Another Day, A Different Angle

What a difference a little sunshine, blue sky and shot composition can make.

Back In The Arctic

I first arrived in Kotzebue in January 1993, landing in the winter darkness in the midst of a snowstorm. I meant to only stay for several months, but ended up living here for two and a half years — first as editor of the local newspaper, then striking out on my own doing desktop publishing work.

I’m back, now, for two days, and it’s much milder weather today, if you can call temperatures in the mid-40s in July mild. As the plane landed around 11 a.m., the local temperature was 39 degrees — I was wishing I hadn’t left my jacket behind as I rushed out of the house in Anchorage this morning.

Kotzebue is a town of about 3,000 people — mostly Inupiat Eskimos — located 30 miles above the Arctic Circle and not connected to the rest of the world by road. The only way in and out of the area is by plane — Alaska Airlines flies several 737 jets a day between Kotzebue and Anchorage, 550 miles to the south. The town is located on a gravel spit at the tip of the Baldwin Peninsula, which juts out into Kotzebue Sound, which in turn leads into the Bering Sea.

Kotzebue is not what you’d call picturesque (the beautiful areas of this region are across the Sound on the mainland). But I was lucky to have a bit of blue sky blow in tonight, so I went out to see if I could capture some shots that would put a good face on this little arctic burg.

Shit Outta Luck

Here’s a quintessentially Alaskan story, courtesy of my sister’s friend, Michelle:

A few years ago, at a music festival held in the small (very small) town of Hope, Alaska, a problem arose with the Porta-Potty facilities. A collection of the portable toilets had been trucked into town for the dramatic increase in the town’s population during the festival.

On the second day of the festival, with the Porta-Pottys filled to capacity, the crowds became restless. A festival organizer took to the stage to announce that, as good festival organizers, they had anticipated waste management needs correctly and that fresh Porta-Pottys had been on their way by truck from Anchorage. Unfortunately, the truck had hit a moose en route, so fresh cans would not be arriving that day.

It’s a fairly common occurrence in Alaska for cars — and occasionally trains — to hit moose. And the results are generally not pretty, especially for the vehicles. When I was a child, living in Denali National Park, my family signed up on a list that offered free moose meat. All you had to do was wait your turn for a moose to get hit (or killed illegally). We shared ours with another family, butchering the moose and packing it away in the freezer. Road kill that feeds a family.

But I don’t know how I’d feel about getting a moose that was hit by the Porta-Potty truck.

Can't Think Of An Appropriate Headline For This

Just for laughs… my senior photo from high school.

The Weather Ain't So Hot

Despite (and maybe because of) the fact that I lived in Alaska for about 16 years, I’ve never been a big fan of the weather. Most people would take that to mean the winters are cold and miserable — which they can be. But I’ve never thought much of the summer weather, either. The best I could say for summer in most parts of Alaska is that sunshine and warmth are more likely than in winter. That’s not saying much.

This summer has been an unusually nice one in much of the state. But again, that’s relative, and there’s still plenty of bad weather, as well.

We got lucky with weather on our trip out into Denali National Park. Our warm, sunny week was sandwiched between two storms that dumped unusual levels of rain in the interior of Alaska, where Denali is located.

Floods slam Interior a 2nd time
Anchorage Daily News

Road crews struggled Monday to keep parts of the Parks Highway open while cabin owners near Denali National Park and Preserve tied steel cables to their structures to keep them from floating away after a storm dumped more than five inches of rain on parts of the Interior over the weekend.

The storm caused flooding along several creeks from Cantwell to north of Fairbanks, the National Weather Service said.

The photo on the left in the collage above shows an evening last week when we dined on the patio of the Creekside Cafe, near where my mother lives outside of Denali. The photo on the right is from a few days ago, after rains swelled nearby Carlo Creek and flooded the area.

Alaska has some amazing things going for it — weather is not one of them.

Visiting Denali

I’m in the midst of a two-week stay in Alaska, visiting family and enjoying my childhood haunts. I’m traveling with my sister, Heather, and her boyfriend, Chris.

We spent the first week in Denali National Park, visiting my mother at Camp Denali, where she works. This week we’re down in Anchorage with my father and step-mother. Later this week, I’ll fly on business up to Kotzebue, an Inupiat town above the Arctic Circle where I lived for two and a half years in the early 1990s (and where the Goo Goo Dolls recently shot a music video).

I didn’t get a chance to post anything here last week, so I’m just going to share a few things about my time in Denali now. (You can see photos in the Photos & Flicks section.)

BACKGROUND

My family moved to Denali National Park and Preserve (then called Mt. McKinley National Park) in 1976, when I was seven years old. My father worked as the mountaineering ranger at the park, managing climbing expeditions and coordinating rescues when climbs went bad (and, on the less glamorous side, leading garbage-cleaning expeditions). We lived in the park for eight years before moving on to another part of Alaska.

Our family friends, Wally and Jerri Cole, purchased Camp Denali around the same time we moved to Alaska, and my family occasionally spent time out at Camp during summers (the only time the facilities operate). Both of my sisters worked at Camp for seven or eight summers, and my mom has been working for the Coles now for ten years. I’ve never worked at Camp — I just take advantage of the family connections and visit every couple of years (Thanks Wally and Jerri!).

To say Camp Denali is in a good location is an understatement one could never understand without visiting. It’s situated on private land that was once at the very edge of the national park, but which now lies surrounded by a park that was expanded in 1980. It’s at the end of the only road into the park, and it has a view of Mt. McKinley that is unparalleled.

LOWELL THOMAS JR. AND TIBET

During our stay at Camp Denali, renowned Alaskan bush pilot (and frequent visitor to Camp Denali) Lowell Thomas Jr. showed guests an old television special featuring his trip to Tibet in 1949 with his father, Lowell Thomas. The two men were among the first Westerners invited by the then-hermit nation to visit and to meet the Dalai Lama. The footage was incredible, as was the story of their trek into and out of Tibet. Lowell Sr. broke his hip in a fall from a horse on the return trip, and had to be carried in a stretcher for 20 days back to India.

A WOLF AND KILL

It’s common to see grizzly bears and caribou from the one gravel road that winds into Denali National Park. It’s much less common to see a wolf, as they tend to be skittish about any kind of human contact. So it was a rare thing to see a wolf just ten feet off the road during our return trip through the park. It had just killed a caribou calf, and was resting after feeding. Four caribou sat resting about half a mile further up the hillside, part of the group that the wolf had taken the calf from. After sitting for a while, the wolf got up, walked alongside us, across the road and back to the kill to feed some more.

AND…

Also saw plenty of grizzly bears, had spectacular weather, did lots of hiking, enjoyed good food and company, and had a fun overnight camping trip into the backcountry.

North Cascades

I took a quick, overnight trip up to the Methow Valley, just on the east side of the North Cascade mountains. The weather and scenery were beautiful, as usual. If felt great to be back in this terrain.

Too bad the focus is a bit off on the photo of the flowers above…

The first two shots below were taken from the North Cascades Scenic Highway near Washington Pass. The third was taken during a hike nearby.

Sigh...

While in Japan for the past year, I missed (well, that’s not the right word) the continued degradation of American broadcast news. I don’t have a television right now, so I haven’t been watching television news since I got home.

Last night, I caught an episode of CNN.

How sad.

It’s not even worth discussing the quality of news on television anymore. What was most shocking was how plastic and unreal it all appeared. They’ve managed to package reality in a way that is not real.

And even what used to be basic rules of good journalism are now delivered with a wink and a tittering laugh as if to say, “How silly that we have to continue with this facade!”

The moppet in the anchor chair practically exploded with enthusiasm while waving the latest edition of Time magazine before the camera — synergism at its most desperate in the AOL Time Warner kingdom. She forgot the disclaimer then, but managed to throw it in after the last segment, an in-house stroke job covering the $40 million sale of a penthouse atop the new AOL Time Warner Center in New York City. In a perfect Elle Woods moment (and I don’t mean that in a good way), she mentioned that the building in question was owned by CNN’s parent company, “but not that any of us here would ever be able to afford that apartment!”

Me, Here And There, Online

I sound stiff as a board in this interview, conducted by Yukiko Kojima, who is an English student at Mie University in Japan. Ms. Kojima did a bang-up job putting the interview together — perhaps I can blame the lack of much life in my answers on the fact that I responded to her e-mail questions in a jet-lagged haze the first few days after returning to Seattle. Or maybe I just need to loosen up a bit. Regardless, thanks so much to Yukiko for thinking of me for her interview, and for being such a professional.

Also featured online is a collection of some of my Japan photos over at Menstream, a publication out of Singapore.

Monsanto Doesn't Like The Truth

Monsanto likely wouldn’t be too happy with the “Got Milk” parody posted below. The frankencompany that wants to genetically reengineer — and then own — the world’s food supply has sued a dairy in Maine for telling customers that the dairy’s products are free of artificial growth hormones.

Monsanto, which is a major producer of artificial growth hormones used on dairy cows, believes the Oakhurst dairy’s “no hormones” labels constitute misleading and deceptive advertising.

Monsanto Sues Dairy in Maine Over Label’s Remarks on Hormones
nytimes.com (free registration required)

Monsanto, the maker of agricultural seeds and chemicals, has a reputation for responding strongly to critics of its biotech seeds and its artificial growth hormones.

The company has been pressing government officials in Maine to get Oakhurst to change its labels and tone down its marketing. On July 3, Monsanto filed its suit against Oakhurst in the United States District Court in Boston, seeking an injunction preventing Oakhurst from using the labels.

Monsanto says not only are the labels misleading to consumers but also that there is no way to distinguish between milk that comes from cows treated with artificial growth hormones and milk that comes from cows not treated.

In a statement released after the suit was filed, Monsanto said that “these misleading representations directly disparage Monsanto’s Posilac bovine somatotropin product and the milk from cows supplemented with bovine somatotropin.”

If ever a company deserves to be disparaged, it is Monsanto.

Got Mutation?

No, I don’t got milk. And why would anyone want to get milk if it’s the Hulk’s drink of choice? Who are the advertising geniuses who thought a raging, green, mutated monster was a good poster child for that mostly-unnecessary hormone cocktail called milk?