FLYING HIGH

EVERY DAY IS A WINDING ROAD

- SHERYL CROW

I hitched a ride with a vending machine repair man
He said he's been down this road more than twice
He was high on intellectualism
I've never been there but the brochure looks nice

Jump in, let's go
Lay back, enjoy the show
Everybody gets high, everybody gets low
These are the days when anything goes

Everyday is a winding road
I get a little bit closer
Everyday is a faded sign
I get a little bit closer to feeling fine

June 19:  Happy Father’s Day to all you dads out there!  We celebrated by sleeping late, making pancakes in the RV, going to dump our tanks, get fresh water, fill up the propane tank and to top it off, do laundry.  If we can, we’ll get back to the golf club in time to watch the end of the U.S. Open on TV.

FLYING INTO ST. PAUL, PRIBILOF ISLANDS, ALASKA

PENAIR TURBOPROP

GALE AT LIQUOR STORE

LIQUOR STORE VESTIBULE

June 20-24:  Today we flew to St. Paul Island of the Pribilof Islands, located in the middle of the Bering Sea.  Our 3.5 hour flight was on PenAir, on which you may have not had the pleasure.  There was no security check.  We boarded the 30-seat twin turbo-prop aircraft, tightened our seatbelts, stuffed in the provided earplugs and hoped like hell we would be able to land at our intended destination, which is often fogged in.  En route, we made a refueling stop at Dillingham, a surprisingly large and isolated community, set in what appeared to be a gigantic bog, with a few hills that anywhere else would be called mountains, near the west coast of mainland Alaska.  The seemingly ten-year-old flight attendant, who did everything except fly the plane, was reading The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Homes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  This hefty tome was probably the reason that upon arrival, I was told my checked bag had been “bumped” to lighten the plane’s load.  (It arrived the following day, allowing me to return all the borrowed warm waterproof clothing necessary for a visit to St. Paul.)  We were met at the airport “terminal” (which also served as the hotel) by our guides for the four days we were going to be on the island.  We made a quick stop at the liquor store, pictured above with the enchanting entranceway.  Lodging was dormitory style in pre-fab buildings, with the toilet/shower rooms down the hall from our room.  Makes for a bunch of long walks in the middle of the night for an old guy such as myself.  No complaints, though - the place was clean and neat and probably had the softest towels we had encountered anywhere. Our meals were at the Trident Fishing Company galley, which serves all of the fishermen and dock workers who service the large halibut and snow crab fishing industry based on the island. The food was remarkably good, highlighted by very fresh halibut on several occasions.

ST. PAUL ISLAND COASTLINE  ADD MORE ALCID PIX


This unique archipelago, including St. George Island, is completely volcanic in nature, with no trees, windswept grassy slopes, black sand beaches and and steep cliffs along the sea coast.  Parts of it look like a perfect place to put a golf course, with rumpled grass-covered dunes, sandy blowouts that look like bunkers and high teeing grounds.  It is cold, blustery and rains A LOT.  So what in anyone’s name are we doing here?  This, my friends, is the “Galapagos of the North”, with the world’s largest population of northern fur seals (400,000), 200 MILLION breeding seabirds and site of dozens of rare bird sightings for North America due to its proximity to Asia. Previous to the Russians coming here in the mid-1700s, no humans lived on these islands due to their remote location, harsh climate and lack of an adequate supply of fresh water.  But then the Russians discovered all those fur seals and what fine coats and hats their hides made.  So, in accordance with grand European tradition, they enslaved native Aleut people from other islands and forced them to harvest and process the seal hides.  (On other Aleutian Islands, the Russians just killed all the Aleuts so they could empty the island and introduce the blue morph arctic foxes that they preferred for additional furry clothing items - but that’s another story).  When the Americans took over in 1867, they didn’t do much better on human rights issues.

LEAST AUKLETS

The seal trade ended about 35 years ago and most of these islands became part of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge.  Now the seals are happy, or as happy as an animal that swims around in icy water all year can be, the seabirds get to breed without their eggs being taken and visiting tourists can look at them to their heart’s delight.  Except when it’s pouring rain, blown sideways by the wind and freezing cold.  Which is most of the time.  Ironically, the village on St. Paul is now the largest concentration of Aleut people in the world, with a population of about 400.  

The island is basically owned by the TDX Corporation, which is the Aleut company running all operations here.  Gale and I made arrangements with TDX to house and feed us and guide us around the island while we looked for birds, seals, foxes and whatever else turned up.  As it is, there are five species of alcids that nest here in great numbers.  Least, crested and parakeet auklets, plus horned and tufted puffins are easy and occasionally, a few other alcidae are found.  The breeding land birds are snow bunting, rock sandpiper, Pacific wren (subspecies) and giant-sized gray-crowned rosy-finches.  There are four common species of gulls - glaucous, glaucous-winged, black-legged kittiwake and red-legged kittiwake, the last of which is almost endemic to the Pribilofs.  Everything else is a great find.

PARAKEET AUKLETS

CRESTED AUKLETS

We saw all of these species on our first day, including Gale getting her 600th North American species (rock sandpiper) as soon almost as we got off the plane.  The HUGE bonus was seeing a large swift fly over and getting good enough looks and photos to identify it as a common swift, a vagrant from Eurasia!  There had been only four previous records of this bird for North America, seen by only a handful of people, so that gives you an idea of how rare this species is.  So vagrancy is a good thing here and makes everyone smile.

TUFTED PUFFIN

Each day we covered almost all the same places, hoping to find more vagrants, hoping the rain/wind would stop/slow down, hoping for better photos.  Another rare bird (for here) showed up - an osprey, but since the wind was blowing from the west, this one probably spoke Russian.  Even better was a slaty-backed gull, another Eurasian wanderer.  Every set of cliffs we visited held scores of breeding seabirds.  The only trick was getting an angle from the top of the cliff to look sideways at the birds perched on the jutting bare rocks.  Sometimes I scampered (more like slid on my ass) down a ledge to get a better view.  Far offshore, when the fog lifted, we could catch glimpses of pods of orcas or killer whales, Their tall dorsal fins protruding from the water like periscopes, cruising these cold waters in search of salmon or soon, unwary seal pups on their first journey at sea.  We watched one of the fur seal colonies where the 600 pound bulls roar and wait for the 100 pound females to arrive, ready to deliver their pups and then get re-impregnated.  The beachmaster bulls are a fearsome lot, fighting amongst each other for position on the rocks, slashing with long sharp canines that cause terrible wounds.  The most frightening thing was seeing the males fight over a female where a male would violently grab a female and fling her around, sometimes 5-6 feet in the air before she bounced on the rocks.  We were told that two males fighting over a female have been known to literally rip her apart.  Compared to that, competition for the affections of “Murre-let” in a Texas bar are pretty tame.  Arctic fox, much smaller than red fox, commonly roam the island, looking for injured birds, fish or eggs they can grab.  They seem to bounce, more than run, as they lithely move among the rocks and beaches looking for food.  I found a family of tiny Pacific wrens, with two just-fledged chocolate-colored chicks begging for food from an insect-bearing parent.  The final couple of days were mostly a rerun of the first, but we did manage to find two more rare species - common snipe and wood sandpiper, both vagrants from Asia, brought here by the strong west winds that had been prevailing for several days, the “Kamchatka Express”, as I called it.

The weather was good enough for us to depart on schedule Friday afternoon.  Unfortunately, there was one passenger who we were supposed to drop off on a quick stop at the neighboring island of St. George, but the fog was so thick we couldn’t land and the poor guy had to continue on to Anchorage with us. Since there wasn’t another flight to St. George for days, who knows what he did.  We did arrive safely in Anchorage, picked up Albie (remember Albie?) and repaired to our home away from home, Cabela’s parking lot.

June 25-26: I came down with a nasty cold, so we have relaxed in Anchorage and attended to doing all the things that need to be done before heading up north to Prudhoe Bay.  Two major problems have surfaced: our water tank seems to be leaking and I have filled up the hard drive on my computer with photos.  The latter requires me to understand how to get my external hard drive to work, a task far beyond my technical capacity so far.  So bear with me - the photos for this post are somewhat limited, since I can't load most of the new stuff.  I'll make it up next time!  PS: I just discovered I could easily add captions to the photos - I'll have to go back and redo all prior posts.