Going to the dog food store

Things aren’t cheap in the Arctic. And the heavier things are, the more they cost here compared to anywhere else. The problem is obvious. We are 330 miles above the Arctic Circle and 150 miles across frozen marshlands and heaving sea ice to the nearest road. That’s only the end of the mostly unpaved Dalton Highway and the Prudhoe Bay oil fields, still 400 miles or so from the nearest dog food store in Fairbanks. A few barges each year take advantage of the short summer window of ice-free passage through the Bering and Chukchi Seas to bring building supplies, fuel and shiny new cars to Barrow, but the dog food, people food and other daily goods come by plane. That isn’t cheap, and you pay by the pound.

So a gallon of milk, even the hormone-ridden cheap stuff, is eight or nine dollars a gallon. Amazed to even find it, we splurge on the organic milk for Luke at $7.99 for a half gallon ($7.69 on sale!). A jug of OJ runs between eleven and fifteen dollars depending on your brand and pulp preference, and a quart of Gatorade is $3.69—on sale. Spices aren’t too bad because they are light, as long as you aren’t looking for anything too crazy, like nutmeg or ginger, then you’re just out of luck. Not being a dog owner and still nursing the bruise on my chin from my jaw hitting the floor at the $2.89/lb sale price of a head of cabbage, I didn’t check the dog food prices, but I’m sure they would be enough for me to further put off getting Luke that puppy I know he wants.

It’s no wonder snowmachines have replaced dog teams as the preferred means of travel on the North Slope. But what did people feed their dogs before technology and Purina retired them to the menial tasks of guarding doghouses and barking at passers-by? And why does our friend Geoff still run a dog team when he has a perfectly good snowmachine?

Layla and I found out on the day after we got back from a week in Colorado with Luke’s grandparents. We came home Sunday to a few messages from Geoff, who always seems to invite us on fun adventures when we’re out of town, saying that Monday was the last day that he would be taking the dogs to a nearby lake to go ice fishing. We briefly contemplated whether to bring Luke, but decided that since nether of us really knew what we were getting into, we’d better not. After a few phone calls and some hectic Luke packaging, we had a plan. Layla would take Luke to work for the last hour or so of the day while I went to the lake with Geoff and the dogs. At five, Layla and our neighbor Craig would come out on his snowmachine, and Craig’s wife, Cyd, would watch Luke. That settled, we were on our way to solving the Barrow dog food mystery.

I showed up at Geoff’s fairly well prepared, but not trusting that I was. Geoff and Craig are both experienced outdoorsmen, even by Alaska standards, and like many old hands, forget what us greenhorns still don’t know. Maybe they just know enough not to make any promises or predictions about the arctic, so explanations of what to expect are sparse. Layla and I have each spent enough time outdoors to know that it’s always colder than you expect and it’s always wise to be prepared to be self-sufficient. I must admit I was less than prepared to be self-sufficient, but I was plenty warm and was traveling with a man who has taken a dog team hundreds of miles to the North Pole, so I didn’t worry too much about our evening trip onto the thinly snow-cloaked tundra. Nonetheless, I’m not used to going so blindly into a winter activity, so I borrowed an extra jacket and a neck gaiter from Geoff.

Geoff has eleven dogs for a ten-dog sled, and every dog he has craves to pull. They know that one of them will be left out each time, and each dog has its own set of enthusiastic tricks to curry favor with the boss when he brings out the harnesses. Some dance on the top of their houses, others spin and wag until they wear an almost perfect semi-circle through the snow and straw to the dirt. Their howls carry the excitement through the air and into my suddenly strident limbs as I lead them to their place in front of the sled. Or did they lead me?

With all of their energy, strength and excitement, there’s no stopping them for the first few hundred yards after they start pulling. My job was to stand at the road and signal when it was clear for the team to blast from the yard, cross the first street, turn through the next yard and over the second street at the edge of town. Once across the second street, I chased the team in my oversized snow boots and jumped onto the sled to enjoy the ride.

After the dog’s bellowing chaos of anticipation before the first “Kiita!” and my short burst of adrenalin from jumping onto the moving sled, we shot through an invisible portal to the serenity of a silent world where the only sound was the soft swishing of the sled on the supple snow. The panting dogs pulled happily as the whines of two-stroke snowmachines burning through town faded into the distance. In my first two minutes on the sled, I already had the answer to why Geoff still prefers dogs to snowmachines.

The dogs knew the ancient trail we were following well, and even the two snowy owls (or was the one a Gyrfalcon?) didn’t stray them off course. Geoff let me “drive” while he skied behind like a canine powered, snowy bearded water skier in full arctic gear. We traveled so silently, that even though he skied twenty or so feet behind the sled, we could talk without raising our voices, and it almost seemed profane to scar the sublime silence with any unnecessary volume.

I have no idea how far we went or how fast we traveled, but it seemed like we went just fast enough and not nearly far enough. Occasionally I kicked my feet off the runners to run behind the sled then hopped back on to enjoy the ride. Even ducking under a gas pipeline that feeds town didn’t dampen my enjoyment of the quiet expanse swishing underneath me forty furry steps at a time. After riding and driving back on the sled that evening, Layla said it was the best time she had had since we moved to Barrow, and I knew exactly why.

When Geoff and I got to the lake, the sun was setting behind a low bank of clouds on the Chukchi Sea. Geoff secured the sled with a set of hooks in the back and set a mountaineering ice screw in front of the second set of dogs and clipped it to their lead. I grabbed a bag of now frozen fish from yesterday’s haul and gave one to each of the dogs. Scales, heads, bones and all, I think the slowest dog finished his in about twenty seconds.

Least cisco, a cousin of the more famous arctic cisco, are white fish about twelve to twenty inches long and are plentiful in this lake. The lake also has a few of the fatter, more tasty broad whitefish, which, if caught, will find its way to the frying pan, not the kennel. With the dogs content to rest and digest, Geoff and I reopened the holes in the frozen lake and began to haul out the first net. Each net had progressively larger holes, and we began with the smallest.

The easiest way to clear a fish from the net is to push them through head first instead of trying to back them out, but in the small net, that wasn’t always easy. After a few brutal gill tearing episodes and one beheading begot of frustration, I was almost half as fast as Geoff at removing the fish from the nets. We cleared the hundred or so foot nets in sections so the fish wouldn’t freeze before we could get them out of the net.

Layla and Craig arrived just as we began the second net, and despite being a bit taken aback by the flopping, then twitching then stiff fish scattered on the snow, Layla jumped right in and began her education on clearing fish from a net. The larger nets were more forgiving, and by the time all three nets were clean, we felt like we were actually helping out not just tagging along.

Usually, Geoff and Craig would haul the nets, clear the fish, then use a rope attached to the far end of the net to pull the net back into the lake and across the span to another hole where they would secure the rope. Because today was the last day Geoff was going to fish this lake, Craig and I packed the nets into nylon bags while Layla and Geoff counted and bagged the catch. From three nets, we landed almost 250 least cisco and one cherished broad whitefish. The cisco reward the dogs, and the whitefish the fisherman.

As we worked, the sun dipped below the cloud bank where it had been hiding and turned the undersides of the clouds a vibrant pink. The dogs howled in anticipation when I went to the sled to grab my camera, and even Craig, a twenty year arctic veteran, had to grab his camera to try to capture the scene. I would have been more comfortable on the ride home had we left then, but we still had to fill the holes and break up the chunks of ice that they had removed from the surface of the lake to access the water below. Leave no trace, yes, but this also keeps other unsuspecting travelers from riding into the erratic chunks in dark or whiteout conditions.

No problem. I grabbed the heavy duty ice axe and began to break up the chunks. I mistakenly walked to one chunk from the side where the hole was, and as I hit the chunk, my boots broke through the newly forming ice and I plunged into the pond up to my knees. With stronger ice all around, I managed to haul myself out of the hole while the others were just turning to respond to my faint and reflexive call for help. Luckily, we were about ready to go, so I wrung out my socks, loaded the sled Craig was pulling behind his snowmachine, and we headed for home. Layla went with Geoff and the dogs, and I rode on the sled behind Craig’s snowmachine.

It was well past dark when we got home, and Luke, Layla and I were all ready for dinner. As a recent victim of global warming (holes in lake ice usually freeze solid in hours this time of year and this hole had not solidified in over a day), my toes were a bit cold and my pants were frozen stiff, but a hot meal and a glass of wine made the perfect ending to our trip to the Barrow dog food store. It may have taken a little while longer and a few more people, but feeding the dogs here sure beats a trip to the florescent lights and pungent packages of the grocery store’s pet care isle, and it was a trip we won’t soon forget.

What it's all about

Like proud cultures everywhere, the Inupiat of northern Alaska portray their heritage in many ways, but they aren’t just remembering their heritage, they’re living it. Many high schools around the country have nicknames that honor those traditions, and the North Slope schools are no different. The nickname for the high school team in Barrow is the Whalers. In Point Hope, it’s the Harpooners. Bowhead whale skulls adorn the entrances to each school in town—a small one in front of the elementary school up to a twenty feet long, five-ton skull at the local college. Instead of a favorite sports team or labor union, local people have the names and flags of their whaling crew on the backs of their jackets. Around town, painted dumpsters sport depictions of bowhead whales and whale flukes. On the side of one dumpster, it reads, “Save the Bowhead…for dinner.”

In Barrow, life really does revolve around the subsistence whale hunt. Unlike the tri-corned hats in Williamsburg or the bead and blanket shops outside tribal casinos, the whale skulls and whalebone grave markers you see here are not reminders of a heritage past, but active parts of an ancient culture still alive in the present.

Before moving to Barrow, I, like most outsiders, thought of Inupiat whaling as a novelty, as something they did to honor tradition. I had been in Alaska a number of years before moving to Alaska’s farthest point north, but mostly urban Alaska. I thought of subsistence as a supplement to a “normal” diet, a way to eat cheaply, and to eat well. To me, the subsistence lifestyle meant carrying Alaska’s proud history of frontier independence into the internet and supermarket age. It was a nice touch, but that was all.

Even in Barrow, it took me until this weekend to really understand what a true subsistence lifestyle means to the people and communities who live it. It’s deeper than the holes it fills in their checkbooks or the facetious comments on dumpsters that make Greenpeace cringe. It’s deeper than words can adequately describe.

When I hear the North Slope Borough Mayor try to explain it to a gathering of oil industry and government officials, I wondered if his trouble describing the importance of subsistence, whales and otherwise, stemmed from a lack of suitable English words. Now, as I try myself, I know that if the words are there, I definitely don’t know what they are.

When I saw the smile on the successful whaling captain’s face and the enthusiastic cooperation of the crew members butchering 30 tons of meat in about as long as it would take me to butcher 30 salmon, I felt it. Like when Layla was pregnant, I’m not claiming to know what it means to be pregnant or to be a hundredth generation subsistence whaler, but I know that it’s more profound and deep than I can understand. The Mayor doesn’t need to find the words to explain it to me. I can never hope to know it, but now I get it.

There is no other culture left in our country which has as direct and active ties to its pre-Columban heritage than that of the Alaska Natives in the far north of Alaska. They may use aluminum boats with outboard motors for the fall whale hunt now, and bulldozers and forklifts to move them onto an abandoned military runway to butcher them, but using these modern conveniences has not taken the pride or meaning out of the hunt. And it has not made the hunt any less important to the hunters and their families than it was ages ago. It’s not just about the tradition or the fact that subsistence supplies eighty percent of their diet, it’s what connects them to each other, gives them identity, frames their rites of passage and otherwise defines the Inupiat as a people.


I can still see the reverence of their ancestors in the hunters and crew, which did include some young people, although I cannot help but feel that I am witnessing the last generations of a great culture. I fear that the constant currents of western life are carrying Inupiat youth away from this ancient culture on rafts of plastic and ephemeral satisfaction, and that the strong ties to the past are today facing their most daunting challenges on multiple fronts. The dozens of enthusiastic Inupiat helping to clean, portion and haul the three whales caught on Sunday still show the same connection to the whale as ever before. But with the constant and unstoppable pressure from outside sources like climate change, the incessant encroachment of oil drilling in their hunting grounds and the temptations of western life, history may well remember these Eskimos the last of the intact culture.


We arrived at the old steel plank airstrip just in time to see the forklift lower the first whale onto the rusty planks. The Navy built the airstrip with steel grids linked together over the natural gravel because no other hard surface could withstand the harsh environment. Just north of town, the old airfield sits on a spit that divides the Beaufort and Chikchi Seas as it projects north from mainland Alaska. A few dozen people were there when we got there to see the first whale of the season, and over the two hours it took to process the whale, more people would come and go.

A whaler paced anxiously around the whale with his long carving blade fastened to the end of a broom-length wooden pole. The instrument looked as if it had been handed down for generations, as it likely had, and seeing it in the weathered hands of the parka-clad man instantly made me forget the five ton yellow hydraulic forklift that had placed the whale in front of us. The sight propelled me back in time better than any sci-fi, time-travel movie could ever do. I reached out and touched the whale’s tail to beam me back to the present.

There were spectators, mostly locals and a few lucky tourists, but the event was anything but theater. After a prayer and a few photos of the captain and his family and crew, the captain made the first cut and the pragmatic dismantling began. The crew and a few others working for their share of the catch quickly allocated tasks and took to their jobs with business-like efficiency and head-down hard work. Bystanders soon realized they needed to give the crew plenty of room or they would be run over by six foot slabs of steaming maktak. That light bulb clicked for me early in the process when I looked up from my camera’s viewfinder to barking admonishments and four crewmembers in rubber boots and bloody Helly Hansens charging toward me. They drug their pink burden with ropes attached to medieval hooks. Two went to my left, and two to my right. In a move wrought of necessity and reminiscent of my childhood dodgeball days, I hurdled the spindly ropes and narrowly avoided an embarrassing and sure to be unpleasant face-down ride on the fatty sled. Pay attention and stay out of the way, son. These people are working.


It was a relatively warm day, probably in the mid-twenties, but after a couple hours I began to get cold. The wives and daughters of the crew boiled slices of the fresh maktak and fed it to the gracious workers, many of whom had shed their parkas and hats to keep themselves from overheating with all the work. I find maktak palatable, but after a couple hours of standing around only yards from two chilling arctic seas, I was hoping one someone would offer this gaper one of the steaming morsels of instant energy. No luck, and as it seemed to disappear from the tray as fast as she could bring it, I decided not to ask.

Some women cut maktak with their ulus, or “women’s knives,” and others worked the stoves. Two other women collected the whale’s intestines in large burlap sacks to be cleaned an served at the community feast that evening along with the tongue and kidneys. An elder man sat near the stoves with a file, sharpening the various cutting tools. One man explained to him that a notable hunter of a past generation gave him his adze-shaped butchering tool. The old man smiled as sharpening that blade had taken him back in time as well.

In all, the hunters landed three whales that day. Their sizes increased at almost perfect intervals with each new catch—26 feet, 37 feet and the last was 47 feet. Harry Brower Jr., Chairman of the Board for the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission got the first whale, and Jake Adams, former President of the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation got the second. The Mayor of the North Slope Borough, Edward Itta landed the third whale, which took two heavy duty forklifts and a bulldozer to slide the behemoth onto the airstrip.

Itta struck the great bowhead around mid-day, and the sun was setting around six o’clock when the heavy equipment brought it ashore. Onlookers took pictures and kids climbed onto the enormous whale while the Mayor hauled out his boat and drove to the scene. A cloud hid the last sun, and cold and fatigue (yeah, it was tiring just watching) set in for the three of us. We piled in the car just as the crew began to carve the first slats in the giant whale. The crew had plenty of work ahead of them, and the crowd had thinned, now composing of more spectators than helpers. Their enthusiasm and deliberate work would keep the crew going into the darkness, but we needed some dinner. Even after being here almost a year, I was glad to have been able to take a brief glimpse into an age-old culture still fighting to stay alive today.

Here are some more photos of the day...warning, some are a bit bloody...