North to Alaska’s midnight sun

Press, 1 August 1989, Page 41

North to Alaska’s midnight sun

Story and pictures by

LES BLOXHAM,

travel editor

Les Bloxham visited Alaska as a guest of Princess Tours and Alaska Airlines. In the northern summer the cruise line offers a range of tours in Alaska as optional extras to its cruises along the coast from Seattle to Anchorage.

Alaska surprised me. I arrived there with a bag crammed with polar gear but ended up wearing a T-shirt and shorts in Fairbanks, and only jeans and a light sweater inside the Arctic Circle. Certainly it was the middle of June, but no-one in our party of travel writers really expected Alaska to be quite so warm. In fact, finding an Eskimo dressed in furs was about as hard as spotting a bear, moose, or igloo. So we took a plane north to Kotzebue, a small village on the Baldwin Peninsula 40 kilometres within the Arctic Circle.

Close to 80 per cent of the town’s 400 residents are Inupiaq Eskimo who continue to pursue traditional subsistence lifestyles — hunting and fishing sufficient food in the short summer to carry them through the long dark months of winter.

We found some in seal-skin furs, too — but only while entertaining us during a cultural show and dance. They were pretty warm by the time it was over and were clearly relieved to get back into cooler, more sensible attire. The town has an excellent museum, comfortable hotel, school, a couple of stores, several churches, a satellite communications dish, and an airport that provides a twice daily link with civilisation two hours flying time to the south. It also has obvious economic problems, for times have been tough in Kotzebue in recent years.

Now, like thousands of other places round the world, Kotzebue is looking to tourism to save it from its woes — not an easy task when one is limited to a season of three months of acceptable warmth and daylight. Villagers who once relied solely on the trading of furs and fish, now sell homemade souvenirs and entertain visitors by performing traditional blanket-tossing displays and opening up their sod igloos for all to see.

Incidentally, if you go to Alaska hoping to find storybook dome-like igloos made of ice and snow, you’ll be disapointed: they can only be found “next door” in the frozen wastes of northern Canada. At the time of our visit in June, the sun rode round the horizon without setting, for Kotzbebue is a part of Alaska’s land of the midnight sun. The locals understandably welcome , the sun after months of darkness and, apparently, are reluctant to shut it out. The curtains in my room in the Nullagvik Hotel, for instance, failed to cover the window completely, and I found it rather confusing to be awakened at 2 a.m. by a shaft of sunlight hitting the pillow.

To be honest, there’s not a great deal to see and do at Kotzebue and all that is on offer can be covered in a few hours. But an overnight stay is essential if you want to check that the sun really doesn’t set during those few short weeks of summer.

On the other hand there’s no place like Nome — 30 minutes by air on the south coast of the Seward Peninsula, and

barely 200 kilometres from the eastern tip of Siberia. Nome, population 4300, is rich not only in history but also gold, minerals, and oil. In many ways it has been nurtured in much the same spirit as the old mining towns of our own West Coast. The discovery of gold near Nome in 1899 sparked a gold rush of epic proportions and within a year, 20,000 people, had trekked there to make their fortunes. Some indeed did, and by 1911, gold worth SUS6O million had been recovered.

Gold still remains the area’s major industry, much of its being won back from the sea by giant dredges that work close to the shore during the golden months of summer.

Nome holds a wide appeal for tourists, particularly in the spring when the annual Iditarod long-distance sled-dog race reaches its finale. The marathon begins in Anchorage, 1700 kilometres to the south east, and usually takes a gruelling two weeks to complete. The Iditarod Trail had its beginnings as a supply and mail route to and from the isolated .gold mining camps in the north. It became famous in 1924 when a diptheria epidemic hit Nome and lifesaving serum had to be rushed up the trail by a relay of dog teams.

Today, the Iditarod event commemorates that heroic feat and attracts mushers and dogs from around the world.

Nome has a good range of hotels and restaurants. Tourists will find enough to keep them busy for at least a couple of days — activities such as “spying” on the Siberian coast (from a safe distance on a sight-seeing flight) or joining a musher and his dogs for a sled-ride across the tundra.

During our time in the north the only remnant visible of winter was the last of the pack-ice breaking up in the sea off Kotzebue. We had to travel 1200 kilometres south to see Alaska’s really spectacular year-round wonderland of ice — its glaciers. This can best be done by travelling by train from Anchorage to Whittier, at the head of Prince William Sound, from where one can take a “26 glaciers in one day” cruise through the fiords. I thoroughly recommend this excursion, even though the day is long. Incidentally, there were no noticeable signs of the Exxon Valdez oil spill at this end of the sound, which is about 120 kilometres from the reef that gutted the tanker five months ago. (Next week: By dome car from Anchorage to Fairbanks)