Barrow Whale (10 Oct 08 0256)
by Matt Nolan
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Panoramic photo by
Matt Nolan
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Barrow Whale (10 Oct 08 0256)The World > North America > USA > Alaska > Arctic National Wildlife Refuge |
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The local residents of Barrow hunt bowhead whales as part of their subsistence use. Here they are pulling strips of muktuk off. They had a long day trying to get the whale out of the ocean, and with it being so late they did not bring it to the normal butchering site, and here you can see beach sand mixed with snow on the ground. It was below freezing with a stiff wind and blowing snow, and most of these folks hadnt slept in a while.
Local whalers in Barrow have just landed a large bowhead whale. They have already begun scoring...
This location has several types of equipment designed to measure snow fall, as an inter-comparison te...
We spent a week based out of Happy Valley, creating a photo inventory of glaciers in the Brooks Range...
The Kavik River winds its way from the Brooks Range to the Arctic Ocean, past Kavik River Camp.
Everyone gets ancy after a few days of bad weather. Here Rick and the Big Dog look on as a super cub...
Frank and Charlotte make use of the warm and dry galley, as well as the internet, to process radar da...
Our last camping spot of our Hulahula River float trip was on the last bit of tundra before the ocean...
We shuttled loads off the glacier to here, where we recombined them into a single load back to Coldfo...
We had a long day from Fish Hole 1 to here, the 5 mile strip. We decided it would be best to camp at...
On our trip from the mountains to coast, we took a break here for lunch and science.
The biggest city in Alaska is Anchorage, sitting in Cook Inlet on the coast of the north pacific. Suburban expansion in Anchorage means houses are being built up into the mountains behind the city.
People in these new developments complain about "the wildlife" sometimes but you know what? You're gonna get moose in your yard when you build houses on their terrain. They will eat your flowers and sleep in your driveway, and stare at you over the top of a parked full-size pickup truck. They're like cows on stilts. I'm just trying to give you an idea of the scale of things up in Alaska, where there are more small planes per capita than anywhere else in the US. Many small villages get their fuel supply flown in by large aircraft, and that's it for the year.
North of Anchorage there are six hundred miles of mountains with very few roads or people, and then up at the top of that expanse is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It's about nineteen million acres of space, or seventy-seven thousand square kilometers.
If you put a map of the state of Alaska on top of a map of the United States, Alaska would cover half of the country. Alaska by itself is the size of half of the United States. That's an easy idea to miss because most maps shrink Alaska when they show it next to the continental U.S.
Back to the pictures: locals in Kavtovik make use of the natural environment. Whale bones on the beach are an example of the subsistence lifestyle which has been going on here for long before airplanes and panoramic pictures.
Alaska is beautiful in the fall season. Fireweed turns bright red and the birch trees change to gold. You have no idea what air is supposed to smell like until you visit Alaska.
This is a really interesting set of pictures. Scientists get the award for "most thorough documentation" of a spot.
Okay, I haven't personally been up as far as AWNR, but I can tell you just from hiking Girdwood that it's a very very amazing feeling to walk for a while, turn around, and see absolutely nothing man-made anywhere in your field of vision, except your boots.
Mattanuska Thunder!
Text by Steve Smith.
