Hey.
My friend Tohru Saito and I are at the Anchorage International Chili's,
enjoying free wireless internet and waiting for a flight to Bethel to join
Kenji Yoshikawa on his spring snowmachine trip in the name of science.
We are traveling by snowmachine from Emmonak, on the mouth of the Yukon,
to Kotzebue. Kenji estimates our travel time at two weeks to trace the
westward-pointing nose of the Seward Peninsula. That's more than 800 miles.
Kenji will be installing permafrost boreholes at some of the villages we
pass through, and I'll be looking at some weather stations and snapping some
photos and such. I'll post some when I get a chance. This snogo travel, new
to me but not to Kenji and Tohru, will allow me to carry this little miracle
of a machine.
We accomplished the first hurdle in any major trip, getting out of town,
and will soon get farther out.
Far out.
Mouth of the Yukon. Closest spruce tree is 100 miles upriver. Sinuous
snakes and worms of river channel all around. Not a hill in sight.
We're travelin' light. And waiting for a few sleds from Anchorage so we
can start our 800-mile journey.
Kenji has drilled a permafrost observatory, a hole about 4 meters deep,
and he found no permafrost. That's what this trip is about, to find out the
state of the state's permafrost. "Emo" floods from ice jams every
few years, and Kenji said that water inundation might be what thawed
permafrost here.
And you thought gas was expensive in Bethel . . .
Tohru enjoys his visit to a family restaurant.
We left Shishmaref two mornings ago for the 100-mile
ride cross-country to the village of Deering. Before we left Shish, we
stopped for gas again, because one of our five-gallon jugs was missing and
the tanks on our machines were also a bit light.
Here’s a donation can at the Shish store for the
potential move to the Tin Creek site. There’s a price tag of $180 million,
and the villagers will have to pitch in if they are going to pull off the
move.
Here’s our friend Kaji, who flew into Shishmaref to
help us with the drilling and logistics, and because he likes Shishmaref. He
did a great film series on Shishmaref:
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/
~vision-q/works.html
Out of Shishmaref to Deering, more than 100 miles
across tundra and sea ice, Kenji was again breaking trail, taking us on a
straight line through very flat light. I asked him how he could navigate so
well, and he says he uses the sun or other features of the landscape to keep
oriented, and checks his GPS when he needs to.
We had almost no visibility for the entire 100 miles,
and the light got so flat that I couldn’t see Tohru’s tracks in front of
me. It was surreal, bumpy and a bit brutal, and I was glad to get to Deering,
the first one-street village we had seen since Shaktoolik. Steve, the
principal, let us into the school, and we met a few locals, including Calvin
Moto and eighth-grader Ting-Mac Hailstone.
This morning, we took off again into flat light that
Tohru described as being inside a ping-pong ball, and riding wasn’t much
fun–we’d hit bumps on the sea ice without seeing them. We rode this way
for about 5 hours and 90 miles.
Here we are finally hitting the markers for Kotzebue,
after another stellar navigation job by Kenji. Today, with an invisible sun,
he said he used the clouds to keep his bearings. And we were on sea ice. I
continue to be impressed.
We made it! More than two weeks and 800 miles, stopping
at 16 villages and installing permafrost monitoring stations at all of them.
Saw a good portion of the fantastic, varied terrain of the Seward Peninsula.
From the mouth of the Yukon to north of the Arctic Circle. We fly back to
Fairbanks tomorrow. Thanks for coming along.
