WEAVER FAMILY: A Busy Day of Flying - We walked into Nome and Unalalkeet, and slept at Emmonack.

June 29 (Emmonack)

Well, it all worked out this morning, thankfully! I woke up at 7 – Roger had been awake earlier but was kind enough not to wake me! We loaded up all the luggage into the plane, and he took off for a private strip about a 10 minute flight away, leaving me behind to pick up later. He wanted to go when it was pretty cool so the aircraft would perform better. He got off ok, and within a half hour was back again to pick me up and off we went with no problem. If he wouldn’t have gotten back for whatever reason, we had a plan with Travis that if he didn’t hear from us by 8 pm tonight, he (or someone) was supposed to come looking for us, since we had no communication to file a flight plan. This place at the hot springs had no phone or any way to connect with anyone of course, so we wanted a back-up plan in case something would have gone wrong. Then we flew back to where he had dropped the luggage. Since it was a private airstrip the guy there wasn’t entirely happy about him landing there, but after Roger explained he was very nice. Roger had an interesting chat with the fellow. He was actually working an old dilapidated gold dredge that has been digging away since the gold rush according to him. The only time it was shut down was during WWII. As usual there is an airplane sitting there which they use to get in and out of. On the way to Nome we say many small gold digging operations – the closer we got the more we saw. Apparently since the price of gold has gotten so high there are more and more people heading to the hills to dig or pan for gold. We then flew on to Nome, AK where we fueled and walked over a mile into town and ate lunch at ‘Airport Pizza’, and had some wonderful burgers. We got internet there so did some flight planning and computer stuff, returning phone messages, etc. It is amazing there the internet is accessible at many of these villages, but no phone service. Then back to the plane, and we took off for a couple of different strips that Roger had flown into when he lived up here in 1983 for a summer and flew out of St. Mary’s. Basically we just did ‘touch & go’ stops (not coming to a full stop on the run-way, but touching and then going up again). He just wanted to see the villages, and it seemed to him that they were smaller than he remembered – at least some of them. The biggest building in the village is always the school, which the government has provided for them.

We ended up at the village of Emmonack and decided to stop there and camp for the night. We set up our little tent in the grass behind the airplane and crawled in. The tent is a 2 person tent, but if you know how big that is, it really isn’t supposed to fit two adults – not six feet adults anyway. It’s a tight fit, but has done the trick. There was no running water at the hangar, and the toilet was a bucket with a plastic bag in it and a wooden toilet seat on top. They have an incinerator thing there they burn it in every day – at least that’s what the sign said. There was a bit of a breeze blowing, so the mosquitoes weren’t too bad, thankfully. JOLENE