UNALAKLEET – Over the past few days, as a dreaded Bering Sea storm moved north, all Iditarod flying felt the consequences. Dog food deliveries arrived late to checkpoints. Officials and race-watchers were grounded. And it hammered home the old Alaska flying adage, "If you don't like the weather, just wait" while reminding everyone how dependent "The Last Great Race" is on aviation.
Earlier this week, we were pleased our airplane was tied down on the exposed Anvik airstrip firmly enough to withstand a hurricane. But at 2 a.m. Thursday, when Martin Buser arrived in the village and sat down to a five-course gourmet dinner as the first musher to the Yukon River, the wind was dead calm.
That was the last calm we'd feel for a while.
How bad did it get? Bad enough that your scribe passed an unexpected milestone Friday: losing lunch in her own airplane. That proved to be the metaphor for the flying day.
Heading from the Yukon River village of Anvik a short hop upriver to Grayling was fine. But the farther west we went in our quest to reach Unalakleet on the Bering Sea coast and refuel, the more dramatic the flight became.
"Moderate turbulence" is a term pilots frequently use. It sounds benign, but context is everything. A few, pronounced bumps of turbulence are one thing. An hour of emphatic up, down and sideways drafts are totally different – but an experience covered by the same phrase.
This scribe had climbed in the airplane after several cups of coffee and a protein bar. With hands off the controls for a few minutes, and eyes no longer strictly focused on the instrument panel or the terrain, that mechanism in the brain that handles motion without sickness started to fail. Perhaps the sad result was inevitable. (Self-sealing air sickness bags in the airplane made a bad situation a little better – we recommend them highly).
Fuel planning
A bit of background here: McGrath was the last location where fuel was available, and we filled up (including some in our wing-tip tanks), knowing that the next place to buy aviation gas would be almost 300 miles to the west, in the thriving town of Unalakleet. (The vastness of distance in Alaska explains the importance of fueling plans: Few villages have enough airplane traffic to stock more than a few gallons of spare AvGas, which, for you non-pilots, is different than automobile or snowmachine gasoline.)
The 100 gallons on board seemed plenty for our plans. But shuttling all our gear and people to various places would require a refueling stop before we could get it all to the Bering Sea coast.
With the Iditarod race leader expected to arrive on the coast sometime early Sunday, we hoped to get us all there by sunset Friday. That way we could deliver our journalists back to Kaltag during daylight on Saturday while staging out of Unalakleet to be in touch with editors.
Mother Nature had other thoughts.
After mile after mile of continuous, rocky turbulence, we approached the village of Kaltag, the last Iditarod checkpoint on the Yukon River. The trail here turns due west for the long portage through some hills and down into the Unalakleet River Valley. The low pressure system we'd been watching all week had finally moved north to interfere with our best-laid flying plans.
Low-visibility flying
About 30 miles southeast of Kaltag, Iditarod Air Force pilots reported on the radio that Kaltag had just "gone down," with visibility too low to land. We could see that snow showers were spotty -- some thicker and larger than others. And they were moving quickly. As luck would have it, the one over the Kaltag airstrip had moved by the time we were 20 miles out.
A stop in Kaltag had not been in our plans. But for a solid day, we'd been hearing pilots talking about the terrain being "all clogged up" between Kaltag and Unalakleet. Since Kaltag was clear when we flew over it, we decided to "poke our nose" into the skies beyond, over the portage toward Unalakleet. It seemed possible that the weather system might lift enough for us to go through a brief, open window of good visibility. All we had to do was clear the low hills several hundred feet in elevation stretching west for about 20 miles. After that, it was possible to follow the winding Unalakleet River valley to the coast. If we made it over, we'd be the first aircraft to have done so – in either direction – for two days. What we didn't know at the time was that the precious dog food cargo needed for the Yukon River checkpoints was being staged out of Unalakleet. With weather down, it was still sitting there and the mushers were getting perilously close to arriving at the Eagle Island checkpoint with no food for their hungry dogs.
Just as predicted, the hilly terrain was still "clogged." So knowing that Kaltag was open, we turned back to land and compare notes with the other pilots. It seemed that a little bit of patience on the ground – without wasting precious fuel – might be in order. (And the calm air on terra firma would be a pleasant interlude.)
After 30 minutes or so, we thought the sky looked more promising to the west and decided to try again.
It was the same. Visibility was just fine – seemingly for 10 miles or so – as we left the Yukon River and climbed toward the hills. At first we thought we might make it over. But the ceiling dropped before the terrain fell off to the valley. It was another no-go -- another U-turn back to Kaltag.
Plans A, B, and maybe C?
VFR (visual flight rules) flying in the Alaska Bush is all about constantly re-evaluating the best options amid changing weather. We all live with the ever-present thoughts about those whose choices didn't work out well.
On the ground back in Kaltag for the second time, we re-evaluated our options.
• Plan B: Spend the night in the village school –- always open to stranded strangers -- and let our journalists in Anvik and Grayling know that our plan to return for them that afternoon wasn't happening.
• Plan C: Fly 60 air miles northeast to Galena, another large village with a fuel-sale operation and the chance to visit some local friends while over-nighting.
And one more chance to try an amended Plan A – press on to Unalakleet and let the journalists know that we had run out of daylight to get back and pick them up in Grayling and Anvik. That would mean another overnight in the schools for them.
A new piece of information led to choosing an amended Plan A: An airplane loaded with the previously mentioned dog food had just landed coming east from Unalakleet. The pilot described visibility that had worked for him. We decided to make a third attempt, knowing that we could turn back to Kaltag or veer north for a Galena overnight.
The thinning 'clog'
This time, there was a visible change in the conditions. The sky looked slightly different in all directions as we climbed to clear the hills. The clouds had a bit of definition, instead of appearing as a wall of light grey. Even the ever-present turbulence was tamer.
Flying over the peaks, we could see terrain. While the picture was "obscured", we were undeniably seeing visible contours of rolling hills. So on this third attempt, we kept going where we had turned back twice before. The turbulence was with us all the way to the coast. But visibility was unlimited once we reached the historic Old Woman Cabin between Kaltag and Unalakleet, where the flat land stretches all the way to the sea. It had been only a 10-mile wide "clog" that stopped all the air traffic.
Finally, blue sky
The low-pressure system moved east and south on Saturday. A stronger high positioned itself over the Norton Sound area where the race moves toward its finish in Nome.
If the high holds for three days, the weather risk will have diminished as a variable for the mushers and pilots alike.
This reminds us of something few meteorologists talk about in their nightly TV weather reports: the phenomenon of Bering Sea weather systems. Old-timers will tell you that the Bering Sea is fueled by such extreme forces of wind and temperature that the systems tend to "make themselves and keep to themselves." Occasionally, as in the last two days, they encroach on the shore and push over the mountains north and east.
We may be back in a more normal flow now. The Iditarod champion should be in Nome Tuesday, and if the system is stationary long enough, we may even be able to make a visit to the isolated community of Little Diomede (with its sea-ice runway) in the center of the 50-mile wide Bering Straits before leaving the coast next week.
Meanwhile, the weather in Unalakleet is uncommonly warm and calm.
Alice Rogoff is publisher of Alaska Dispatch.