Took a little weekend trip to Barrow, AK, which is the farthest north town/place on the North American continent. It's right on the Arctic Ocean; population 4,200, mostly Eskimos. The sun rose on May 10 and won't set until mid-August. Thought I'd share some pictures with y'all, so hopefully they work (I've never posted images before).
Cool. I personally prefer Ketchikan, Skagway and Juneau. Mostly cause those are the only three cities I have been to.
Just for the heck of it, here are some pics from a trip I took there last May, when the temp was 9 degrees.
Nice pictures. I thought you went there in your first post just for vacation and visiting to claim you were there etc. But you were there more than once? What were you doing up there?
Everyone that I've ever talked to from Alaska hates that place. Mostly because they have to go there to work...
I'll let the japanese go up their for their honey mood lights, but I'm out. That place looks really boring to me.
Thanks for the comments. It's a really interesting place to visit on one condition: that you don't spend more than one or two nights. After that you'll be bored to death. This weekend I happened to be there during an Eskimo whaling festival, which was a cultural experience to the extreme. The one picture of the person on what looks like a trampoline is called a Blanket Toss; they use this blanket to launch a person up into the air to spot whales in the ocean. Since the ground there is as flat as Houston, in the old days there was no other way to get a view of anything since there are no trees within 300 miles and no hills. I always like going back into Bush Alaska because it's nice to get back to the real Alaska. I think Anchorage is the greatest place in the world for me to live, but it's definitely not overly representative of what Alaska is really like. Kaiser Soze: Yup, just vacationing/for the hell of it. I live in Anchorage so it's easy to bomb up there for a weekend. Uprising: I've been there twice now, both times on vacations (read: weekends). Alaska Airlines flies in there twice daily with 737's so it's actually pretty easy to get to. EddieWasSnubbed: Believe me buddy, people here hate it for a reason. It's a crummy looking place, and getting sent there for an extended period of time would feel like a jail sentence to a lot of people, especially since you can't buy booze there (Natives have a bit of a drinking problem) and there are no roads out; you have to fly out. But I've always had a blast going up for a couple days and wandering the beach on the Arctic Ocean. I definitely wouldn't want to get stuck there, however. I have quite a few more pictures; if anybody is interested just email me at lonestar_ak@hotmail.com and I'll send them to you. I didn't want to post all of them on here in the interest of bandwith.
Garry: So, the Norwegians find it, and they dig it out of the ice... MacReady: That's right, Garry. They dig it up, they cart it back to their base. Somehow it gets thawed, it wakes up, probaly not the best of moods, and... I don't know, I wasn't there!
Thanks for posting the pics. Very nice. Seems like a party town... lol. I especially got a chuckle out of the sign that reads "Slow Congested Area" yet the place is deserted.
Awesome pictures. I'm surprised that the area looks so poor though. I though Alaska gets more federal infrastructure funds.
Will Rogers was killed in a plane crash in Barrow, along with a famous bush pilot named Wiley Post. Baqui: Actually, Barrow and the North Slope Borough is an extremely wealthy municipality. This is the same municipality that Prudhoe Bay is in, which means tax revenue from the oilfields. The Arctic is just a different world, though. Things are built for function, not for looks. If something breaks down and they can't fix it, it stays whereever it died. Also, it's important to remember that it's still very much a subsistence culture up there.
