I have created my own Arctic winter day of night, right here in Wasilla; the new Uiñiq - front cover

I think I must be homesick for Barrow and the Arctic Slope, for those long nights that extend all the way through the day with no sun ever rising; those all-day nights during which, if one wants, one can slip into the comfort of a warm cacoon of darkness, hidden and protected there from the glare of world.

I think I must be homesick for this because, to the degree that is possible, I have converted Wasilla into a place where the winter sun never rises. Actually, it does, for just a few hours, but I go to sleep before those hours begin and wake up after they have passed.

So I do not see the sun. It is as if it never rose at all.

Today, I arose at 3:38 PM, pretty much right at the moment of sundown. It was time to head out for my regular afternoon coffee break, even though I had begun no task that I needed to take a break from, and to head to the drive-through of Metro Cafe, which is exactly what I did. I took this picture along the way. Admittedly, this is not a very good picture - I missed the good picture by a few seconds. It happened while I was too far back to get it, although I could have if I had had a bigger lens on the camera.

In the good picture, the one that I missed, the school bus had stopped and all of a sudden a whole passel of kids shot out and in a line sprinted through this little patch of light.

Oh, did it look neat!

By the time I got close enough to take that excellent shot, it was gone. A straggler got off and headed through the light, so I took this picture, so that I could tell you all about the one I had missed.

A couple of hours later, Margie was about to fix dinner. For some strange reason, I felt very hungry and decided that this a night to go out for steak - something we do maybe once every couple of years or so.

So we did, and here were are, at Denali Family Restaurant, where we had never tried dinner before. Margie had a chicken fried steak. They had a special that covered their New York steaks - $3.00 off but still pretty darned expensive, so I ordered one. The baked potato was very good, the roll was delicious - tasted like it might have been fresh out of the oven - and the once frozen half-ear of corn on the cob tasted the way corn on the cobs that have been frozen tend to taste.

The New York steak - it was okay. Not great, but okay and being okay it still tasted good. One would not call it "superb," "exquisite," "mouth watering" or anything like that. It was okay. Good enough.

Afterward, our waitress asked us if we wanted dessert, but we declined and went home, where I scooped up some Rocky Road out of the carton and made myself an ice cream cone.

I am happy to report that my shingles are diminishing. They are still there, but to a much lighter and more bearable degree than just two days ago. Maybe by this time next week, they will be gone altogether. My need for copious amounts of sleep still remains, however. 

Now I need to see if I can a little work done, so that I can finish up today's tasks in time to go to bed before the sun rises.

And here is the cover of my latest Uiñiq:

This is whaling captain Billy Oyagak of Nuiqsut, standing in the middle with members of his crew on Cross Island, balleen from their whale behind them. Other successful captains and crews that fall season of 2010 were Herbert Ipalook, Thomas Napageak and Edward Nukapigak, who hosted me.

That season happened very fast. The crews left Nuiqsut almost at the very end of August and arrived at Cross Island to find the weather perfect and whales passing by in good numbers. I could not come until September 2. Originally, I thought they might possibly have landed a whale or two by then, but that there would still be at least two, maybe three strikes left for me to follow.

As it happened they had landed all four before I even got there. They were still cutting and putting up the whales, and there were polar bears wandering about. I had a good time, took lots of pictures, but still fell far short of what I had hoped to do.

So I want to go back, get in a boat at Nuiqsut and ride out to Cross Island with them. Stay for a month, come back at Naluktak and a few other times, too. I had hoped to go back this year, but irony of ironies, I could not because I was working on getting this Uiñiq done. Nuiqsut/Cross Island was the first story that I laid out and originally I laid it out huge - my first layout filled up almost the entire 120 page magazine. But then, as I worked other storeis in, I had to keep cutting it back and cutting it back and so in the end it wound up at 17 pages.

That still left it as the largest single spread in the magazine, but 17 pages wasn't enough to even begin to do Cross Island-Nuiqsut justice. I couldn't even leave my polar bear shots in, and I had a couple of magnificent polar bear shots and a fun story based on polar bears coming into and passing by camp. Elsewhere in the magazine, I had a double-truck polar bear shot I took on the sea ice off Barrow, and that took up all the space I could afford to give to polar bears in this Uiñiq.

So I hope to go back and somehow find the way to produce either a Uiñiq or a Uiñiq sized or bigger publication wholly on Cross Island and Nuiqsut. In fact, I would like to do that with every village on the Slope - and some off the Slope, too, like Fort Yukon and Arctic Village.

But how do I all this? The decades are flying by. I still think of myself as a young man, fit and strong enough to do anything, but in fact I am on the verge of becoming old - and this bout with shingles that I have just about but not quite won is kind of a telling sign. And this work is not easy to do. It is hard - both in the field and back home, when it becomes necessary to put in 20 hours, 24 hour, 30 hour and even 40 hour days to ever get it done.

I do not wish to listen to this sign the shingles have given me. Yet, if I don't, and just keep living in the manner that I have so far lived, I might just get taken down and not get anymore done at all.

And there was a great deal of material that I gathered from all over that I did not manage to get in at all. I don't why, after all this time, but when I set out to make a 116 page publication (which is what it was budgeted for but I pushed it up to 120 at my own expense) I think that gives me enough space to cover the whole world.

So I shoot this, and I shoot that; I go here, I go there, I interview this person and that person and all the time I am thinking I can work it all in and then when it comes down to it, I can only work a fraction of it in.

That's one of the reason I plan to create on online magazine. I could work it all into an online magazine. I remain at a bit of a loss on how to go about it. I have a colleague who is expert at online publishing and he says he will help me set it up. He's booked solid until January. Once he helps me set the format I want, then how do I fund it?

It ain't cheap to travel around Alaska, you know.

Still, we will see what happens then.

For sure, I need a new airplane. I don't merely want one, I need one. It seems impossible right now, but I know it's not.

Well, I've been rambling, writing more words than most visitors will ever read. Guess I'll stop now.

I've got some things I must do and I had better get at it if I want to get to bed before sunrise.

When on the ice, always look before you pee

I now take the reader back a bit over one month ago, either to the final minutes of May 10 or the opening minutes of May 11. I am unsure which day it was, I only know it was right about midnight, so it could have been either one. It is true that my camera stamps the time shot into the metadata of each image, but it is also true that I have only had this camera for about four years and so have not yet found the time to set the time.

Anyway, it was right about midnight, May 10 - 11, the final full night of my last trip up north. I was in the Saggan whaling camp of Edward Itta, Mayor of the North Slope Borough, and I realized that it was time to visit the latrine.

The people who know the ice will tell you that when on it, you must always be alert and prepared for polar bears. You, or someone nearby, must always have a good rifle or slug-loaded shotgun handy, just in case. I did not have a weapon with me, but this was not really a problem because everyone else in camp did and their eyes are sharp and they are always looking.

As noted, I had to go, so I left the spot at the blind where I had been with the others, watching for bowhead, and walked to the latrine, which was located in the cracks at the base of one of a multitude of ice upheavals. I didn't think much about anything, but just got straight to business.

About three-quarters away through my task, it suddenly occurred to me that had I done all this without even bothering to look about for polar bears. So I raised my head. What you see above is what I saw.

The thing at the bottom of the picture is the windscreen of a snowmachine.

I was in no real danger, because as noted, those whom I was with are sharp-eyed, well-armed, and always looking and even though their attention was focused primarily in the opposite direction, from which a whale might come, they, too, had spotted the bear and began to call out to me, just to be certain that I knew there was a photo opportunity in front of me.

The bear spent some time studying us from various vantage points, pooped, and then moved along to the northeast.

Within an hour or so of when I took these pictures, the wind had turned to the southwest. Ice was advancing, the lead was closing and we had to pull back.

The happenings of the next 30 hours or so are among the most frustrating happenings of this year for me ever in my career. In the hope that a whale would come to this camp, I had already delayed my departure by a couple of days over my plan. I needed to get home, prepare a few things and then head to Tok and Fairbanks to cover the honoring of Ahtna elder Dr. Katie John, but I had held off pushed my departure back to the last moment.

Twelve hours after I had left Barrow, the lead had reopened, conditions had become good, a bowhead came to the Saggan crew and they accepted its gift. For them, for the Iñupiat community of Barrow, I was happy and grateful.

For me, I was devastated. Absolutely. Devastated. Crushed, you could say. No one can know when a whale will come or what crew it will go to. Sometimes, several seasons can pass by without one coming to where you wait. Yet, this time, if I had stayed one more day, I would have been there when the Saggan whale came.

Then, of course, I would have missed Katie John receiving her honorary Doctor of Laws degree and that would have left me devastated as well. 

Sometimes, there is no winning, even when you do win - because I absolutely did win. To be there for all of Katie's honoring was a win... it was a special, once in a lifetime - a long and great lifetime - event, and I had to be there. I just had to.

But I still feel sick inside to have missed the Saggan whale.

What a beautiful, special, event that would have been and how honored I would have felt to have stood as a witness of it.

Originally, I had planned to post coverage of what I saw and experienced that trip to Barrow to the same degree that I posted Point Hope. Although I missed the final event, I none-the-less got several pictures that I believe many readers would have found amazing.

But I did not anticipate how long it would take me and it is just too late, now. Soon, I will be back in Barrow and at the rate I have been going I would still posting my last trip and people would think the snow never ever melts in Barrow, which it does, as you will soon see, right here, on this blog, if I but move along and stay in the present.

So, except for this bear and at least one people story I will yet work in, I am going to drop that coverage for now.

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Leaving Tikigag: the flight from Point Hope to Barrow

As always happens, the time soon came when I would have to leave Point Hope and it came earlier than I wanted or would have planned - were it not for the Era schedule. Era is the only air carrier that links Point Hope and Barrow and they only fly twice a week - Tuesday and Thursday; $410 for a one-way ticket. This will give you an idea how expensive it came be to travel about the Arctic Slope.

I wanted to stay at least through the high school graduation on Friday but I needed to be in Barrow no later than Monday, so I had to go Thursday.

At nighttime before I left, I saw Jesse Jr. walking home. 

He and his brothers would now get their room back.

Many decades separate us, but Jesse and his brothers all felt like friends now.

On May 5, immediately after taking the picture of the Tikigaq Harpooner Three-Peaters, I barely caught a ride to the airport in the truck of a man who runs a little on-demand-cab service. If someone needs a ride to the airport, or anywhere else reached by the villages very limited road system, they can call and he will come and pick them up.

So Krystle called for me.

The cab was full of his family.

I thought I wrote down the names of everybody, including the dog, but I can't find them. Still, if you find yourself in Point Hope and you need a cab to the airport or someplace else, just ask anyone and they will direct you to the driver and then he and his family and his dog will come and pick you up and give you a ride and then when you ask how much he will answer, "whatever you want to pay."

Be as generous as is practical for you. His fares are not like those of a city cab driver, but come only sporadically - mostly when an airplane lands.

The cab driver's daughter, the little dog and the airplane. 

Once airborne, we passed over the Lisbourne, the last bumps of the Brooks Range, which themselves are the final northward extension of the Rocky Mountains, which come to an end just before they reach Point Hope and fall into the sea. 

Pans of ice floating in new ice forming below.

We landed for a brief stop in Point Lay, to drop off one passenger, plus this four-wheeler and to pick up a couple more passengers.

And here we are, landing in Barrow.

Some new readers who have come over as a result of the piece in the Lens blog of the New York Times may be feeling a little confused right now to find me flying in someone else's airplane instead of my own.

What the Times said about me being a bush pilot is true, all right, but for some reason they chose not to mention the part about how I crashed my airplane in Mentasta and, for now, anyway, must fly in other people's airplanes.

Originally, I had intended to blog my time this trip in Barrow pretty much the same as I did Point Hope and I have every bit as much material to work with. However, I had also intended to have the whole package complete at least three weeks ago and here I am, still muddling along.

Realistically, I do not have time to do a decent edit of the Barrow pictures right now, although in time I will, for other purposes than this blog. I think what I will do is, on Monday, after returning this blog to Wasilla over the weekend, I will just put up anywhere from one to half-a-dozen images from the Barrow portion and then get back to blogging the present, but only briefly most days, as I have tons I must do this summer, so, even though in my mind I have no higher priority than developing what this blog has begun, for now, I must put the huge bulk of my time elsewhere.

Thanks for traveling with me!

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The Tikigaq Harpooner boys "Three-Peaters" - basketball is big in Point Hope

No time to write much, so I will keep it brief. Basketball is big in Point Hope. Really big. And this year, the Tikigaq Harpooner boys won the Alaska State 2A Championship for the third year in a row. This is senior Zach Lane, one of the "Three-peaters." 

Actually, this is graduate Zach Lane. High school is behind him now.

I wanted to get a picture of all the Harpooner three-peater boys, but a few were out of the village. I had imagined photographing them with a harpoon and basketballs out on the ice, wearing white, to make it clear that the name "Harpooners" means more to them than does the average high school team name, but I was not able to pull it off.

I barely got this photo. Leonard called to tell me the boys were on their way to the high school just as I had finished packing so I could get on the plane to Barrow. So I had to hurry. Afterward, I almost missed my flight.

Left to right: Three-peaters Robert Omnik, Jacob Lane, Coach Leonard Barger, George Vincent, Solomon Frankson and Michael Tuzroyluk, Jr.

Coach Leonard Barger, on the ice, with his rifle and beluga hook. This was Leonard's first year coaching varsity, but he had been the middle school coach for a few years, where he had worked with all but the senior boys.

"It's been fun," he said. "It was a good year."

Both Rex Rock Sr. and wife Ramona have been on this blog recently. Before he was taken by surprise, nominated and elected to serve as the President of the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, Rex had been coaching the boys and he was he who had led them to their first two state championships.

He still showed up for every game and before hand would meet with the team and then would see them through the game.

Ramona is coach of the Harpoonerettes, who had the best season in the lead but did not win the tournament. They have next year to look forward to.

This is just a typical night at the school gym.

By now, readers know two-old Jonathan Frankson, son of Jesse and Krystle. He is a strong kid and can already stuff the ball.

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Tikigaq: back out on the ice with two WEIO Olympic champions, I see my final whale for this Point Hope visit, but no polar bear

On my final full day in Point Hope this trip, I found Krystle tying braids into the hair of David Thomas. David has roots here, lives in Palmer, but comes back as often as he can to reconnect with his traditional way of life.

David is also a star at the World Eskimo-Indian Olympics, held each summer in Fairbanks. Last year, he won first place in the knuckle hop, the toe-kick, the one hand reach, the Alaska high kick, the blanket toss and also received the sportsmanship award.

Many readers probably do not know what those events are. It has been a long time since I have covered WEIO. In her comments to this blog, Annette Donaldson has been urging me to come up for WEIO and has pointed out that this summer will be the 50th anniversary of the games and so will be extra special.

If I can go to WEIO next month, I will show you those events. I have much going on this summer and a huge amount of work that I must complete and so cannot say for certain that I will be able to attend, but if it is feasible, then I will.

I will look forward to it with both excitement and dread.

Excitement to witness the games, the dances, the traditional clothing fashion displays, all the events and the protocol of strong sportsmanship, but dread at the thought of having to join in the media scrum and being forced to jostle about with all the other photographers and videographers who will be covering the event.

Even back in the 80's, when I used to attend WEIO regularly, before there was a camera in every phone, it could be a real battle and I remember some hard and sharp elbows. So I fear it will really be a media scrum this year.

Even if it is, a photographer at WEIO should be polite, calm and good tempered at all times - just like the athletes. Being polite and a good sport and even giving assistance and encouragement to those you compete against is part of WEIO tradition and protocol.

Later that afternoon, I followed Jesse Frankson Sr. and David back out to the lead. Jesse is also a WEIO star and holds the world record in the one-foot high kick (Canadian style) - 9'10". the one-hand reach - 8'10" and the kneel jump - 63 1/4 inches.

So here I was, on the ice, with two of Alaska's most famous Native Olympic stars - right here on the ice of Tikigaq - where many of the games were born.

Jesse and David had come out earlier in the day and had happened upon a huge polar bear. David had watched in amazement as Jesse and the bear had spent some time studying each other while being separated only by about 15 feet.

We hoped that we might find that bear this trip as well.

The lead had still been open when Jesse and David had been out earlier, and so they also had hoped they might catch a beluga.

When we got there, the lead was closing fast. This bowhead swam through a mix of newly freezing slush ice and ice that was traveling in on the southwest wind.

Soon, the lead was completely closed. Yes, this is the very same stretch of sea pictured in past posts with belugas and bowheads swimming through it, with an umiak traveling through wide-open seas.

That is how fast it can change.

And when it gets like this, the hunt shuts down and the hunters must wait for the water to open again.

We meandered a bit on the return to the village, hoping to find the big bear. We did not find it, but we did find this raven perched atop a peak of pressure-ridge ice.

Jesse and Krystle, preparing meal-sized portions of their share of this spring's maktak for freezing.

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