Happy Halloween!

So Halloween in the small native village of Toksook Bay is just like most other towns across America. It’s all about the candy! There are a few adults that do actually dress up, but mostly it’s kids….4th grade and down. I was going to go for something subtle, like wear my glasses that I have never worn in public yet, but I decided go with something a little more creative.

Side note…

We have been trying to attack our behavioral problems in more a positive manner. That is, instead of telling students “don’t do this” and “don’t do that”, we are focusing on the students that are doing what they are expected and giving them kudos or props. Telling them they are doing a great job. We do that through four mantras; be respectful, be responsible, be helpful, and be safe. When students are doing what they are expected to we give them a “Gotcha Card.” It’s amazing how this effects student’s behavior.

Back to original thought…













I decided to dress up as a human “Gotcha Card.” It went pretty well. Even some of the kids got it. Halloween doesn't always have to be "Who are you." It could be "What are you." Some of you might be saying, "what a dork", but who knows, maybe my quick sketch of a generic piece of paper on a white cotton shirt will be mass produced and sold all over the village. My legacy will have manifested itself.

Thanks for reading.
Happy Halloween!

The River of Frozen Dreams

Winter seems to have taken a firm grip on the land over the past 4 weeks, but we still don’t have much snow. I figure that it will probably warm up around the beginning of November, although I really hope it doesn’t. The snow that we got 3 weeks ago is still hanging around and towards the end of this week, we got another inch of powder. The temps have not gotten above freezing the whole time though, so the ground (aka soggy spongy mattress ground) has been hard as a rock for some time now. This makes it perfect to ride on, so Katja and I have been cruising up along the river for evening rides. The river itself is a little sketchy to ride on yet, although I have seen 4 wheeler donuts out on the middle of ice. I’m not going to risk it though. We can ride about six miles in about an hour, but only 2 miles of that is on the tundra. Tundra riding is still pretty slow going.
Fishing would be so much easier if I could ride all the way up to where the Dollys are hanging out. It takes me about an hour to get to the fish when the ground is soggy and boggy, but only 30 minutes from my house when the ground is frozen. It is hard to believe that I was fishing this same water about 1 month ago. Many things take forever up here, the mail, traveling, etc. The weather happens very suddenly.

Today, Katja and I went on our mountain circuit ride where we ride up to the top and then maneuver our way down the other side without getting killed. With snow on the ground it’s a little softer falling, but you end up falling more often, so I guess it evens out. I went over the bars a couple of times today. We had a great ride though. I must have been really focused on keeping the rubber side down, because all of the sudden, I saw blackness in front of me and hit the breaks as hard as I could. Too late, my front wheel sunk into the murky blackness and I had to catch myself, which meant that my foot sunk down into the bogginess as well. Surprisingly I was able to pull my foot out quick enough so that I didn’t get too wet. I tried to sneak around where the ice seemed a little thicker, but I broke through again. I quickly decided that I made a wrong turn and backtracked to another trail that headed up towards higher ground. Katja did amazingly well the whole time we were out. She is leaps and bounds ahead of where she was last year as far as skijoring (bikejoring) is concerned. I’m really looking forward to this winter when we get the skis out.

Changing of Seasons

I know that I'm getting too excited too early, but I can't help being energized with the first snow fall. Katja was pretty excited as well. Once again, she can get a mouth full of snow, which quickly becomes ice cold water, at full stride to stay hydrated on our endurance adventures. Early this week, we took a quick spin around the 3 mile x-country course after the ground has frozen hard and there was a light dusting of snow. The trail is alittle easier to pick out with a light snow. It's pretty difficult even in the best conditions. The wind was blowing pretty hard up on top of the ridge, so it meant that I cooled down quickly when I had to stop and round up my adventurous run away dog, who had taken off on another quick side venture. She has gotten much better at staying near me when we run, but there is just so much to explore out there, she just can't help herself sometimes. She healed the rest of the way back to the village, so I treated her to a left over steak bone in my fridge. The next day she in turn treated me with a nice steamy pile of poo outside my bedroom door. I guess on top of the dog food, the steak pushed over the edge. I decided to leave out any photos. That hasn't happened since the first few months she lived with me.

Today we rode to the top of the hill and then when off trail over the side towards "the thumb" to pick up another trail that winds around behind this ridge and follows the wide valley below. Again, Katja took off returning after a period of shouting for her. I was getting concerned that she had come across a fox and gave chase, which could last for a long while. I hope that never happens. Upon returning, I scolded her for running off and then we continued down the hill, following the snow filled tracks of the 4 wheeler trail. We flushed a nice size covy of ptarmigan, which normally would entice Katja to take off again, but she was able to contain herself this time. I guess she connected the dots. It has been cold enough that even the swampy ground is fairly frozen enough so that I don't sink my front wheel through boggy sections of the trail. We got back to the town relatively dry and worn out. Another successful outdoor adventure.

Fishing in the Fall

So last weekend, I made one last voyage up the Alakugaq to fill my freezer. I actually wasn't planning to keep any fish, but when I caught some good size fish, I changed my mind. I had decided to hike farther up river than I had ever been before. I also had dinner plans for 6 pm, so I knew that I couldn't spend too much time exploring.
I rode my bike as far as I could over the squishy tundra and then hiked the rest of the way. There were still many salmon swimming up the river, so I assumed that there would also be many Dollys following them to suck up their eggs. There were indeed a lot of fish in my usual fishing hole, but I wanted to explore farther up river, so I caught a few and then continued hiking
I knew that I was going to be wiped out at the end of the day, because I was already feeling tired as I hiked across the soggy landscape. Parts of the ground were solid and other parts were totally exhausting to get through. As I got farther up stream, the river got very narrow and the fish would spook and dart around

The "Hinter" of Hinterlands"

Nunuvak Island is beautiful, with its diverse coastline, its rolling hills and larger mountains in beyond, and its highly fish populated rivers. The village, Mekoryuk, sits on the eastern end of the island and the rest of the island rarely gets visited except by circumnavigating the island by boat or taking a painstakingly slow, bumpy, and sometimes barely navigable 4 wheeler ride across the tundra. One nice thing about the village of Mekoryuk is that it is more sand than muddy, which is much easier to deal with as far as keeping your house and yourself clean.

It’s always exciting for me to see and explore a new place. Friday evening we to a 4 wheeler out to some big sand dunes on the coast and walked out over tidal flats and rocks as the tide slowly crept in. After taking some death defying leaps off the dune tops, we cruised back to town and starting cooking up a vegetable medley, many veggies we couldn’t even identify. A short jam session with Kale on Ukulele and me on guitar followed by some vaguely interesting tele and I headed to bead. Our plan for Saturday was to take a slow, bumpy, and sometimes barely navigable 4 wheeler ride over the tundra past the tidal section of the Mekoryuk river to search for Dolly Varden. Saturday, we slept in till 7:30ish, ate a quick breaky and head to the fishing grounds. Kale fished with a heavy duty spin rod and me with my 6 weight fly rod. The section of water was beautiful. A long slow, deep section of water in between to steep, bouldery rapid sections that held fish by the hundreds. We spent about 4 hours catching many Dollys and Kale even caught 4 nice silver salmon. It was much different than fishing the little river outside of Toksook. First of all, the Dollys didn’t aggressively take salmon egg imitations, which are an easy and rich source of food for them. Instead, they wanted to chase some kind, any kind, of streamer. Unfortunately, I only had a couple of flies that made the cut for appearance and actually caught fish. The weather had gotten cold over the past couple of nights and the wind combined with dipping your hands in water to release fish quickly turned my hands into numb clubs of wood. This lead to me dropping one the four flies, that was working for me, in the water, never to be seen again. Luckily I still had a couple of large nymph patterns that surprisingly worked just fine. I caught many fish, some 10 – 12 inches, but most 15 -18 inches. This was okay with me, because between Kale and I combined, we probably caught 80 – 100 fish in four hours. Sometimes on every cast you would have a fish. It was great.

After arriving back to Toksook the next day, I had felt like I had taken a week long vacation. But alas, back to work. I’m pretty happy that I got to see another part of the Yukon Kuskokwim Delta and I hope to get back out to Mekoryuk for another visit. Maybe Katja will join me next time.

Getting to the "Hinter" of "Hinterlands"

This past weekend, I made arrangements with my friend Kale, to visit him and some other friends at their current residence in Mekoryuk on Nunuvak Island. Then came the unpredictable adventure of making reservations to fly there. It isn’t far, just a short 20 min. hop across the Etolin strait. There are only approximately 170 people that live on the island, so there isn’t a high priority to fly there during all the scheduled flight times, morning, noonish, and evening. I made reservations to fly there on the Friday evening flight and return on the Saturday evening flight with one of the aviation companies, however on Friday evening when I went to confirm my flight, the plane was full. Aaaarrrrrrrrgh! Now my understanding of the concept of “reservation” was that my name was to be on one of those seats on the plane for that flight. After contacting the headquarters in Bethel, I dropped it and quickly checked another aviation company that was flying out to Mekoryuk as well to see if they had room for me. They did and I made it out to see Kale. Unfortunately I had to go through a similar scenario for my flight back to Toksook. I ended up making all my flights as I had originally planned, but I was never quite sure I would be flying until I was sitting on that plane. I should be used to this by now, because I have been jumping flights to and fro for almost 2 ½ years now, but I’m still surprised and frustrated when I’m really wanting or needing to make a flight and the plane just might be full or not come at all. To make a long story longer, there is always a certain amount of finger crossing that has to be done in order to get some places in the Alaskan Bush.

Euphoric fishing

This year has been challenging and rewarding in many ways already. I've been trying to get my feet under me in the classroom. Each new batch of 7th graders that get thrown my way try to test their new teacher by driving them crazy. This years group is trying hard, but they aren't getting anywhere. Tough love! There is always so much work to get up to date for the new year as well that it takes me until about October to find my feet. I am almost there and it is still the 3rd week of September, so I think I'm doing pretty well.

As for fishing, I have been rewarded and disappointed. The beginning of the Silver Salmon season was great. My first trip out, I landed 4 beautiful silvers as bright as the sun. Unfortunately, you will have to take my word on it, because I lost the pictures when my work computer crashed. I caught a few more after that and this is a couple of older males that were caught about a week later. I've also engaged my friend and colleague Marty into some flyfishing. He picked it up rather quickly and found success with a few fish. After a couple of weeks of being in the river though, the fish just shut down. Maybe they get too skittish. Maybe they are getting too much fishing pressure from all the kids that try to snag them. Maybe they just can't be distracted from their spawning rituals and don't even bother to chase the colorful flies I throw their way. Either way, I can't get them to bite anymore. I would like to try a different river and see if less fishing pressure has an effect, but the other rivers require a fairly long 4 wheeler drive over the tundra. I don't think that I could even hike there and back in a day and still have time to fish. So I am left to fish the nearby Alukucaq.

Yesterday I hiked way up river and saw a couple of amazing things. First, there are many beavers that inhabit the river and build extensive dams and lodges along the river, sometimes backing the water up for long sections. Second, many many salmon still get up stream through the beaver dams and find spawning grounds way up river. Third, there are a couple of areas that have large groups of Dolly Varden swimming spastically around following Salmon and sipping eggs that drift down stream. On one of my first casts, I hooked with two fish at the same time. Eventually one of them shook the hook, but it was pretty exciting having two fish darting around on my line.

The fishing is starting to come to a close around here though and soon, winter will set in and I'll be forced to fish through the ice. Not a favorite of mine. This fishing season has been a good one. Maybe there will be one more adventure to Nunuvak Island next weekend for some more fishing. I'll keep you posted.

Until next time,
thanks for reading my sporadic blog

Dirk