Koyuk

Now that I'm finally writing again, I'd be remiss not to talk a bit about a recent trip I took for work last month. The regional competitions of the Native Youth Olympics were being held in Koyuk, Alaska - one of the villages on the Yukon River - and I was lucky enough to cover the event for our station.

Like almost all of the villages and towns in Western Alaska, Koyuk is inaccessible by any road system, so getting to this village of some 300 people means taking a small plane from Nome. I've been on small planes before, but never one this small. The maximum passenger capacity was about a half-dozen, allowing for an intimate space from which to view the vast, still-snowy and icy landscape below our wings.

A regular part of daily life in this region, the "milk run" routes of these small planes -- running passengers, mail and cargo from village to village -- play a unique role that aviation does not take almost anywhere else in the world. The bush pilots are a vital lifeline, and this becomes immediately apparent when you see a village, like Koyuk, emerge in the distance from an otherwise uninterrupted landscape of open tundra, sea ice, snow, and scattered trees. Without the planes, each village would be largely on its own.

But I digress - the plane ride was just the first of many amazing experiences on this assignment. The games themselves are fascinating. The Native Youth Olympics involve junior and senior high school students competing against each other in a series of athletic events that relate in a particular way to the traditional subsistence lifestyle of Alaska Natives. The games are incredibly strenuous and demanding; the "Two-Foot High Kick," for example, tasks participants to jump up in the air and use both feet, together, to kick a suspended beanbag whose height off the ground is gradually increased. The winner is the one who can kick the highest. This event, and other variations on the kick, relate to hunting activities, in which different kinds of kicks were used as non-verbal means of communicating between the members of a hunting party.

The games began Friday evening and concluded Saturday night. I tried to keep as close to each successive sport as I could, writing down impressions and results and conferring with the officials overseeing the event. Saturday came the time for live reports, and just before 9am, 12noon, and 5pm, I called into the radio station and gave a brief run-down of the recent event winners. Sunday, I filed one last report in the morning, to be recorded and replayed later that day.

While I waited for my afternoon flight back to Nome, I walked around Koyuk a bit and tried to get a sense of the village. One of the immediate differences is that, lo and behold, there are trees here! Nome is just outside of the tree line (because of the permafrost in our soil), and thus has almost no trees of any kind; but Koyuk's soil is apparently just hospitable enough for some evergreens (although I noticed they never get too tall).

Despite long days (late nights for the conclusions of sporting events, and early mornings to file live reports), it was a great weekend, and a definite highlight of my time thus far in Western AK.