Bicycle Alaska 2008: Instalment 3

BICYCLE ALASKA, 2008

by

John Berry

Instalment 3: Fairbanks, Barrow, Anchorage and Bethel, AK


May 28th (Wednesday): Fairbanks, AK.

Milton A.Wiltse and I were geology students together at Penn, and both rowed lightweight crew in our freshman year. I dropped out of rowing after one year because I wasn't that terrific at it, and also because I had become involved in so many other things at Penn that something had to give. I visited Milt at his family's summer home in the Thousand Islands region, N.Y., in the summer of 1961, and remember his parents as a very gentle and cultured couple. After graduation we lost touch because we went to different graduate schools and then he went to Alaska and I went to Zambia.

Milton and Flora Wiltse and their two huge and friendly dogs live in a very pleasant A-frame type log house in a heavily wooded subdivision north of the University of Alaska. Flora has taught at an elementary school just across the road for years, and Milton has been on the Geology faculty at the University, as well as State Geologist for a number of years. Both are now retired, but still very physically active: Milton was very successful in the University of Pennsylvania crew as an undergraduate, and continued to row for years after he went to Alaska. He still works out every day using weights and doing Nordic walking along the trails above the house. The whole family, including their son, were very keen and competitive cross-country skiers. They were wonderful hosts while I was in Fairbanks: Milt took a lot of time out of his still busy days (he has an office at the University and is heavily involved with using GIS systems to create exploration data bases).

Milt kindly took me around the Institute of Geophysics at the University, and showed me the Museum of the North on campus. This is a modern and very impressive building, with excellent exhibits of 19th and 20th century paintings of Alaska, as well as of Native Alaskan art. The Gallery of Alaska contains areas devoted to the people, wildlife and history of the five major biomes in Alaska. We had lunch at an excellent Thai restaurant with some of Milton's colleagues, and Milt also drove me to the visitor center to investigate trips to Prudhoe Bay, Point Barrow and Anchorage. It was quickly apparent that the only way to see the first two places was by air – any overland trip would take too long and be beyond my budget. It was also clear that any attempt to stay in Denali National Park or to take a tour there would be very expensive.

While we were down town we walked around to see if I could recognize any of the places I had seen while passing through on my way to Ice Island T-3 in 1963, for instance the Northern Lights Hotel. This hotel, in the 400 block of 1st Avenue, had been only 8 years old in 1963, but is now run down and surrounded by parking lots. A couple of blocks away is Courthouse Square, a typical Federal Building of the 1930s in Art Deco style, which I remember as the main Post Office. Round the corner from it is the Co-op Plaza, once a theater but now a two-story indoor Mall. We had a snack in a restaurant there which is run by two generations of a family from Mexico. Back in 1963 the building next door to it was a café which I remember as having a "fuggy" atmosphere and being full of Swedes. In spite of the destruction due to urban renewal projects, which have left downtown as largely a series of parking lots, it was a much more pleasant place than I remember it: sunshine and a slight breeze as against low clouds and a howling, dust-laden wind..

May 29th (Thursday): Fairbanks, AK.

This was largely a shopping day – I got a tune-up done on the bike, and also bought a book, "The Roadside Geology of Alaska", which I sorely needed. Milt bought the book "1491", whose thesis we had been discussing, and presented it to me. I did not have a chance to read it before arriving at home in Texas: in it the author, Charles Mann, argues quite convincingly that the indigenous population of the Americas was a great deal larger than we have been lead by historians to believe, and that it had attained quite a high level of civilization in several different areas, including some, such as the Beni grasslands of the upper Amazon Basin, in which the traces of this high culture have been overwhelmed by nature and ignored by historians. Europeans were able to "take over" both continents relatively easily because their diseases had preceded their attempts at settlement, and in most areas had wiped out a significant (50-90%) of the native population before Europeans actually began settling.

May 30th (Friday): Deadhorse (Prudhoe Bay) and Barrow

I began this summer's trip with some small hope that I would be able to ride the Dalton Highway from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay in spite of the fact that my bicycle is built for riding on tarred roads and is not a good vehicle for gravel roads, especially if the gravel is coarse. By the time I reached Fairbanks it was clear that any such attempt would be foolhardy: I was having too much heart trouble; it was still so early in the year that night-time temperatures would be marginal for my equipment, and I had already damaged my hands severely, probably through frostbite. Furthermore, it would be at least a 7-day trip, and there was not time to do it and still be sure of getting back home to Austin before Ingrid left for Sweden.

I had also started out with a yen to see Barrow again, 45 years after spending a week there on the way out to Ice Island T-3, and this had intensified somewhat because of the update I had received from Andy Williams at the Arctic Research Institute in Kluane on some of the Arctic hands whom I had known. Very conveniently, it turned out that I could visit both places in one day on a single Alaskan Airlines flight from Fairbanks. The air trip also had the potential advantage that I would be able to see the geology clearly displayed beneath me. Alas – in the event this was not to be!

The Boeing 737 lifted off from Fairbanks early in the morning and almost immediately passed over the Fort Knox and True North open-pit gold mines owned by Kinross Gold. The main pit, Fort Knox, is 16 miles NE of downtown Fairbanks, and True North is 11 miles NW of Fort Knox by haul road (http://www.northern.org/artman/publish/knoxp.shtml). The ore is very low grade (0.024 ounces/ton), and occurs in quartz veins, shears, fractures and pegmatites within a granitic intrusion.

There was good visibility over the White Mountains and the broad, braided course of the Yukon River, but the Brooks Range (Philip Smith Mountains in this area) were almost completely cloud-covered, as was the entire North Slope. However, as we approached Deadhorse we got below the cloud ceiling and I could see that the oil field installations covered a much larger area than I had anticipated. The ground was still completely covered with snow, and there was sufficient fast ice along the coast that I could not be certain of the shoreline under the poor lighting conditions.
Fig. 1: The Prudhoe bay Hotel seen from the entrance to the Deadhorse Airport Terminal Building. The dark piles are of dirty melting snow.

Most of the passengers got out at Deadhorse: they were mostly workers for oilfield contracting companies arriving for their duty tours. I got out too, but unfortunately the plane only stayed at Deadhorse for 30 minutes, and so there was no time to leave the airport: I did, however, manage to take a couple of photographs of the Deadhorse Hotel across the way (Fig. 1). My overall impression was of a giant construction camp, with chain link fences everywhere and even the hotel consisting of a pile of factory-built modules. The weather was raw and dull, the temperature just above freezing – shirt-sleeve weather for me, but nearly everyone else was in a parka of some sort.

We could see no trace of the ground or the sea between Deadhorse and Barrow – conditions fairly typical for the Arctic in summer. On landing at Barrow I was mistaken for a scientist visiting the BASC – the old Arctic Research Lab – and on sorting that out I was still offered a lift there in the Consortium's van, and this I happily accepted.

There was very little that I immediately recognized about Barrow: the airport was new (it was built in the late 1960s – my recollection is that the only airstrip was the metal-mesh surfaced one at the Research Lab), and the large insulated pipes alongside the road, carrying water, wastewater and natural gas were new. I had forgotten that at the lab there was a veritable spaghetti bowl of pipes that ran along the ground and then high over all the roads. Pipes everywhere. The huge Radome of the DEW Line station was gone, replaced by a very small one Almost all the buildings at the lab were new, but after being given careful directions I was able to find the old main building (Fig.2) and what I thought was the dormitory building I had stayed in.
Fig. 2: The old main research building at the Naval Arctic Research Lab.(now BASC), Barrow.

The biggest change at the lab, however, was that the Navy had left Point Barrow, and the old Naval Arctic Research Lab was now BASC – Barrow Arctic Science Consortium, which is run by the North Slope Borough (i.e. the regional government), the Ukpeagvik Iñupiat Corporation (owned by the Native people of Barrow), and Ilisagvik College (the local post-secondary college). It shares a large building with the latter.

I was introduced to the Executive Director of BASC, Glenn Sheehan, who immediately gave me a copy of the huge book "Fifty More Years below Zero", a history of the first fifty years of the Arctic Research Laboratory. The book weighs about 5 lbs, and is full of very interesting information, but after scanning it quickly in Fairbanks the very first thing I had to do was mail it back to Austin – impossible to carry it with me on the bicycle! The book's title echoes that of Charles Brower's "Fifty Years below Zero" (Univ.Alaska Press, 1994), describing the author's life in Barrow from the time he arrived as a whaler in 1883.

Everybody in Barrow said that I had to meet Kenny Toovak, since he was the only person still around from the time that I was there. Kenny goes to the lab every day, but I missed him there, and I also missed him at his other regular hang out at the EMS Station. However, I found there a group of older men, speaking in Inupiat and in their distinctively accented English, and playing cards. I asked about the Barrow people who had been on the Ice Station with me, especially Leffingwell. But they were all dead, Leffingwell not so long ago in a tragic accident with his snowmobile. Many of the men had worked at the ARL or on other Ice Stations, and we shared some reminiscences.
Fig.3: Inupiat dancing at the Heritage Center in Barrow.

I went over to the excellent Inupiat Heritage Center, and watched a performance of Inupiat dancing for a group of tourists, who were mainly from Taiwan. The receptionist at the Heritage Center insisted on tracking Kenny down, and before I had seen much of the museum exhibits he arrived. I remembered him vaguely as the foreman of the mechanical Shop at the NARL. I had been sent over to borrow a tool from him, and found him a rather fearsome character: he made no bones about what would happen to me if the tool was not promptly returned!

Fig. 4: Kenny Toovak in front of his house in Barrow.

We talked about the good old days: in the course of the conversation I learned that in 1963 Kenny had been making about $10.00/hour – eight times what I was making ($1.25/hour)!

Kenny offered to show me around Barrow, including the Browerville section across the Esalkuat lagoon from Barrow proper. I soon found that the Barrow I remember had disappeared. In my memory a street pattern was barely discernible, and that the houses were surrounded by what appeared to be midden heaps(Fig. 5)

Fig. 5: The site of the ancient village of Ukpiagvik. The topography is irregular because of the remains of semi-subterranean houses and of midden heaps. My memories of Barrow in 1963 are that the houses were placed on a similar topography. There is no trace of an irregular topography in the presently built-up area.

There are traces of this higgledy-piggledy layout left downtown (see, for example, the aerial photo at

http://irpsrvgis05.utep.edu/baid_ims/viewer.htm), but otherwise one would never believe that

Fig.6: The center of Barrow, showing some houses not aligned with the grid plan. Also shows how the ground has been levelled.

it had existed – the land is flat, the houses are aligned along streets, and most of them are well-built and quite large. I have checked on the web, and there are passing references in documents of the late 1960s to "the recently settled village". On one website a USGS 7.5 minute quadrangle map shows the houses in Barrow apparently randomly distributed (at this scale), whereas those in Browerville are on the same streets that are there today.

Fig. 7: The Presbyterian Church in Barrow.

Further evidence that things may have changed radically in the late 1960s are that the population of the town during the 1890s, when the school, the Presbyterian church (Fig. 7), and the post office were built was less than 150. In fact, according to Milan (1970 - "A Demographic Study of an Eskimo Village on the North Slope of Alaska"), there were only 400 people along the north coast of Alaska between Point Barrow and Point Hope, including both settlements at Barrow.

Apparently, times were very hard during the early years of the twentieth century because commercial whalers had killed all the bowhead whales on which the people depended. The population was further depleted by as much as 100 people in 1911 by a curious, heroic, and little-known episode. There was from about 1893 a Japanese man, Kyosuke Yasuda (http://alaskamininghalloffame.org/inductees/yasuda.php), known as Frank, living in Barrow. He was married to Nevelo, the daughter of Amoaka from Nuvuk, an ancient village on Point Barrow, and was highly respected as a hunter and trader in the community. In 1902 Yasuda formed a partnershipm with Thomas Carter, a prospectore from Montana, to go gold prospecting in and south of the Brooks Range. They made a rich strike in the Chandalar River basin, the motherlode being discovered by Nevelo. A port on the Yukon River was needed to supply the Chandalar mines, and Yasuda selected and established the town of Beaver in 1910. Careful negotiation was needed, because the site was in the territory of the Gwi'chin Athabascans, and they were adamant in defending their game supply. Beaver grew rapidly, and Yasuda and Nevelo returned to Barrow and brought several families out to Beaver. Because the people were so run down from hunger, and especially from the lack of their normal diet (they had been fed sporadically on western tinned food by the government) this overland trip through the mountains took two years. Some of the old people died along the way, but the numbers were made up by new births. Beaver became a truly multi-ethnic settlement, with whites, Inupiat, and two different Indian groups, a lone Japanese. Frank Yasuda was a very generous man, and extremely loyal to his partners and to his clients. His loyalty was rewarded in turn by theirs, and he was held in high regard by all in the Far North, but this could not save him from being interned in 1942 in the lower '48. After the war was over he returned to Beaver, and died there in 1958 at the age of 90. I wish I had known him.

Fig. 8: The new cemetery at Barrow.

Fig. 9: A successful whale-hunting team's umiat and flag on the sea ice at Barrow.

Barrow now has a population of about 4,000 people: it was 4600 in 2000, but only about 1500 when I was there in 1963. The periods of rapid growth were the 1940s (10% yearly, but from a base of only 360 people), 1960s (5% yearly) and 1980s (5%).

In the 1963 Barrow of my memories there were no Government buildings other than the Post Office, and I remember no large stores or banks, even though the web informs me that the Wells Fargo branch, now housed in a beautiful three storey building, was opened in April 1962. Today in Browerville there is a huge grocery, and in Barrow close to the bank is a very impressive Police Station (Fig. 10)and a big City Hall (Fig. 11). Kenny took me to the oldest building in town, the Cape Smythe Whaling station built by Charles Brower in 1885, known as the Browerville Store in 1963, and now as Brower's Restaurant (Fig.12), but we couldn't find the little tea-room where I stopped in 1963. Kenny thought it had

Fig. 10: The rear of the Police Station in Barrow

been pulled down long ago. We drove around downtown, and along the beach to the east, where there are the partially excavated remains of 16 dwelling sites of the Birnirk cultural phase (500-900 AD)(Fig. 5). We also visited the natural gas plant, the local quarry (not much geology was visible) and the new cemetery (Fig. 6)where, unfortunately, the inscriptions on the grave markers all faced away from the road, and the snow was too deep to hike through in sneakers.

Fig. 11: The new City Hall in Barrow
Fig. 12: The old Cape Smythe Whaling Station, now Brower's Restaurant.

Kenny dropped me off in time to eat dinner at Pepe's North of the Border Restaurant, from where I walked back to the airport, arriving back in Fairbanks close to midnight.

May 31st (Saturday): Fairbanks to Anchorage by Train

Once again Milt graciously took me to downtown Fairbanks, and waited while I bought my train ticket and got my bike and baggage checked in. While we were at the station we met Bill Walters, who I had last seen in Sitka. He has still not found the ideal fishing stream in Alaska.

Part of the railroad depot is devoted to a very large and beautifully-built model train layout run by the Tanana ____________________.

We boarded the rear part of the train in brilliant sunshine. The front part was off-limits to us, as it consisted of a series of hermetically sealed coaches belonging to the Holland-America Line and full of cruise ship passengers. Our part of the train was not at all full, so there was enough room for almost everyone to sit in the observation cars, of which there were three, and we had a restaurant car as well. The view from the first observation car along the roofs of the leading carriages gave one the feeling of being in a Hollywood western – it was tempting to imagine oneself walking the length of the train across those roofs! There were two very pleasant young people acting as guides, and the passengers were an interesting and lively lot. Between the scenery, the weather, the guides and the passengers this turned out to be one of the best trips I have ever taken – it was sad when it ended at Anchorage.

The railway line first travels along the southern edge of the University of Alaska campus, and there is some active permafrost in this area of alluvial sediments, making for a slow and somewhat uneven ride. The weather was beautiful, and soon we could see the Alaska Range on our left. The line runs NW up Happy Creek and then follows Goldstream Creek as it gradually bears around to the west and then the southwest, until it finally crosses the Tanana River at Nenana, 44 miles WSW of Fairbanks, on a 700-foot long steel bridge. President Warren Harding drove the golden spike marking completion of the Alaska Railroad here in 1923.

Nenana is a small place, with only about 400 inhabitants, but it has two great claims to fame.

Every year it sponsors the Nenana Ice Classic lottery to pick the date and time, to the closest minute, that spring ice break-up will occur on the Tanana River. This lottery, which is extremely popular all over Alaska, and is now emulated on a smaller scale by several other towns, such as Bethel, began in 1917 when a group of surveyors working for the Alaska Railroad whiled away the wait for the river to open for navigation by forming a betting pool. Over the years since the lottery has paid out nearly $10 million in prize money.
Nenana was also the starting point for the 1925 serum run to Nome. The people of Nome, many of whom were Native Alaskans and had no immunity, were threatened by a diphtheria epidemic that winter. The only available serum was at Seward, on the south coast, and there were no serviceable aerooplanes in which to fly it to Nome. So it was decided to ship it 300 miles by rail to Nenana, and then by dog team from there to Nome (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iditarod_Trail_Sled_Dog_Race#Ceremonial_start).

The 20-lb cylinder of serum was passed just before midnight on January 27 to the first of twenty mushers and more than 100 dogs who relayed the package 674 miles (1,085 km) from Nenana to Nome. The dogs ran in relays, with no dog running over 100 miles (160 km).
The Norwegian Gunnar Kaasen and his lead dog Balto arrived on Front Street in Nome on February 2 at 5:30 a.m., five and a half days later. They became such celebrities that a statue of Balto was erected in Central Park in New York City in 1925, where it is a popular tourist attractions. However, most mushers consider Leonhard Seppala and his lead dog Togo to be the true heroes of the run. Together they covered the most hazardous stretch of the route, and carried the serum farther than any other team. The first dogsled races in the modern Iditarod series, founded by Dorothy G. Page, were called the Iditarod Trail Seppala Memorial Race in honor of Leonhard Seppala. The race now starts in Anchorage and covers about 1100 miles.
Nenana is the center of rail-to-river barge transportation for the Interior. Crowley Marine is a major private employer in Nenana, supplying villages along the Tanana and Yukon Rivers with cargo and fuel each summer by barge.

After leaving Nenana the line climbs the gentle slope of the Nenana River cone, reaching the mountain front after 25 miles. From here the scenery becomes spectacular as the railway climbs along the eastern side of the Nenana Gorge for a few miles and then crossing to the west. At the town of Healy the large open cast Usibelli coal mine lies in a canyon on the opposite side of the valley, but only the facilities for loading the coal onto trains are visible from the railway. This mine was the site of the Healy Clean Coal Project in the late 1990s, and lies only 11.5 miles north of the Denali Park Headquarters.. An experimental clean coal power plant was built at a cost of $300million, mostly shared between the Federal and Alaskan governments, but since operating briefly as part of the demonstration program it has been shut down by litigation. There is also a conventional coal-fired power station at Healy.

South of Healy the railway line enters the Nenana Gorge, where we passed several groups of rafters, and for the next ten miles runs just inside the Denali National Park Boundary. The George Parks Highway on the other side of the river is outside the park. Half way along this stretch is the crowded visitor area of the National Park: from the train we could see three or four large hotels squeezed between the road and the river, as well as huge parking lots for the day-trippers and the caravan crowd. The train stopped here and Bill Walters and several others of our congenial group dismounted. Milton Wiltse had advised me that this was an expensive place to stay, whether tenting or not, and was known as "million-dollar alley" by the locals: I had also checked into bus tours, and found out that they did not coordinate with the train schedules, and were indeed expensive. Milton's advice was not to bother to stay here, since Mt. McKinley is only visible one out of every three times, so to be sure of seeing it requires several days. It had been visible the day before, and clouds were building up today, so I stayed on the train, without huge regrets. The area might be worth a dedicated hiking holiday in the future.

South of Denali Village the railway traverses the west end of the strath occupied by the Yanert River, which rises in the Yanert glacier to the east. Base level for this strath is about 2000 feet msl, and the wide glacial valley that the railway follows southward never gets much above this level. My guess is that the Nenana River has captured the drainage of the Yanert in post-glacial times. Thirteen miles south of McKinley Village and 5 miles N of Cantwell the road and railway cross a major south-dipping thrust fault. At Cantwell both road and rail line enter another huge strath, showing the striated topography due to recent deglaiciation. The drainage divide between the Tenana and the southward-flowing Chulitna river is very inconspicuous and is about 10 miles SW of Cantwell. After following the Chulitna valley for another 30 miles the railroad veers off southward through the Indian River valley into that of the Susitna, which it follows all the way down to the town of Willow. This village of 1,700 people was selected as the new capital of Alaska by ballot in 1976, but another ballot proposition allotting the $2.8billion necessary to effect the move from Juneau was defeated in 1982, so the move never happened. Apparently Gov. Sarah Palin is strongly in favor of the move, and makes a point of spending the absolute minimum of time in Juneau. Gov. Palin's home in Wasilla is 22 miles from Willow.

We had not seen much wildlife in the high country, but from Talkeetna onwards the train regularly slowed down for bear and moose sightings. The engineers knew where to look, and when they saw an animal would radio our guides with instructions as to where we should look.
From here into Anchorage the country was heavily wooded, and towns were a regular sight. After leaving Wasilla we crossed the head of the Knik Arm of Cook Inlet and then ran along the NW foot of the spectacular Chugach mountains for the last leg of the journey. Once we got into the low country on the south side of the Alaska range the weather had become cloudy, and when we reached Anchorage it was cool and somewhatr raw.

I collected my bicycle, loaded it up, bid goodbye to the congenial companions of the journey, and rode off to find the Anchorage International Hostel, where I stayed for the next four nights.


June 1st (Sunday): Anchorage

I attended the morning service at the Central Lutheran Church, a very active congregation close to downtown.

I then wandered around downtown, but not much was open, an dfinally bought a combined ticket to the Native Heritage Center and the Anchorage Museum. Took a little bus out to the heritage center, which offered dance and song performances and also had a series of outdoor exhibits consisting of replicas of native housing, each one with one or more guides from its ethnic group. One of thbe guides for the Yupik house was one-half Yupik, one quarter Finnish, and one quarter northern Irish. She told mme that her paternal grandfather had come out from Finland with the first reindeer herd that was brought to Alaska by Sheldon Jackson. There had been some logistical problem with this herd, and the animals had all died, but her grandfather stayed on and worked with the second, successful herd.

June 2nd (Monday): Anchorage

Rode out to the bike shop and then back by the trail

June 3rd (Tuesday): Anchorage

Did last of my shopping, but couldn't get my heart pills. Rode the bike out to the bike shop and got a lift back to the hostel.

June 4th (Wednesday): Anchorage to Bethel, AK

Left from Bethel, collecting pills on the way.

June 11th (Wednesday): Bethel – Anchorage