An adventure to the Alaskan bush in Quinhagak

As part of my work with Head Start in Alaska I took a one day trip to the tiny Yup'ik Eskimo village of Quinhagak which is at the mouth of the Kuskokwim River in SW Alaska. Our team of 3 flew from Bethel on a 6-seat Cessna. Here is Carl, our pilot, escorting us to the plane. He is laughing because we asked about our inflight entertainment- apparently it will be him!

We were all pretty confident about our chances of making it back from this flight- but we took pictures of each other just in case...

Here's Carl giving us our take-off directions. "Fasten your seatbelts and don't try to open the doors when in-flight!"

As you can see we had a beautiful day to fly. Our Trip to Quinhagak was about 65 miles and took about 50 minutes. We flew at about 2000 feet. All we could see in any direction was frozen tundra and rivers of ice...











That is the Pacific Ocean on the horizon in the picture below (but, no, we could not see Russia)





Below is an aerial view of Quinhagak. The landing strip is in the upper righthand corner and it was a 2 mile drive into town. The Head Start center was in a building near the public school- The school is the larger dark building just above where the road from the landing strip meets the main road in town.

This was the view from the landing strip out across the tundra.

Here is the local staff person who took me on a home visit. She speaks English and Yup'ik, has lived in Quinhagak all her life and loves her job. (and I wish I could remember her name!)

This is the main road in town-leading away from the school. Snowmobiles and four-wheelers are the main mode of travel on town although we were taken to and from the airstrip in pickup trucks. This is a typical residential street in Quinhagak. The houses are on stilts because of the permafrost. They have to be re-leveled every few years. Plumbing is just coming to this street- they run the water and sewer lines through above-ground metal conduits. The main lines were inplace but the homes are not yet hooked up. For now the families dump their 'honeybuckets' into 55-gallon drums located around the town.

I visited the brown home in this picture. The family of 6 has electricity, oil heat, satallite tv, cell phones and a microwave. AND they depend on subsistance-meaning they live off what the land can provide. During the home visit the mom was plucking and gutting 40 Ptarmagin birds that her husband and son had shot the day before. After they were skinned they were tied in pairs and hung outside to dry. They also dry fish fillets and caribou meat that way. In the summer they gather berries.

We returned to Bethel later in the afternoon. Here is an aerial shot of Bethel

Joanie visits Bethel Alaska

Joanie got to go to Alaska again to do some work for the Head Start program. I stayed in Bethel for five days. Bethel is on the Kuskokwim river about 300 miles west of Anchorage. It is the largest town in the region with about 6000 residents. The only way in or out is by boat (in the summer only) or by plane. Everything arrives that way- so things are pricey like $8.50 for a gallon of milk and $5.25 for a can of progresso soup.

I was part of an 8 person team and we stayed at this little motel- we used every room. The owners asked us to take short showers because the water was trucked in daily (at a cost of $4000 a month I was told)

Here is the road to our motel- they were having the first above-freezing temps of the spring- so the roads had turned slushy while we were there.

Here is other direction of the road near our motel- with a snowmobile about to cross the road on the way to the river.

This was the view from our motel looking upstream on the Kuskokwim. The wooden pyramid on the ice is the town's indicator of the ice breakup. Apparently the ice is about 5 feet thick but when this pyramid structure moves they know breakup is imminent and the whole town comes out to celebrate. (It did not move during our visit).

This is the view down-river from our motel

And this is the view from the back door of our motel---at 10:15pm on April 23rd! Note that the sun is still high in the sky~

Let there be light!

Another big change- and job done- in our ongoing saga to update this little cabin of ours...
While Joanie was in Alaska, Kurt cut a hole in the kitchen wall and installed a new 3x4 window. It is the one above the table in this picture. It faces east so we get nice morning sun and we can see who is coming in our driveway.

Here is another shot after all the trim was up...

Didn't he do a great job!

And to top that off- the exterior wall is finished. Kurt trimmed out the new window. Then he had to figure out some way to finish off the area that was partially covered with cedar shakes. This plan turned out great- he removed some of the shakes and added a white trim board to finish it off. Then he reused the left over shakes to complete shaking the wall around the door.

One more thing- we will need to repaint the green trim this summer.