Our last couch surfer “Long Way Dany” is a long-time traveler with quite the journey to talk about. He is also a great videographer. I really liked his latest, made a few days after leaving us.
NoWhere from Daniele Ciccone on Vimeo.
If you ever come to Fairbanks, Alaska for the summer solstice you’ll realize how much we love the sun when we can get it. Come back for Winter Solstice and we celebrate that too, just bundled up with lots of comfort food.
Dress up with 4,000 of us and run a 10k at the Midnight Sun Run.
Go to a baseball game at midnight.
Attend the Midnight Sun Solstice Festival for some live music and street food.
Whatever you get up to there will be light guaranteed as its 24 hrs around here now baby.
You would think that Alaskans would care about the Winter Olympics given that we have ample weather for practicing these sports. In fact, most of us couldn’t care less. I am easily addicted to the Olympics though. I love the personal stories and pomp and circumstance. I spent the Beijing Olympics huddled near my TV for two precious weeks of summer watching people go back and forth in a pool. Man what a waste. I missed out on actually doing something for two weeks because I was watching the Olympics. This year, no more!
I have been invited twice to curling watch parties where die-hard fans huddled around a screen with a Canadian cable channel playing as you apparently can’t trust American networks to provide equal coverage to non-US (and probably better) teams. I didn’t go, as strangely tempting as it was.
Instead what have we Alaskans been doing over the last two weeks?
Carving Ice in the World Ice Art Championships, or in my case, going to look at the finished results.
With our long winters we have to keep busy indoors to so we have an active arts community. Last weekend we had a world famous cellist Zuill Bailey in town for one of our Symphony productions. This weekend we’re off to see The Tempest at the Fairbanks Shakespeare Theatre. I myself am back in piano lessons and loving the use of my right-brain again.
Alaska isn’t exactly on the triathlon or Iron Man circuits so instead we’ve invented our own alternatives. Arctic Man and Iron Dog respectively. Iron Dog is the world’s longest snow machine race and Arctic Man is one of the World’s Toughest Downhill Ski races, and an exciting snowmobile race, all in one. The skier begins at a summit elevation of 5,800 feet and drops 1,700 feet in less than two mile to the bottom of a narrow canyon where he meets up with his snowmobiling partner to finish the race. Attending the starts and finishes of both races is a communal craziness. (13,000 fellow adrenaline junkies make Summit Lake the 3rd largest city in Alaska for a weekend every year.)
If you think that is crazy and wonder whether the winter has frozen our brains, there are even crazier Alaskans who participate in the traditional “Chatanika Days Outhouse Race”. Each March five-person teams race a one-mile course, with four pushing and one riding in the specially built “racing outhouses”.
For those who prefer more sane or scenic pursuits there are also the traditional winter sports: snow shoeing, skiing, snowboarding, cross-country skiing, going to the hot springs and Aurora watching.
So what could you be doing this winter weekend instead of vegging out to the Olympic commentary?
Sorry for the general lack of posting in the last week. I got back from a quick 3 day trip to Chicago (not really worth posting about because I spent the entire trip in the Airport hotel) and then flung myself into work before going out on a work trip. This was my first time visiting an Alaskan village and I wish I had more time to explore. My biggest experience was with village travel and small planes.
Left FAI (Fairbanks) for ANC (Anchorage) the night before, slept in ANC for a few hours and then flew to BET (Bethel) at 7am in a 737 which was half full of cargo. Then was put on a 4 man Cessna charter and flew at about 500 ft. out to MOU (Mountain Village) which took about an hour. It was like a flight-seeing tour over a completely alien landscape. I fly over Alaska all the time, but the view is different when you’re above the clouds in a 737 than it is when you can see the moose a couple of hundred feet below you. The flight out was freezing cold as the door barely closed and the window leaked air through a couple inch gap. I plugged some of the holes in the plane with napkins so that I wasn’t being sprayed with water that was running through the gap in the window and that helped a bit. Pretty miserable, but got great views. Unfortunately my camera was in my bag below the plane so I was taking photos with my camera phone. The N95 takes pretty good photos, but I would still have preferred by camera. I about lost it out the door when I dropped it during some turbulence, but rescued it just in time.
I was boots on the ground from 11am until 3:45pm when it was time to go meet the plane. Now if you’ve only flown commercial flights in and out of major cities you need to reset your mental picture of this. Basically 3 trucks with people who were on the outgoing flight pull up to this big gravel pad a little ways outside the village. There are some lights stuck in the ground and a windsock, no terminal, no staff, nothing. Eventually one of the other trucks pull up and say they just spoke to the airline on their radio (from their car) and that the plane is delayed by an hour (or so) so we continue sitting there. Eventually everyone gets out of their trucks and starts talking, a few people walk off to the side of the gravel pad an pick some wild blueberries for snack food on the plane. Nobody stresses, because really there isn’t anything you can do about it. Eventually someone hears something and we all go quiet. You can hear a motor coming and eventually someone spots the plane. When it lands and the passengers get out, we realize its full of all the teachers who are coming back to work at the village school. Talk about packing light, they have to live for a school year out of a duffle bag, no rollybags in sight and no, there won’t be any other bags coming on future flights. At $1.35/pound, you learn to condense your needs into as little luggage as possible.
This plane is huge compared to the one I came in on, it holds all of 8 people and is a slightly larger Cessna. Still no oxygen masks or boarding passes, but hey the doors actually seal. The only thing they ask before boarding is “How much do you weight?” This time I have my camera, but the flight is higher off of the ground since the plane is larger. Midflight the pilot turns around and yells back that our connection from BET back to ANC is still good as they are delayed an hour there as well. Nobody stresses. My biggest concern on this flight is that since we are at a slightly higher altitude we are basically flying through, not above, not below the clouds the whole time. And since its such a small plane, I see what the pilots are seeing, which is not much besides white puffy clouds. Good thing they have instruments. The air is also choppier since we are going through the clouds, blech. Eventually the heater kicks on and my jaw stops chattering and we arrive safe and sound in BET.
BET feels far more civilized after leaving MOU. It has a counter and boarding passes and everything. Well the computer can’t print my boarding pass so nobody worries about it. Again I’m asked my weight and we all board another plane, this time it probably held almost 20 people and felt enormous. The altitude went up again to just above the clouds and the ride was smooth enough that I got a few winks on the flight. Having been up since 5 am and on my 4th flight of the day I was wiped. ANC to FAI was uneventful and I look back on the whole day as a pretty unique experience. Life is just different in the village. It isn’t rude to stare, everybody knows everybody, mot people are related and half of the construction crew had the same last name. They were genuinely friendly and would strike up a conversation without reserve. I was offered more food than I could ever eat and genuinely felt welcome to be there. I wish the trip could have been longer so I could have seen more of the village than the project.
A few lessons learned:
