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~