At the airport office, we met yet another Eberhardt family member. As instructed, we greeted her with "Hi Junebug!" and she responded appropriately "Cheeseheads!". It was Julie, Kory's sister. Julie joked with customers there that the way to her heart is with auto-start for her car and Bunny boots. Alaska girls gone wild, I guess. Julie was cute and so personable, just like the rest of her family. It was raining when we left Fairbanks. Julie was calmly explaining to a Canadien woman why their family couldn't be on the same plane due to the weight restrictions. We had to weigh our carry-ons, which had to be under 10 lbs. So, here I was, worried the entire flight because the travel agent took my weight from my driver's license!! For Pete's sake, don't they know women lie on their licenses? I was convinced I would be the reason for our certain death. But not worried enough to confess! Instead, I huddled in my seat near the front, listening to the engine noise and questioning the flashing lights of the control panel.
We flew in a Piper Navaho. We could see the pipeline parallel to the highway, then the Elliott highway. A visible curtain of rain, bumps as we skirted it. The pilot narrated our flight with points of interest, such as:
- Livengood (pronounced "lie ven good"). The boomtown of Livengood sprang up in 1914 following Jay Livengood and N.R. Hudson's discovery of gold on Liven Creek. There are seasonal cabins there now. A Canadien company mining there claims to have discovered the world's largest gold strike. In 1916 , 21 mines were in operation but a mere two years later, the boom was over.
- We saw smoke streaming yet from fires. The fires are allowed to burn themselves out as there is no effective way to fight them. Most are from lightning strikes. One burned over 250,000 acres, but like the jackpine, the black spruce requires fire to propogate. Some fires get into the peat and continue to burn under the snow, erupting again in the spring. Those are called "hold-over fires". The fire that we spotted had been burning since the first week in July and has burned over 30,000 acres so far. We flew over another one called the Dall City Fire, which has burned over 450,000 acres.
- The price of gasoline in Stevens Village is $7.50 per gallon. Stevens Village is one of the Athabascan villages along the Koyukuk adn central Yukon River valleys. The peak population is approximately 80 persons. It is only accessible by plane and is therefore very expensive to obtain goods.
- The Yukon River flows east to west and bisects Alaska; the only bridge to cross it is 2295 feet long. For seven months out of the year (mid-October to mid-May) the river is frozen and the only bridge spanning the Yukon is on the Dalton highway.
- The Artic Circle is an imaginary line scribed around the earth which marks, in theory, the southernmost point from which, at sea level, the sun's rays can be seen on the horizon at midnight on the longest day of the year (summer solstice)... and the southernmost point at which the sun's rays can be seen at noon on the shortest day of the year.
We exited the plane in Coldfoot. Coldfoot is little more than a gravel run-way and a truckstop, along the Dalton Highway. If you watch Ice Road Truckers you are familiar with the Dalton Highway. Our groups are broken up into several vans, and our guide is Sarah Rice, a 25 year old woman from Washington who has been up there 5 years. Sarah lived in a tent while attending University and "that appealed to her". She seems to love the Alaska experience, and leads rafting trips in her off time. She works at the truck stop and tells hilarious stories about the people who live and pass through. I'm quite certain they are unaware! She pointed out a small plane their mechanic had just bought and said he is one of those macho Alaskan guys, always showing off by landing on the highway! I guess in a state this big, even the manly displays are on a grand scale!
Cruise West provided box lunches. We were told that other groups are always jealous of the CW provisions... and they were. From the Fairbanks end, the others could order a lunch for $12, of sandwich components to build their own. We had huge sandwiches of turkey, lettuce and cheese on a heavy 12 grain bread, a bottle of water, apple, bag of chips and chocolate chip cookies. Another family on the van, from Boston, whined constantly and the adult son complained that he had to spread his own peanut butter on the sandwich. It's a good thing they weren't part of our Cruise West group, or we might have had to throw them overboard!
The sole purpose for the Dalton Highway is for the trucks to get to Prudhoe Bay. As everywhere else in the world, they are doing road construction now and the truckers are unhappy because they preferred gravel as they could scrape it smooth but paving it creates frost heaves. This is one of those stimulus package programs where the government insists they are going to spend money because it's there, and not because the project makes sense.
Coldfoot is a truck stop with 35 "residents", though no one can own property there. It is owned (the land) by Native Corporations and oil companies. The truckers actually built the truck stop themselves, out of shipping containers. There was no rest stop for hundreds of miles... so they made one! It even has a little post office now! When they added on to the original building they saw the pipes were held in place by duct tape! There are waitresses, mechanics; in the 5 years that Sarah has been there only 3 of the people she has worked with, are still there. They are the "residents" of Coldfoot.
At the end of the tour, despite all my weight restriction concerns, we picked up two summer workers and carried them out. They were young people, and they were split up onto separate planes, but it did alleviate some of my worries, that we had that much "wiggle room". It was so foggy on our return that I couldn't see past the nose of the plane, so I didn't worry myself about weight. I saw that the pilot had two Garmin devices directing him and recalled the time a friend of mine was shocked to have his Garmin device Isuddenly show him somewhere in the Indian Ocean, reporting, "No Road Found! No Road Found!" He seemed to know what he was doing, however, and I know he has made many of those trips. We were told that one in six people in Alaska have a pilots license and one in eight own their own plane.
I asked the female summer employee what she did and she said she found this summer job online. She said she would be leaving as soon as the frost hit and heading next to New Zealand. There are some very interesting wandering souls here.
Todd, one of the pilots, is a musher from Fairbanks. He has 18 dogs and his are spending the summer in Seward, running tourist trips. He was happy not to have to feed them over the summer and he gets them back in working condition. His boss, Chad, estimated that he spends $20,000 annually to feed his dogs. That is because the only he stays in Coldfoot and has to fly his dogfood in, and there is no salmon available for a cheap food source. Chad had a very unfortunate accident with his dogs when he had 5 of them attacked by a "winter bear" and 3 were killed. Todd said there is a Native belief that a winter bear cannot be killed. Todd said he looked at Chad's bear and it had been swimming, trying to catch fish, and then the water froze into icy armor and he understood how it could be quite impenetrable. A winter bear is one who wakes up out of hibernation and emerges in winter, hungry and cranky. They are extremely dangerous.
At the end of the tour, we were presented with certificates documenting that we did cross the Artic Circle. And yes, we have the T-shirt.
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