Alaskan Signs of Spring

Spring in Alaska is...

• The day of the vernal equinox.    
• The day the first rock sandpiper arrives in town.     
• The day that your favorite restaurant opens for the season.     
• The day the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, instead of whatever weird alternate schedule it’s been following since November.    
• The first day when you can actually see grass in your yard.    
• The first day that the grass actually looks green. 
• The day you drain the antifreeze out of the water system on your boat/RV/vacation home.   
•  The day the humpback whales return from Hawaii.    
• The day your neighbor returns from Hawaii.    
• The day you can smell the dog poop melting out of snow on the waterfront.   
•  The day you take the studded tires off of the car.    
• The day when ice is no longer filling in all the potholes on the road to the dump.    
• The day you can see the yellow parking lines in the Safeway parking lot.   
•  The day a motorhome camps at the campground.    
• The day a tent camper camps at the campground.    
• The first day that the bears raid trash cans on Dora Way.     
• The day the first cruise ship arrives in port. 
• The first day of salmon-fishing season.  
•  The day you realize its been a week since you had to scrape ice off of your car.   
•  The day you walk outside without a coat and don’t regret the decision.   
• The day you want to eat ice cream.    
• The day you run into a seasonal worker who’s gotten back into town.    
• The day you spot your first group of tourists.    
• The day you see a leaf sprouting on a cottonwood tree.    
• The day you decide that the skis should probably go back in the garage.    
• The day you grill outside. 

Turn Left for Reality Bypass

Here in Seward, we've had six or eight inches of new snow today, right after the guy across the street spent all day snowplowing his yard.   No, not his driveway - his entire yard.   There is a man who is fed up with winter.   

I overheard a very interesting conversation today at a local coffee shop, touching on everything from General Allenby’s military tactics in the Middle East during WWI , to the Illuminati – who apparently have an ambiguously nefarious plan to reduce the world’s population by 8% by 2022.   (Apparently, the Illuminati are less effective in their nefariousness than they are popularly portrayed, since the US Census Bureau estimates that the world population will add another billion by 2030.)   Also, I learned that under the affordable care act, by 2017 we are all going to have microchips injected into the backs of our necks, apparently part of some sort of nefarious plan to revisit the highlights of the 6^th season of the X-Files.   Or perhaps to drum up some extra business for America's veterinarians.

I love political conversations in rural areas – nowhere outside of a ComicCon convention can you spend an hour having a conversation that bypasses reality on so many different levels.   Like an evening on a farm in rural Scotland where a drunk goat farmer spent an hour telling me about how George Bush (senior) was actually an alien reptile who came from deep inside the Earth – which is hollow, apparently – with these little UFOs that flew in and out through a giant hole in the North Pole.   Which wouldn’t make him an alien reptile, come to think of it, just a regular ol’ Earth-based saucer-flying reptile.   What the farmer was still trying to figure out was whether that made George W. Bush (the president at the time) some sort of hybrid half-reptile alien.  He seemed to think that W’s paternity had some bearing on him being a legitimate president; I kept having to remind him that the US presidency wasn’t an inherited title.      But we were both drunk at the time, so I might be misremembering some of the details.

It makes me want to go back in time and see what the conspiracy theorists back in the 1980s and 1990s were predicting would have happened by 2013, and see how those predictions have worked out.   My guess is, not very accurately...

So You Want To Work in Alaska?

-->

            So, for whatever reason, you’ve decided that you want to spend a summer working in Alaska.   Maybe it’s for the adventure, for the wildlife, or for the fact that a job up here fits in really well with your school’s academic calendar.   Good for you.   Working up here can be both a one-off summer adventure, or a first step into full-time job, or a brand-new career completely different from anything you ever thought you'd realistically be doing with your life.   (If that sounds like an enticement, great.   If that sounds like a warning, that’s because it is.)   Alaska is an amazing place, although if you’re reading this, I’m assuming you’ve already figured that out.   And the summer is the best time of the year (some people would say the only good time of year) to visit the state.   Now here’s the reality check –the jobs up here are about as competitive as anywhere else these days.   Probably even more competitive since the Lower 48 reality-TV film industry has discovered the state, and has set to work chronicling everything from the fishing industry to the highway patrol to the efforts of Alaska-grown amateur gold prospectors, cattle ranchers, and survivalists.

            The folks who come up to Alaska to work tend to fall into one of two broad categories – the wilderness people, and the wildlife people.

            Wilderness people get an REI dividend check that is larger than some people’s weekly pay. You have a home ski mountain, and have climbed all of the major 5.10 routes in a three state area.   Most of your clothing wicks.   You need a roof rack or small trailer to  fit all of their outdoor gear in their car.   You leave your house at 4AM on a Saturday in order to start your backpacking trip as soon as the sun comes up.   You can talk knowledgably about varying models of camp stoves, and have strong opinions about the advisability of bringing down sleeping bags into the backcountry.    

            The other large contingent of Alaskan seasonal workers are the wildlife people.   If your first reaction when you see an animal is to make high-pitched cooing sounds, you are probably a wildlife person.   Other signs of a potential wildlife person include ownership of high-grade camera equipment, a library containing an inordinate number of natural history books, and framed pictures of penguins hanging on your wall.   If you have ever purchased a field guide to a region you have no immediate intention of visiting, just to learn more about the indigenous animals, you are a wildlife person.   You’ll be in good company up here – many Alaskan tourists, to one degree or another, are wildlife people – and the bigger, cuter, and furrier the wildlife is, the better.

            So once you get up here, you’ll have plenty of company.    But first, you need to get a job, or at the very least, come up here with enough skills, experience, and determination to be able to find a job after you arrive.   To that end, here are a few suggestions for what not to put in your cover letter.   

            Don’t tell us about how you want to come up here to experience Nature.  Trust us, we already know.    If you are applying from Ohio to work as a housekeeper for the Middle-of-Nowhere Lodge, or at a gift shop at the Denali National Park entrance area, we already know that the only reason you’re interested in the job is because of its proximity to an iconic Alaskan National Park.    But you’d look like a better employment prospect if you keep this knowledge to yourself.   Because it’s pretty clear that no one comes to Alaska because of the appealing climate, or the cultural opportunities, or really, any reason other than better access to giant wilderness areas, and really cool wildlife.

            Second, don’t necessarily be so keen to talk about how you spend all your free time hiking or mountain biking or extreme zorbing or whatever it is you like to do outside.   Is it relevant to the job you’re applying for?   Are you coming to Alaska to be a zorb guide?   If not, perhaps leave that out.   If you have legitimate outdoor or sports credentials – a wilderness first aid course, or a summer working at a climbing wall, or you earned your Eagle Scout award by building a handicap-accessible nature trail for your local city park, and you can make these accomplishments vaguely relevant to the job you are applying for, then by all means mention them.   But don’t talk about how you want to come to Alaska to hike and fish and take pictures of wildlife from unsafe distances.   That’s why the tourists come to Alaska.   Instead, tell us what you can do that will facilitate the tourists having those experiences.    Once you get up here, you, too will have the opportunity to hike, fish, and piss off (excuse me, photograph) the local wildlife.   But before you can do all that, first you have to convince someone in Alaska to actually give you a job.   

            Also, it’s probably not a great idea to talk about how bad-ass of an outdoor person you are, unless it’s relevant to the job you’re applying for, and you have the experience or certifications to back it up.   Because the person who is reading your cover letter is very probably a long-term resident, or sourdough, Alaskan.   They shoot their own meat, go skijoring with their dogs at minus twenty degrees, and club salmon on the head with sticks.   This person has been in the state long enough to get a year-round position with the company that’s hiring you, and could very well be the manger or owner.   This person is probably more of an outdoor guru than you are, and probably has a number of highly skilled outdoor guides working for them already.   These are the folks who watch the Discovery Channel, and talk about how Bear Grylls is doing it all wrong.   Don’t try to out-outdoors them, because it probably won’t work.

.  

            So what are Alaskan employers looking for?   Generally the same things as employers everywhere – experience, reliability, and a good attitude.   That being said, here are a few suggestions for prospective Alaskan summer workers.   This is especially tailored to anyone who is looking to get a job as a guide or outdoor instructor.   (I’d like to point out that these are my own personal opinions, not those of any company I work for, nor am I involved in hiring decisions for any company I work for.   And if you ask me about how to get a summer job in Alaska, I will tell you what I tell everybody – look on coolworks.com.) 

           

            If you are interested in working as a guide, have you taken a wilderness first aid course?   If the outdoor recreation field has anything like an industry-standard basic qualification, the wilderness first responder, or WFR, is definitely it.   In some ways, it is more valuable to a prospective guide than a college degree.   (I’ve worked with guides that have masters’ degrees in wildlife management, and with others that dropped out of college in their second semester.)   Some veteran guides have a list of outdoor certifications as long as your arm, but generally for a guide starting out, the single most helpful credential you can have would be a WFR.   It’s a ten-day course, offered by the National Outdoor Leadership School as well as a number of other regional outdoor training or recreation companies.   Expect to pay around $700-800 for the course, and if you want to stay certified you’ll need to take a 3-day refresher course every two years.   

            Even for people who have no intention of ever working as a guide, or ever setting foot in the wilderness, I’d recommend taking this course simply for the life skills it imparts.   It’s sort of like the Red Cross first aid course as taught by MacGuyver.   Plus, even if you never mean to put yourself in a wilderness situation, a wilderness situation could show up nonetheless – such as a friend who came very close to delivering his wife’s baby in their living room when she went into labor during a blizzard that had shut down most of the roads in their county.   I am not the kind of person that tends to throw around the word ‘empowering’ very often, but in this instance I think the term applies.   

            Aside from wilderness medical skills, the other two most important qualities we’re looking for are both hard to put in a resume – people skills, and good judgment, or what I’d like to call advanced common sense.    By and large, beginning guides don’t need to be wildlife experts, or botanists, or know the latin name for sphagnum moss.   However, beginning guides do need to be able to learn basic information about the local plants and animals, and also find a way to convey that information to guests in an engaging manner – all the while cracking jokes, being friendly, and putting clients at ease in what is for most people a very unfamiliar environment.   That’s where the people skills come in.

            Generally speaking, tourists to Alaska don’t need the Verna Pratt Field Guide to Alaskan Wildflowers thrown at them on their first day in the state.   Pointing out the really bright and colorful flowers, such as lupine, fireweed, and monkeyflower, will be enough to satisfy most non-plant people.   People who are seeing a bear in the wild for the first time do not actually care about the flowers growing next to the bear.    But the tourists both need and appreciate having someone with them in the field who acts as a host – sharing their knowledge and enthusiasm, lending someone bug spray when they forgot theirs back at their cabin, or asking how their pictures of that bear turned out when you see them at the bar that evening.

            People skills are also very relevant to group safety.   As a guide, you will at times be the sole person in charge of a group of people who may never have been in a backcountry area before this trip.   You need to be able to constantly assess both the clients and the environment around you for possible hazards.   You need to know not only your own abilities, but you need to be able to accurately assess the abilities and comfort level of your clients, some of whom you will have known for less than a day.    This requires both leadership skills as well as tactful group management – advanced people skills, so to speak.

            If you are reasonably outdoorsy person applying to work as a kayak guide, your company can and will teach you how to be a good sea kayaker.   They will teach you things like how to rescue clients that have flipped their kayak, or how to tow an exhausted paddler back to shore.   They will teach you skills.   They will teach you technical expertise.   The thing to keep in mind is that technical expertise is NOT the same thing as good judgment.   Good judgment is about when and how to use those skills – and more importantly, it is about being able to run your trips conservatively enough so that you DO NOT HAVE TO CALL UPON your awesome rescue skills.   That is something that’s harder to teach, if it can be taught at all.   Mostly I think it’s equal parts common sense and experience.   For most beginning guides, myself included, it’s a happy combination of common sense and plain luck that carries us (and our clients) through our first few months on the job.

            Even after you’ve gained some experience, not every trip you lead will go according to plan.  In fact, I can just about guarantee that something will go spectacularly wrong on at least one or two trips a season, and you will be the person who will, for better or worse, be dealing with it.   Your choices will decide whether the trip ends badly, or ends as a story that everybody has a good laugh about later that night at the bar.   

            One of the best ways to learn from trip catastrophes is to talk about them with other guides.   Be prepared to share mistakes or near-misses, or things that just didn’t go as well as they might have.   Be prepared to listen to other guides’ mistakes – we all have a few, trust me – and try to learn from them.   Your mistakes are going to teach you more than you could ever learn from anyone else – however, it will speed up your learning curve (and would probably be a lot better for your clients) if you tried to learn as much as you can from other guides’ mistakes as well.   

            For example, after leading canoe trips in Pedersen Lagoon for three years, I now know where all of the sandbars and barely-submerged rocks in the lagoon are.   I did not learn this from studying a map, or scouring the coastline with binoculars at a low tide.   Mostly, I learned where all the rocks are by smacking into them with my canoe.   Once you’ve hit a submerged rock with a canoe full of guests (and their usual reaction when the boat hits a submerged object is to peer at the water like they suspect that crocodiles are going to pluck them from the boat at any moment), you’ll remember the location of that particular rock for the rest of your natural life.   And you’ll swear that you’re never again going to do anything so stupid as get a canoe full of guests hung up on a sandbar, in full view of some guy with a tripod taking pictures from the dock.   Which will be true until you find another sandbar at the other side of the lagoon next week...

Still interested in working up here?   Then I wish you the best of luck.   (And if you're still looking for a job in Alaska, be sure to check out coolworks.com - they have a pretty comprehensive list of seasonal Alaskan employers...) 

Things They Don't Tell You About Winter in Alaska

You already knew about the months of limited daylight, the sub-zero windchill, and the 8-10 feet of snow.   Here's what they don't tell you about winter in the 49th state. 

Resurrection Bay, Seward

• If a piece of metal gets cold enough, your hand will stick to it.   Kind of like the kid licking the flagpole, except you don't even need to use a particularly wet body part - your index finger and an iced-over gate latch will demonstrate this effect just fine.

• In the winter, you will give electric shocks of static electricity to everything you touch.   Doorknobs, pets, children, iPods…   If it can carry a charge, you will give it one.   Constantly.

• Most city streets get temporary winter-season dividers between the oncoming lanes, in the form of giant piles of snow that have been plowed into the middle of the road and left until spring.   Intersections between streets are usually left clear - but don't plan on being able to turn left into someone's driveway, because that side of the street is probably barricaded.  

• Your car needs winter gear, too - except gear for the car is more expensive.   Getting a set of studded tires, an engine block heater, and an auto-start will set you back about $600 or so.   It makes that Patagonia 800-fill goose down parka with the detachable faux-fur hood look cheap in comparison

• Christmas is sot of a big deal in Alaska, partially because in the middle of a cold, dark time of the year, it’s good to be able to look forward to a time where a family can gather together and enjoy a respite from the daily challenges of winter.   For most Alaskans, this means a vacation to Hawaii.   For the rest of us, Christmas dinner will do in a pinch.  

• The dead animals get festive - because nothing says ‘Alaskan holidays’ quite like a string of Christmas lights decorating a caribou head.

• The weather becomes even more a topic of conversation than it does in the summer, perhaps because there isn’t much else going on.   I’ve found that Alaskans are more creative in discussing the weather than people in the Lower 48.   For one, the weather here is a little more intense – we routinely measure snow in feet, not inches, and wind speed in Beaufort storm scales, not miles per hour.   Another popular climactic pastime is comparing the current weather to whatever the weather was doing at the same time last year, or the year before.   (If nothing else, you can always say that no matter how bad the weather is this week/month/season, it is better than the same week/month/season in 2008.)

• A subset about talking about weather is talking about earthquakes – how long it lasted, what shook and for how long, under what sort of object you took shelter, and what you did immediately afterwards to make sure a tsunami wasn’t on its way to obliterate coastal towns in your area.

• When traveling outside of the state, most non-Alaskans you meet will be fascinated by your local weather - even if it isn’t all that fascinating to you.   Prepare for these inevitable conversations by making sure that you know the current average temperature, hours of daylight, and inches/feet of snow on the ground for your area before leaving the state.   People you have never met before will, on learning you are from Alaska, want to know your local weather, and how many feet of snow is sitting in your yard.   They will want to know how you personally can stand living somewhere that dark and cold.    If you would rather not spend your entire vacation discussing seasonal affective disorder, consider just telling people you live ‘out west’.   This is a good strategy for dodging weather conversations entirely.   No one wants to hear about your weather if there is even a remote chance that you live in southern California.

Fall Update

            Seward has gotten its first official snowfall of the winter, and in a bit of impeccable timing, I managed to be out of town when it happened.   I am currently in West Virginia, visiting family there for a few weeks, before returning to Alaska for six months of winter.   Perhaps this is only fair, since I missed out on winter entirely last year (I was in New Zealand, so I got three summers back-to-back).   

Iceberg Lodge girls

            The Iceberg Lodge is all closed up for the winter, and ready to slumber under the snow until next spring.   I spent the end of September helping a local dog kennel clean up after a flood.   With this particular flood, it wasn’t so much the water we were cleaning up as it was the gravel and rocks that the flood left behind.   The stream that flooded contained a lot of glacier debris – silt and rocks, mostly.   And a lot of those silt and rocks got washed into the buildings from the force of the water.   I spent a lot of time shoveling rocks out of the building, with the help of a few small bulldozers.   Some of the rocks were pretty large – I found it amazing that water could move something that I had trouble lifting with a shovel.   Sometimes, the work felt a little bit like excavating Pompeii.   Or what might happen if you pissed off someone who works at the Metco gravel lot. 

            Fortunately, my car survived the flood just fine – we were concerned about our cars when we saw on the internet flooded-out pictures of the building across the street from where we had parked them.   Fortunately, the water didn’t get high enough to damage anything.   

            Comparatively speaking, the Iceberg Lodge did very well during the flood because the water didn’t actually threaten any of our buildings.  (A few of them leak, but we've known that for a while.)   And the plant life around here can deal with the weather just fine.   Our forest’s moss carpet will take the worst rain and ask for more.  We have puddles and mud holes on our roads, (basically, wherever we have build and cleared things), but the forest itself never looks like it’s gone through any hard rain.   The moss just soaks it in like a green organic sponge.   The little pools in the forest get bigger, and creeks get wilder, but the plants still seem pretty happy.   But I think the rain must be rough on the bears.   I didn’t see any bears at all during the Iceberg Lodge's closedown period, which is unusual.  However, we did get a bear ceremonially seeing us off at the Point on the day we left, as well as the day-of-departure rainbow.   Both of these are becoming Iceberg Lodge traditions.

A rainbow over Pedersen Lagoon

            The other interesting thing about the shutdown week is that there has been a huge increase in the amount of trash that washed up on our beach.   I think the tsunami debris is beginning to arrive in a big way; if this continue over the winter, the beaches are going to be pretty coated by the time we get back in the spring.   Mostly, the trash on the beaches is a big pain to clean up, but there is also always the opportunity to find cool stuff mixed in with all the Styrofoam flecks and empty plastic bottles.   I found a few small fishing buoys this year, and every year I find at least two ball caps over the course of the summer.   The prize for the best sea debris this year definitely goes to our maintenance guy, who found a bag of Zodiac emergency gear carefully tied off to a tree, which had been uprooted and washed up on our beach.   There was a flashlight in there, with extra batteries, pumps, blige spones, and some things that looked like part of a boat repair kit.   We hope that whoever lost their gear, they didn’t actually need any of it.