| Kotzebue - Day 1 | |||||||
| The "city" is not what I had expected. I suppose you could say that for Alaska in general. Kotzebue is 30 miles above the arctic circle, but there is no snow on the ground. We were told earlier that slush (water/snow) had fell earlier this week. The ground is really wet with puddles all over. There are maybe 2 or 3 paved roads here. The rest are dirt roads filled with potholes. There are also very few road signs except I saw 1 stop sign and 1 speed limit sign. The average home here is very small. The outside of the homes appear to be worn and falling apart. There are old motorcycles, 4 wheelers, cars, caribou antlers and miscellaneous junk littered around the houses. | |||||||
| Kotzebue - Day 2 | |||||||
| We ate lunch at the Pizza House. Very good food. We preferred
Pizza House over the chinese food we had yesterday (note:
we ate at Pizza House breakfast, lunch and dinner during
the weekends). I watched a group of children on freestyle/ bmx bikes jumping some dirt piles that a construction crew dumped on the ground. It reminded me of when I was younger and my brother, myself, and a few other kids did the same exact thing |
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| Kobuk - Day 4-5 | |||||||
| It was announced over
the CB that there was a herd of caribou out by the
village cemetary. We had 15 minutes until our first patient of the afternoon so we grabbed
our cameras and ran for it. Not too long after we started
running, a construction worker offered me and another
doctor a ride on his 4-wheeler to go check out the
caribou. The doctor jumped on the front bars and I jumped
on the back seat behind the driver. Turns out the
cemetary is a lot farther than we had guess-timated. By
the time we arrived, there were no caribou left except
for 2 that the hunters had killed with their rifles. Before leaving Kobuk for good, we got to borrow the health aids 4 wheeler for a joy ride. So we all hopped on the Honda 4x4 and rode off down the same road as the day before. We went out to the same place as yesterday in search of any sign of Caribou. We didn't find any, but we did find the carcass of one of the caribou. The doctor took a pic of me pretending like I was going to lick the Caribou's bloody rib cage. It's a great picture. Hopefully, he will send it to me like he said he would. A little bit later I got to ride the 4 wheeler. At first I got to ride by myself so naturally I screwed around. After that, I drove them back to the village. |
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| Back at Kotzebue - Day 8 | |||||||
| After visiting Kobuk,
we went to Shungnak. Shungnak is great. I wouldn't mind living there
someday provided I had a modern home, plumbing, and could
make enough money to support myself. We got to try
Caribou and Moose meat. Both are good. They taste like
beef. While walking around taking pictures, I got to talk to some of the villagers. Mostly children because they love the military uniform. They see me and say "Whoa cooool! Army!". The kids here are very cute. Despite what I was told, most of the girls I have seen aren't really fat. They aren't exactly thin either, but middle of the road. Yes, some of the girls are even hot. I don't have any pictures of hot girls though. If I get the guts to do it and I see a hot girl in Point Hope or Noatak, I will get a picture somehow. I doubt it will happen in Point Hope because some of their food up there includes whale blubber and seal meat. That isn't exactly on many weight watcher diets these days. I still want to try both if possible. The only other weird things I've eaten have been seaweed chips and cactus. Both of those were when I was younger. |
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| Point Hope - Day 9-12 | |||||||
| Point Hope wasn't much
fun unfortunately. We didn't have as much free time as
before because we worked about 2 hours longer per day (8
am to 6:30pm). I got some nice pictures though. There
aren't any trees or hills here in Point Hope. Mostly just
gravel. With the exception of the water bodies (Bering
Strait and lakes), Point Hope is a very dull looking
village. The interesting things about the village was the
cemetary with whale bones, the "old town", the
old looking canoes on stilts, the lakes, the sea, and uh...
thats about it. The old town was where their village used
to be, but they moved back a little bit because their old
village was flooding over too much. There are still some
houses standing out there. Its pretty neat... like a
ghost town. We did get to try whale blubber. They call it Muktuk. I tried the Beluga whale and the Bowhead whale. I ate the Beluga fairly easily. It just tastes like fat on the side of your steak. The blubber was about half an inch thick and the fat was about another inch. . The blubber on the Bowhead whale was about an 1" to an 1 1/2" thick not counting the fat. There was about 3 inches of fat on top of the blubber. The Bowhead tasted like salted rubber. I lasted maybe 10 seconds before I spit that out. Aside from that, nothing interesting happened. P.S. No good looking girls to take pictures of. |
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| Between Point Hope and Noatak - Day 12 | |||||||
| Wow, the flight from Point Hope to Noatak was great! We flew about 500 ft above the ground for most of the flight. We saw many herds of Caribou. Some as small as 5 caribou and as large as 100 or so. We also saw a herd of Musk Ox. They looked awesome. I wish we could have seen some grizzlies, but I can't complain. How many other people have seen Musk Ox in their natural habitat? | |||||||
| Noatak - Day 12 | |||||||
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