I had been setting new records for personal farthest-north for the better part of an hour when I looked out the window of the small jet carrying me to Barrow, Alaska. The landscape below looked exactly like the topographic maps of the region - plenty of frozen oval lakes, and ruthlessly flat. To the right I could see Admiralty Bay and Dease Inlet, to the left I could make out Point Barrow.
As the plane banked over the Arctic Ocean on the approach to the Barrow landing strip, I gave some consideration to the substantial risk I was taking. Not the risk that the plane would fall into the Arctic Ocean and that I would die in ice water - for there was plenty of shore-fast ice and icebergs floating in open water farther out - but the risk of bad weather in a day and a half. Instead of heading to Europe or Africa, I had gone to Barrow for the transit of Venus across the face of the sun in 2004. While Barrow promised to be just as exotic as any overseas destination, it also threatened to be considerably cloudier than most anywhere else on the planet during the month of June. Today, however, Barrow had the clearest of skies.
Stepping off the plane showed the weather to be not only sunny, but downright hot - nearly 40 degrees. My three compatriots and I, shortly to be dubbed the Group of Four, were arriving in Barrow 24 hours ahead of the rest of the astronomers in order to organize an observing site, get an on-the-ground look at the weather prospects, and charter a plane for what we thought would be the only way to get a look at the transit. Surely, in a village that gets on average 29 cloudy days in the month of June, the present weather was just tempting us. Baggage was gathered while Scott and Richard walked to the rental car agency. Dave and I guarded what was surely the largest concentration of astronomical optics for a thousands of miles radius and discussed what kind of plane we would end up with to take us above the clouds the next night for our brief opportunity of transit viewing.
The largest concentration of astronomical optics for thousands of miles. TOWTOVE Group of Four luggage piled up at the airport in Barrow.
Scott and Richard returned with grim news. Not only was the car not ready, but they indicated that the rental contract included an unacceptably restrictive provision, causing them to squash the deal. Dave believed them. Having a little more experience with Alaskan humor, I waited for the punch line. It turned out the contract included the following text:
The agency delivered the car to the airport and we stuffed our luggage into the vehicle. As we got in, Rich called out, "You guys don't have any whales in your pockets, right?"
It was remarkably easy to find our hotel, and after check-in and a twenty-minute break, we made our plans. First things first: it was time to eat! Over burgers at Ken's, we discussed our strategy. We would first drive around aimlessly for an hour, and then we would visit the FAA Flight Service Station for charter flight advice. Following that, we would visit the National Weather Service office and pick up a forecast. Then we would think about dinner, and scout some observing sites in earnest.
Barrow's worst traffic jam.
The streets of Barrow are not crowded. The worst jam we got into involved two cars stopping at an intersection at the same time and insisting the other one go through first. The roads, all dirt, were well maintained and we were able to reach speeds of up to 35 miles per hour in places. Point Barrow, the farthest-north bit of land in the United States, would not be an option for viewing the transit due to the danger posed by the astronomer-eating polar bears known to frequent the region. But we drove as far north as we could in a passenger sedan, keeping on the lookout for likely spots. I ruminated on the unusual circumstances that had brought us here: The transit would occur roughly between 9:00 PM and 3:00 AM, demanding that we take advantage of the midnight sun. At this time of year, that meant we needed a four degree horizon. It did not look like that would be hard to come by in the flat arctic tundra around Barrow, but I had a clinometer with me to aid in the search anyway.
"What the hell is that? Palm trees?" The voice from my compatriot woke me from my contemplation about observing horizons, and I looked out the window to the right at palm trees. Surely there wasn't a even a tree for a couple hundred miles, let alone a palm tree. I looked again, and it turned out to be mock palms made of driftwood trunks and baleen for palm fronds. Clever. Clearly it was also beyond the merely bizarre, but definitely clever.
Soon we were at the end of the navigable road. The Chukchi Sea was to our left, and the Beaufort Sea to our right, separated by a few hundred feet of land. We walked a few hundred yards up the spit toward Point Barrow, decided it looked pretty much like everything else we had seen in this direction, and resolved to turn the car around. "Anyone have any whale meat?"
On the way back to town, we had a discussion about the nature of all the satellite dishes and domed enclosures off the road to the east that we were observing. Deciding to check it out, we turned down the road leading to them, but the argument was settled by the street sign - "DEW Line Road," it read, and in less than a mile we encountered a warning that we should proceed no further. Scott executed a masterful nineteen-point turnaround on the narrow dirt road.
Zipping back to Barrow at a knuckle-whitening speed of nearly 30 miles per hour, we passed a curious structure set into the sand on the beach. It was a pair of telephone poles sunk into the ground, with a nailed-together ladder leading up to a platform at the top of the poles. It was obviously a lookout of some sort, but what was it used for? "You want to climb that, Jeff?" asked Scott, obviously in jest. I told him I would think about it.
FAA Flight Service Station, Barrow Alaska.
Our FAA visit was a good opportunity to get some local knowledge about weather and routes, and also to see what sort of gear the Federal Government provides to locations flung as far from Washington as Barrow. But the real payoff came with the visit to the National Weather Service office. Not only did we get a forecast, we also got some satellite images of coastal fog, a bunch of balloon data from the night before, and an invitation to attend the next balloon launch in an hour or two. The seven-foot latex balloon was said to expand to some forty feet at high altitudes, and to stretch so thin you could see through it.
Balloon launch at National Weather Service, Barrow Alaska.
Our final business item for the day was visiting Cape Smythe Air to check into a charter flight for transit time, and stopping by the radio station at the request of the station manager who seemed to think our trip newsworthy. The radio station was closed, however, and we had to return after the transit. Dinner was at Arctic Pizza, a nice shop overlooking the Chukchi Sea.
After dinner, we did additional reconnoitering by driving around some more. Our site search began in earnest at this time. I liberated my compass and clinometer from my luggage, and we visited several locations that had looked promising on our earlier drive. Three locations seemed to be favored by the group. The first was outside the Barrow utilities building just south of the runway. One of the attractive things about this site was that setting up in the lee of this large building got us out of the continuous arctic wind. The clinometer revealed too-high horizons in front of the building, but perfect 0.5 degree horizons in the side yard.
A beachfront location was just as good, except it overlooked the sea ice and was more scenic, and was exposed to the wind and hence less comfortable. The horizon, naturally, was excellent.
The third location had us driving out Cakeeater Road, which morphs into the aptly-named Gasline Road. This route took us inland, and looked like a good escape route if we needed to escape coastal fog that was thick on shore and thin over land. It was much farther from home base, however, and we hoped that we wouldn't have to use it. The most likely observing site was a turnoff with an interpretive sign.
This ended a long day, and we returned to our hotel and crashed.
Cakeeater Road/Gasline Road interpretive pull-out.
The following morning dawned bright and sunny - the weather no doubt teasing us. Over the night I had gotten up twice to check the weather. Both times there was thin coastal fog filtering, but not obscuring, the sun, and I felt fairly confident that whatever weather we had at 9:00 PM this night - when the transit began - would hold through the event. So I claimed to myself, anyway - it made me feel better to believe that anything about the weather up here was predictable.
Breakfast at Ken's was followed by a trip to the Alaska Airlines terminal to pick up the other formal member of TOWTOVE. Chris was to fly in now, twelve hours or so prior to the transit, and would fly out the day after the event.
During the afternoon, I elected to forego visits to the NOAA office and other chores, and stay in my hotel room making solar filters. My 80mm refractor needed one, as did my binoculars, and I had brought solar filter raw materials, rather than completed filters, to Barrow in the expectation that the materials were more durable than the finished products. I set up shop on a table in my hotel room, and one by one the TOWTOVE members came by and asked me to make a filter for their instruments. As it happened, this was one of my major contributions to the expedition - everyone in the group except Chris used a filter that I made for viewing the transit. I even retrofitted Dave's binocular filters with Baader filter material, replacing the inferior mylar that he previously had.
Dave, tricked out with new Baader Astro-Solar binocular filters.
On completion of the filter construction project, Dave and I took all the instruments down to the hotel parking lot and started testing them. The rest of the group drove up around that time, announcing that the NOAA forecaster was optimistic about our weather chances. That was good, because at the moment we were experiencing come-and-go visibility, with the sun occasionally obscured by passing fog banks. The group decided against hiring an air charter at this point, and to trust to the ground-based weather. The die had been cast.
Chris pulled out a hand-held hydrogen-alpha telescope that he had made special for the chartered airplane contingency at this point. It was a wonderful conversion of a Coronado solar filter to a straight-through configuration, strapped onto the remains of a small 80mm refractor. The instrument revealed no prominences that might play a part in the transit, however.
After stowing the instrumentation and the newly made filters, TOWTOVE piled into the car and drove north on the coastal road, which we had discovered was referred to as "the highway" by locals. We stopped at the lookout tower, which I had decided to climb. The rest of the group pressured me into not feeling any pressure to climb the contraption, which clearly was not up to OSHA standards, and we walked over to the base of the ladder. Chris and I stood at the base discussing the stability of the platform, when I noticed a young woman walking down the highway. She was walking toward town, but she was looking straight at us. I had the idea that I would climb the ladder, do my thing, and get down, attracting as little attention as possible. For all I knew, the platform was some ceremonial thing, or perhaps it was a government or utility facility that I wasn't supposed to be on. Stealth, it seemed, was the wisest option. But before even making ourselves conspicuous, eyes were on us.
The young woman crossed the street toward us, and I told Chris that I thought we were about to have an interaction with the locals. He looked over his shoulder and said, "yeah, your probably right." At about that moment, the young woman broke her silence.
"Hey, are you guys tourists?"
We did, indeed, have to admit that yes, we were, in every possible sense of the word, tourists. I was a little annoyed that she spotted us so easily, though.
She walked up to me, and asked if I wanted to climb the ladder to the platform. Chris helpfully said "no way" at this point and disappeared, but I said I was planning to do it and asked what the platform was for.
"It's to look for polar bears."
With that, Maggie shot up the ladder like she'd been doing it all her life. I stayed on the ground a second, gave final instructions concerning my burial to Richard in case I fell off, and handed him a bag to hang on to while I was topside.
The ladder was not what I would describe as rock-steady. In fact, it wriggled around quite a bit on the way up. When I got to the top, each gust of wind would move the platform about a foot or so, and the rebound would set up a more or less rhythmic shaking that was somewhat unnerving.
"Are you afraid of heights?"
I muttered something about this reminded me of climbing some ladders in the navy, and I'm never too happy with heights, blah blah blah.
Jeff and Maggie on the polar-bear lookout tower north of town.
The view from the top was wonderful. When standing on a level surface, given my height, the distance to the horizon is 3.2 miles. On the platform, that swelled to at least eight miles. Barrow and Browerville were stretched out before me, but beyond I could see miles of tundra, the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, the pack ice, and a lot of ice out at sea. I started shooting pictures while having a conversation with my serendipitously-acquired tour guide.
Polar bears, it turns out, are spotted from this platform for a variety of reasons. One reason is apparently so that people walking from their houses north of Browerville into town will know about them before encountering them suddenly and unexpectedly. There seemed to be an indication that those folks in town whose job was to protect the villagers from polar bear depredations used the platform as well. I received a lesson in polar bear spotting. They would show up as dark spots against the ice, and although it was a little early in the season yet, a few early travelers might be inshore now: we should be a little careful about polar bears.
Maggie descended, leaving me at the top alone for a few minutes more. I shot some more pictures, and then had to figure out how to change my camera's CF card while standing on a two foot wide platform, blowing visibly in the wind, with no guard rail to lean against, and only a board nailed overhead to grab with one hand. Somehow I got the job done, finished out my panorama, and came down the ladder. Maggie had, in the meantime, apparently discovered that we were astronomers, and was exchanging local information with the rest of the group.
TOWTOVE Group of Four leader Richard, with Scott (in red), taken from the polar bear lookout tower.
After piling back into the car, my TOWTOVE compatriots made several jokes about how scared I must have been on the narrow platform. But I didn't notice any of them up there with me, thus making me indisputibly either the most courageous, or the stupidest, of the TOWTOVE members. But this debate was cut short by encountering a massive group of parked cars with many people running to and fro. We pulled over and got out of the car to see what was going on.
It was, as it turned out, a whale that was going on. The village had turned out for a mikigaq picnic. Mikigaq is whale meat taken from the head, neck, and tongue, perhaps with some maktak (whale blubber with skin attached) thrown in, and allowed to ferment for two weeks in the whale's own blood. The mayor of the borough, George Ahmaogak, had hunted the whale a couple weeks previously, and the whale was out on the edge of the sea ice. It was flenshed there, and the meat, baleen, bones, and other desirable whale parts were taken over the ice to shore.
Mikigaq picnic.
George Ahmaogak has an interesting place in society. The Borough, equivalent to a county in most of the United States, is about 89,000 square miles in size. Only eleven states are larger than this borough. Are you the governor of Minnesota? If so, the Mayor is in charge of more territory than you are. Are you governor of the large western state of Washington? Your state is puny compared to the Borough.
George Ahmaogak.
Whaling is still practiced by Barrow villagers, and success in the hunt is indicated by flying a flag. It has not always been so. For some time, they were formally prevented from hunting whale by the federal government and its treaty obligations. Imagine if foreigners showed up in your town, and announced that you were no longer allowed to eat any food that had been grown on a farm or raised on a ranch, and the reason was that the foreigners laying down this law had destroyed all the farms. This is analogous to the situation the Inupiat villagers of Barrow were in for some years. In more recent times, the International Whaling Commission regulates the whaling hunt, providing strike and kill quotas to Inupiat villages across the arctic. The hunt is well regulated, and there is great pride taken in the sustainable whale hunting practices of the traditional Inupiat. The populations of bowhead whale have risen even while they are hunted.
The flag proclaims a successful hunt, in which the entire village will share.
More interesting than the politics of whaling were the people at the picnic. I have never seen a larger group of happier people. In fact I think I have never seen a happier person, alone or as part of any group, than any one of the villagers. It was obvious that Inupiat claims concerning the importance of whaling were not merely lip service paid to a lapsed and irrelevant way of life, but were in fact traditions as important as Christmas or Thanksgiving are to many Americans.
We left the picnic without having sampled the mikigaq, much to my disappointment when I learned that some of our group had been offered some.
We made it to the airport in time to pick up a TOWTOVE late-joiner and honorary member, Michael, hailing from Juneau. Chris and I went into the terminal and, like cops looking for a suspect, attempted to "make" our man. Chris and I managed to correctly identify the astronomer from the group of forty or so people in the terminal without aid and without speaking to the suspect. Michael happened to be carrying a sign that said "Venus," but it was hidden when we first saw him.
Michael was speaking to Andy, another astronomer up for the event, and Andy promptly joined our group. We went to Ken's, finished off hamburgers or whatever, and began the process of shuttling people out to the observing site. While I had made filters earlier in the day, the rest of the group had gotten permission from the local utility to use the lee of the building south of the runway that we had visited the day before. As this was less than a mile from the hotel, it was convenient to home base, as well. On arrival, we discovered that not only could we use the site, but they had arranged their machinery in an astronomer-friendly manner, and had also opened up the building so we would have access to restrooms and hot coffee.
Equipment was set up, and the transit began shortly after 9:00 PM with a spate of poor seeing. I called first contact a little late, but had a good deal of trouble with second contact, calling it out at least twice as the poor seeing confused the issue. Within about ten minutes the seeing became quite steady, despite, or perhaps because of, the thin coastal fog that was rolling through. The fog would occasionally get thick enough to obscure the sun for up to a minute or so at a time, but for the most part we could see the sun through filtered instruments more or less easily for most of the transit.
Ben Frantz.
Starting about twenty minutes after second contact, we began to be visited by villagers who had heard about our expedition. Ben Frantz, the General Manager of the Barrow Utilities and Electric Co-op, was there, and we provided him with Baader filter material so he could take transit photos with his own camera. Ben was the man responsible for us having access to the site we were using. Students in a computer program from the community college arrived in two waves, the second wave carrying digital cameras which they promptly began to use to afocally image the sun through our instruments. Many villagers showed up on their own initiative, and got a look at this rare celestial event. Victor, a birder who was on our flight to Barrow and who we had befriended, took some shots through his long lens. A party atmosphere developed in short order.
Willy and Verena Berger, of Williams Lake, B.C., had also been on our flight into Barrow. The flight attendant had announced on our landing that this couple had been married in Barrow twenty-five years earlier, and were back to celebrate their anniversary. They arrived on foot, on their anniversary day, and got a look at the event that, twenty-five years before, they were destining themselves unknowingly to see.
Willy & Verena Berger.
The party was briefly interrupted by a safety concern. Sometime during the night a woman approached me, mentioning that she was concerned that she had seen a polar bear over to the west, and could we look at it through the telescope to see if it was a bear, or just something blowing in the wind? Fortunately, the suspected bear - which was at quite a distance but still uncomfortably close - turned out to be a trash bag.
The party atmosphere was helped along, to my perspective at least, when I was speaking to a native and bemoaning that I had not had a chance to try any mikigaq at the picnic earlier in the day. She immediately offered to go home and bring out another whale delicacy for us to try, and I eagerly accepted. She returned in about twenty minutes with a cool-whip container full of uunaalik. Uunaalik is the skin of the whale, with a layer of blubber as thick as the skin still attached, that is diced and boiled just until it becomes buoyant. She had lightly salted it and the result was wonderful tasting. It tasted somewhat of fish, but had a smooth texture and I could have eaten it all night. Fortunately, I did so - I managed to trade a sheet of Baader solar filter material for the remainder of the uunaalik, and I feasted on it through the following day.
At about twenty minutes after mid-transit, a thick fog bank moved in and obscured the sun completely for a considerable time. The villagers had mostly retired, and some of the astronomers started to pack up. Scott ran an astronomer-load back to the hotel, including Dave, my Arizona observing pal.
When he returned for the rest of us, it was clearing up, and we elected to set up just outside the hotel for the transit end. This location, quite a bit closer to the sea, was for the moment clearer than the farther south and more inland utility building. The group observed the sun continuously through the end of the transit, missing perhaps a total of a half hour to the thick fog bank. I called out third and final contacts, the last event being called less than ten seconds from the time of the USNO prediction.
We had succeeded against all odds in seeing the transit of Venus from the ground in Barrow, Alaska.
TOWTOVE leader Richard, observing the transit unfiltered, with the naked eye, through a fog bank. Richard, along with Jeff and Scott of this expedition, are the only observers reported to have made unfiltered naked-eye observations of any transit of Venus.
The rest of our Barrow trip consisted of bringing people to the airport for departures, visiting the radio station for interviews, thanking some of the important players, doing a little casual birding, and trying to catch up on our sleep. Chris, who shared my room, and I were so wired after the transit (which ended at 3:20 AM) that we could not get to sleep until around 7:00. We took him back to the airport later that day, and our expedition was back down to the TOWTOVE Group of Four. I was unclear on what had become of Michael or Andy, but there was nothing in the Barrow news about astronomers having met untimely ends, so I assumed things had worked out for them.
Most of the time spent birding was in search of swans, which nest on the tundra around Barrow and which are not something you see every day in other parts of the world. We did not have good success, however, and spent some hours driving around in the search. We did see a gull robbing another bird's nest of chicks, and we saw some Arctic Terns scanning ponds for food. Red Phalaropes were pretty common. Mostly, though, as we drove along, we talked about our incredible good fortune at having seen the transit through mostly clear air in one of the cloudiest locations in the country. We were grateful that we had not had to glimpse the transit through an airplane window on an expensive charter.
"SWANS TO THE RIGHT, STOP THE CAR!"
I was a little shocked to realize the voice that had bellowed that out was my own. We got out the spotting scope, and took in our fill of two Tundra Swans ensconced in their namesake habitat. Lamely, I took an afocal shot through the spotting scope, which sort of almost turned out nearly ok.
Dave, eating at Pepe's.
Dinner was at Pepe's, the farthest north Mexican restaurant in the world. After dinner, we met up with Joe the Waterman and headed to his house to have a look at what had been universally billed as the best museum in Barrow.
Joe "The Waterman" Shults.
We were confronted with an astonishing array of found and acquired objects - mounted wildlife exhibits, pieces of anatomy, and an incredible number of technological artifacts from the indigenous culture that had been found washed up on the beach. What the Waterman's museum lacked in interpretive aids like signs and audio recordings was made up for by a dense selection of exhibits and a running explanation by the host. Descriptions of museums tend to be histrionic or hackneyed, a fate I haven't been able to avoid in my own draft, so I will leave it at this: If you are ever in Barrow, make sure you get a chance to visit Joe's museum.
The following morning, we turned out for our flights at the airport, still somewhat groggy and deprived of sleep, but incredibly satisfied at our expedition's success.
TOWTOVE members Jeff, Scott, and Richard (from the right), a bit sleep deprived after successful transit observations.
Go to the TOWTOVE home page or to Jeff Medkeff's home page.