Umiak Race

One of the highlights of Saturday's 4th of July activities was the umiak race. The umiak is the traditional open boat made of walrus or seal skin stretched over a wooden frame. Each boat is entered by one of the whaling crews. The prize for the winning crew is a drum of gasoline. As you might guess, the race is sponsored by the local gas station Eskimo, Inc.

Four boats participated in the race across and back on the freshwater lagoon. This is one of the fresh water sources for the village as it is separated from the salt water by a small earthen dam. The large pipes seen in the first photo running along the shore hold all of the utilities as you can't bury them due to frost heaves. So all of the utilities are run above ground. The building with the red roof is the elementary school. The crew with the matching blue jackets won the race. They seemed pretty organized compared with some of the other participants.

Some other activities included children and adult games. On Friday afternoon, I stopped by to check out the food booths with diverse offerings reflecting the nature of the community. Everything from spam musubi (spam w/sushi rice wrapped in seaweed) to a taco truck to reindeer stew. The popular offering seemed to be teriyaki Copper River red salmon served Hawaiian plate style. i.e. with a scoop of white rice and a scoop of macaroni salad. I opted for a bowl of Filipino spaghetti. The sauce was made with banana ketchup and hot dogs. Below is a pano taken while waiting for the umiak race to start.

I spent most of Saturday out on the BEO (Barrow Environmental Observatory) to fix a few more radios. Things are starting to turn green but that also means that there is a lot of standing water. Fortunately, it was still only 38°F so there weren't too many mosquitos but when the wind dies down or you are near a nice warm building like the BEO Control Sled, you start to see more than a few of the pesky insects.

It turned out that one of the reasons for the poor performance they've been experiencing was the wrong radio being installed. I had asked the tech to install a radio last year and somehow he got hold of a different radio. I had purchased only 5 GHz radios but somewhere they found some 2.4 GHz radios. This is what was installed on the Control Shed which means that it was connecting into the building WiFi and not the large panel antennae on the roof. I'm amazed that it even worked at all...

Bridget had asked me to take some pictures flowers on the tundra. At this point there weren't very many either in number or variety.  I don't know what they are.