We’re back for a day after jumps to Gambell and Nome.  Jumps through space and climate.  We met our tour group in an airport hotel at Anchorage.  After a night on a wide bed we flew to rural Nome via Alaska Airlines and then on to Gambel via Bering Air.  There we walked off the plane and on into town finding views of Red-necked Stint and Lesser Sand Plover in the “airport lagoons.  Along the way we began to experience the wonderful round gravel that makes up the bar that underlies the town of Gambell.  It refuses to compact and is displaced underfoot.  Walking along on it is like walking upon dry sand, except that sand does not hurt when it crawls into your boot. 

Our luggage traveled by trailer behind an ATV to the “lodge” with a blue door and a handwritten sign, “Welcome Peeps.”  Peeps are small sandpipers sought out by the grizzled tourists who come to Gambell in June.  The ATV was driven by a person of Siberian Yupik descent.  These folk have hung around on Saint Lawrence Island for a few millennia.  A cold place without trees, they somehow survived moderately cold winters without wood and so without heat.  Seems unimaginable to someone like me who hates being cold.

At Gambell we walked about much on the ball bearings gravel to the beach, the boneyards, the mountain, and south of the lake. 

The beach was wonderful.  It consisted of the same “washed river gravel” as the rest of the Gambell area.  The large waves rattled the stone and threw pebbles into the air.  Above them flew the eider, auklets, murre, puffins, and loons that we sought.  Behind the birds shown the snow on high mountains across the Bering Straight.  It was hard to imagine that we looked up upon the mountains of Siberia.  Glazed with snow and ice, the Russian landscape seemed as harsh as that of northern Alaska.  We viewed it with some trepidation.  I remember being “bussed” by Cuban aircraft while in the Cayman Islands.  I doubt that more sober Russians would buss us on territory of the United States.  But one never knows. 

The boneyards were more spooky, even for a realist such as myself.  Imagine a lawn excavated into a series of pits surrounded by ridges and adorned with bits of bone from seal, walrus, and whale.  Alas poor Orek, I knew him well.  The scattered vertebrae were as large as my chest. The rib bones could provide for a tepee.  The landscape appeared as the noman’s land in WWI.  We birders wondered across this space in search of small Asian birds that drifted too far west to above American soil and so fell into the pits for shelter and food. 

In the evening the natives would come into our lodge to sell the bits of walrus ivory that they had excavated and carved into small art.  It was hard to resist spending twenty, forty, or fifty dollars to support a family that dried seal meat upon twig frames and collected spring herbs for nourishment.  Subsistence living is such a tough life.  The tribe uses grants to import tiny prefab housing so folks no longer have to live in earthen housing.  The state provides a gravel main road, the school, and the new health center under construction.  Otherwise these people would meet the U.N. criterion for being poor.  By our standards they are dirt poor. 

The nearby mountain is a plateau that was somehow pushed up from the surrounding landscape and presents cliffs to the town area that is a gravel bed deposited by the sea.  Its slopes included rocky points and snow covered slopes.  The alcids, puffins, murres, auklets, dovekies, and guillemots nested among the rocks and kept cool on the snow fields.  There they preened, courted and mated in front of we observers.  They also made a huge cacophony. 

The lake south of town was long.  It was 90% covered with ice when we arrived and 80% when we left.  I suspect it will be open water by the time July comes around.  A few miles long we tried to get a ride to the south end.  This was often provided by a tiny trailer towed by ann ATV.  Don’t tell our life insurance company.  I said a Hail Mary each time we passed high above it on the gravel roadway.  And I’m not religious.  There we found gulls and odd sandpipers and plover, many with a Russian accent.  They carried no visas.

Every day it was cold and often windy.  Each day as June progressed we assumed it would become warmer.  Instead it became colder.  We wore down vests, lined jackets, scarves, and thinsulate hats.  Still we were cold and our faces became red.

We stayed arm in a heated lodge and ate well because we brought our own food and cook.  In the end a Bering Air two engine prop plane came back for us.  As the copilot pulled up the steps and closed the door he said, “now I take you back to civilization.”  He lied.  he took us only to Nome which is half civilized.  A wild west town with saloons and rough justice, it seemed larger but just as rough as ten years ago when we last visited it.  Another restaurant burned this month leaving us one for supper.  We stayed int he best hotel.  Across the street was a house with a refrigerator and a dozen pallets int he front yard.  Next door was a pickup truck with two flat tires.  How classy. 

We drove out the three roads into the wilderness to seek sub-arctic birds.  Yes, we found Bristle-thighed Curlew, Bluethroat, and Arctic Warbler.  We braked for moose, caribou, and the strangest Beringean mammal, Musk Ox.  We found no bear and were glad of it.  Our guide who once survived a terrifying charge of a grizzly took time to buy bear spray before our first outing.  One may not fly with the stuff.

On our last day we birded from 6 a.m. until midnight looking for foreign gulls and shorebirds at the mouth of the Nome River.  The light was glowing and the air clear after a rain shower.  The sun would set in two hours and rise in four.  So strange.

The next day we would return to Anchorage that seemed as far south as Dixie.  This morning we awoke in Palmer to sunshine, 51 degrees, birds singing, and a plush lawn with many dandelions blooming.  So nice. 

Tomorrow we fly to Dutch harbor.  More adventures.  Wish us well.