Barrow, Alaska Trip

[NightTrain]

Just got back from Barrow last night... didn't get any free time to speak of to wander around and explore, but I did take a few shots here and there. That's one of the downsides to operating like we do - we hit town and work hard & fast until we're exhausted, sleep for a couple of hours and do it again until we wrap up and haul ass out of there. That doesn't leave much time to be a shutterbug and load up on pics or go see cool areas.

First, a pic of where I am in relation to where Barrow is - I'm about 50 miles North of Anchorage.

It's 723 miles as the crow flies from Anchorage to Barrow.

[NightTrain]

A pic of the sunrise somewhere halfway to Barrow... a couple of lonely mountains poking up through the clouds into a pink sunrise. It was beautiful to watch as I sipped my coffee.

[NightTrain]

The ice pack over the Arctic Ocean as we swung around over the water on approach to Barrow.

When the wind and tides work together, the ice breaks and hundreds of square miles of ice float away from land... there's been many cases of people out on the ice pack on their snowmachines or dogsled and suddenly find themselves on an ice island with no way to get back. That's kind of a big deal, especially when there's bad weather preventing an air rescue via airplanes or helicopters.

[NightTrain]

And here is the Northernmost point in the United States. Possibly North America, too - I don't know if Canada has a more Northern location or not.

I think the stop sign is quite fitting.

You can't really see it in the distance in this shot, but out on the water it's a forest of broken ice jumbled together 30 feet high as far as you can see, making what looked like an impassible barrier. I studied it and didn't see any possible route to take a snowmachine through, but I'm sure there are areas to sneak through.

[Kathianne]

It looks very, very cold! Brrrrr!

[NightTrain]

It looks very, very cold! Brrrrr!

Yeah, it was. The ambient 30 below isn't that bad, but it's the wind that knifes right through you that really sucks!

I'd never live up there... it would suck! I have to have trees and mountains around me to be happy.

[NightTrain]

Typical Barrow scenery.

Note all of the Aerial power & telephone lines. Everything is aerial up in this region because it's pretty much sea level, and because of the permafrost. These lines really take a beating from the storms that roll through and power outages are frequent.

All of the internet and communications here is via Satellite. There's a major fiber project scheduled to arrive in Barrow this Summer and when that happens they'll have lightning fast comm with fiber to all the residential - but until then the internet is brutally slow. It took about 2 - 3 minutes just to load the Fox News website in my hotel room, and when you're trying to talk on your cell phone, there's a several-second delay which makes having a conversation extremely difficult. The best way is to treat it like a 2-way radio : say what you need to say, then wait 7 or 8 seconds for the response.

It was about 15 below zero in this shot.

[NightTrain]

Almost all of the structures this far North are built up on pilings. I spotted a couple of buildings on the ground, but almost every one of them were abandoned after a couple of years when the floors turned into some crazy madhouse angling up, down and sideways.

This is because of the permafrost - the ground stays frozen year round. If you don't build up on pilings like this, the heat from the building melts the ground and the structure begins settling in weird ways. So the solution is to keep heat away from the permafrost and keep it frozen.