Barrow, The Far North

Boy, do I have some catching up to do! Mike and I arrived home last night from our (drum roll, please) FABULOUS vacation to Alaska and Canada. I managed to get one post done while I was there, but after that...I got too involved in what we were seeing and doing to care much about blogging. So now...we start our journey from Barrow, Alaska -- the northernmost community on the North American continent.

We flew from Fairbanks to Barrow via another coastal town - Prudhoe Bay. Prudhoe shot onto the map in 1967 with the discovery there of North America's largest oil field. From the airplane, we could easily see the long snake of the TransAlaskan Pipeline meandering across the treeless, flat, Arctic tundra. You saw a closer "land" view of this on my previous post.We also enjoyed seeing the frozen Arctic Ocean below us. Can you see the large cracks in the surface at the bottom half of the picture?

We arrived at Will Rogers Memorial airport in Barrow, and found our way to this signpost, which pointed the way to cities all over the world. We are posing here with a copy of "OK!" magazine. They hold a contest in which readers submit pictures of themselves reading the magazine in remote locations around the world. I figured this was about as remote as I could get. If I get published, I'll let ya know!Barrow is a very small town, and the buildings there are short, squat and simple. It reminded me a bit of Tijuana, with trash littering the ground and junk laying all over. This picture below shows just a bit of the main street. Our hotel is on the right, and the frozen Arctic Ocean is just beyond the buildings. Most of the people were Inupiat Eskimos, and most of them were very friendly. We were invited to attend the Nalukataq, which is a yearly celebration of a successful whaling season. The native eskimos are subsistence hunters, and divide up the whale to distribute to the community at the Nalukataq. We were given a warm bowl of caribou soup, which was really good! As I was eating it, a toothless elderly Inupiat woman got right close in my face and said, slowly, "That soup will keep you warm."Then we were offered a serving of mikiaq, which is fermented whale blubber soaked in blood. The red is blubber, and the black attached to it is the skin.Mike's dad and I passed on the mikiaq. Sue (Mike's dad's wife) and Mike were brave though, and tried a bite. The consensus was that next time, they would pass on the mikiaq, too. Ya gotta give them credit for trying!

We took a short tour of the town, which included a visit to the Barrow "forest". Since the environment is so harsh there, no trees will grow. Some industrious eskimo made his own trees out of driftwood and baleen from a bowhead whale! Here is our group standing in between jaw bones of a bowhead whale, and of me standing inside a bowhead skull. These are some BIG whales!

We also visited the larger-than-expected grocery store, which (much to my amusement) had snowmobiles for sale in the freezer aisle. Milk was $9.69 a gallon, and Bing cherries were selling for $12.99 a pound. I guess that's what happens when everything you eat (except whale) has to be flown or barged in.

We visited the Inupiat Eskimo Heritage Center, where we got to see some native dancing, and a demonstration of the blanket toss. As you can see from the video, it's sort of like jumping on a trampoline, except the people holding the blanket (including Mike, his dad, and Sue) are raising and lowering it to toss the woman. This is a game often played at festivals and other Inupiat celebrations. The "blanket" for the game is made from seal or walrus skins, so it can handle the pounding that results every time a player lands on it after a "toss." The winner is the player who bounces the highest.

We also thought this picture of a native Inupiat Eskimo and her baby was cute -- we had to include it!

We could not leave Barrow without a couple commemorative shots. The first one is of Mike and me at MIDNIGHT, on June 21, the summer solstice, which is the longest day of the year.Barrow has 82 days of continuous sunlight - the sun never sets below the horizon. It is an odd sight to see the sun circling completely around the horizon instead of coming up and then slipping below and out of sight. I enjoyed it.

We also have a shot here of me standing on the frozen Arctic Ocean.The pack ice was beginning to break up while we were there, but was still solid in most places. It was easy to hop from one ice floe to another. It was very interesting to see the ocean all frozen over and not moving.

Here is another picture of Mike and me, his dad, and Sue standing on the ocean!

Last but not least, you will see me taking a "dip" in the Arctic Ocean. Maybe not a very big dip, but a dip, just the same! I can now add it to my list of "things I have done". As you can probably tell, it was really, really C-O-L-D!!!!!