter of 1905/06, sledged down from the Arctic Ocean to send a telegram announcing his successful Northwest Passage in Gjoa.  (Amundsen of course later went on to additional fame by being about the 13th mammal to arrive at the South Pole, the first mammal over the Pole being his lead dog Etah, a Samoyed.)

Because of the Yukon Queen II catamaran that arrives every day from Dawson it is possible to clear U.S. Customs at either the downtown uphill 1800′ grass/gravel/dirt/crossroad strip or the 3600′ gravel runway two miles out of town.  “Just fly over the town before you land,” Chuck, up for a month from Anchorage said on the phone, “and I’ll come out and clear you in.”  It was a beautiful, though slightly bumpy, ride up the Yukon River valley at about 1500′ above the river and 1000′ below the nearest mountain peaks.  That’s one thing that I love about Alaska flying.  You can look down, sideways, or up and see interesting sights.

Eagle has some historic military buildings from its days as Fort Egbert and a bunch of mushroom pickers working in town temporarily.  They walk through the woods and/or bogs all day collecting Morel mushrooms and sell them for $500 or more in the evening to a local businessman who dries them and ships them out.  Some of these folks are very strange characters indeed, with craggy features from living hard in the wilderness for many decades.

I left Eagle at around 12:30 for a flight to Anchorage.  This would have been an easy flight in a Piper Malibu with its ability to climb above the 15,000′ clouds and, at 24,000′, pick its way around any high cumulus buildups.  In an unturbocharged unpressurized plane, however, this required following the highways through passes underneath the clouds.  The Cirrus can’t handle ice and the freezing level was around 8000′ so ice would have been a distinct possiblity at the 10,000’+ minimum enroute altitudes on the instrument routes.  Also thunderstorms were forecast and you wouldn’t want to blunder into one while flying blind.  So you’re in a mountain pass, which fortunately tend to be wide in Alaska due to having been carved by glaciers rather than rivers, and there are mountains on either side, scattered clouds below and next to you in some places, rain showers reducing your forward visibility to 5-10 miles, and an overcast layer right at the tops of the nearest peaks.  For the flatland pilot this is terrifying.  I put the flaps in and pulled the power back so that I was going slow enough to evaluate every next step and so that my turning radius would be reduced if I decided to go back.  One thing that was odd about this flight is that the views to the southern coastal mountains were sunny and clear, revealing beautiful icefields and glaciers.  It always seems like the only bad weather in a region is right where one is intending to flying.  Unfortunately in Alaska it is tough to get complete information.  The Flight Service folks have Webcams in many of the most important passes and can tell you whether they appear open but most of the state’s weather is not measured by ground stations or RADAR.  If you go off an established route you are truly on your own.

Coming out of the mountains into the “Anchorage Bowl” was like returning to civilization.  RADAR, approach control, control towers, etc.  All the comforting bureaucracy to which a New England pilot becomes accustomed.  I landed at Merrill Field, which is smack in the middle of downtown Anchorage, and taxied over to the Ace Hangars.  This little cooperative has self-serve gas pumps ($3.35/gallon for members), a pilot’s lounge with high-speed Internet, and motel rooms for rent above the hangars.  You can stay right next to your airplane!  The guys at Ace gave us a lift to my friend’s house by the water where Alex was reunited with his Husky/Border Collie friend Bobbie.

Thus ends our little trip from Boston to Anchorage via Yellowknife and Kugluktuk.  We left on Wednesday morning and arrived a week later on Sunday afternoon, making it an 11-day trip with about 35 hours of flying for a total of maybe 4000 nautical miles. The Cirrus is holding up quite well except for one distressing incident an hour from Yellowknife in which the entire Avidyne Primary Flight Display “red-screened” for 15 seconds but then came back to life.  Once again the latest in software technology proves to be less reliable than what mechanical engineers designed 50 years ago.

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Due to freezing rain and snow forecast for Inuvik, NWT, Alex and I came to Kugluktuk, Nunavut yesterday from Yellowknife.  Kugluktuk is 67 degrees 49 minutes north latitude, i.e., well above the Arctic Circle.  The town’s 1300 residents get all of their supplies in via air or by barges that come up the Mackenzie River, east through the Amundsen Gulf of the Arctic Ocean, through the Dolphin and Union Strait and into Coronation Gulf.  Sealift is possible only after the August breakup of the ice.

The Canadian Flight Supplement, equivalent to our FAA Airport Facilities Directory, shows that the 5500′ gravel strip here has 100LL fuel for sale.  I decided to call and verify.  “Yes we do have Avgas,” Alameda said, “How many barrels do you want?”  If you want less than 55 gallons or you don’t carry your own pump you’re kind of stuck.  “There are some guys doing an aerial survey up here who are using Avgas and have a pump.  They might sell you some of theirs.”

The hotel in Yellowknife was full, Inuvik was inaccessible to a plane without good de-icing gear, so I decided to launch.  It was a beautiful day filled with Arctic light and a few puffy clouds spreading over the rock-and-lake-studded tundra.  During the 2.5-hour flight I did not see another airplane or any sign of human influence on the ground aside from one small mining town.  The Cirrus SR20 can be run “lean of peak” with remarkable fuel efficiency:  8.5 gallons per hour at 140 knots.  I made it all the way from Yellowknife to Kugluktuk on less than half of the Cirrus’s tanks.  Frugality turned out to be unnecessary because just after I landed Denys taxied in with his Piper Navajo, festooned with magnetic survey gear.  Yellowknife and the lands to the north turn out to be home to some of the world’s richest diamond reserves, unproven until the early 1990s.  Folks fly around in bizarre aircraft looking for anomalies that indicate the presence of kimberlite pipes.  Denys and his crew filled N707WT, drove me to the town’s only open hotel (closed as of tonight for two weeks’ holiday), and brought me back here to the airport today.

Kugluktuk is an easy place to make friends if you’re traveling with a dog.  The “Copper Inuit” here have been making full use of modern technology.  The entire town, like most towns in Nunavut, is blanketed with a wireless Internet.  Travel in winter is via snowmobile, in summer via powerboat or four-wheeler.  Everyone is enthusiastic about hunting and eating “country foods” such as dried caribou, seal meat, or dried Arctic Char.  The local newspaper is filled with statistics on animals hunted for food or their hide.  The saddest number for me was the CDN$80 average price paid for a seal skin; it was painful for me to think about a wild animal killed for such a low price.

The teachers working in the government building invited me in for coffee and showed me their translation projects.  The Inuktitut language had mostly died out, except among some elders, and the territorial and federal governments are trying to revive it.  The kids, however, are not said to share the bureaucrats’ enthusiasm for the ancient tongue.  They’d rather speak English.

Folks in town pitied me for having to live in “the south”.  “How can you live in a place where all of the land is restricted and you can’t just go where you please?” they asked.  Here one can got for hundreds of miles in almost any direction without running into private property.  If you want to build a cabin you apply for permission from the tribal council and pay a minimal annual rent on the land (don’t try this if you are white).  “What did I like about Boston?” they asked.  “It is easy to find experts from whom to learn,” was my reply.  “But we have the Internet,” they responded.

Thanks to Irene, Corey, and Carey, Kugluktuk can be a very comfortable place to stay.  They run the Coppermine Inn, which is also the town’s only restaurant (superb home-made pies!).  The town offers beautiful views of the bay from almost every street.  The bugs haven’t come out yet this year (end of June is usually the beginning of the season of mosquitoes so numerous that you inhale them by mistake and so big that they ought to have navlights).  It would be a great place to return in April to run around in snowmobiles and look at the northern lights.

Everything was going swimmingly until I went back to the airport.  The public forecast had been for a nice sunny day.  A cold front, however, had swept down from the northwest and brought low ice-filled clouds and rain mixed with snow grains.  Right now it is 3 degrees C, about 1400 overcast, and the rain is coming down sideways.  Willie Laserich, the German bush pilot legend, came in a couple of hours ago from Cambridge Bay in his de-iced Twin Otter and said that he wouldn’t be willing to proceed southwest (my direction) even in his vastly more capable airplane.  Hans, who runs the flight service station and quasi-control tower here, is keeping us supplied with hot dogs, ginger ale, and high-speed Internet.  Maybe in another 8-12 hours things will clear and we can move on to Norman Wells or Dawson City, Yukon…

(Personal note: I’ve now visited every Canadian territory and province.  Before this trip I had never been to Manitoba, Saskatchewan, or Nunavut.)

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