 and hard times. My name is Ken Burtness and I'm coming to you from Haleiva out at the North Shore of O'ahu and today we have a very special program that I'm sure that you'll enjoy called the joy of Alaska. And my special guest is my cousin, Mary Burtness, who's a teacher and a long time resident of Alaska. In fact, Mary's been there 41 years, almost as long as I've been in Hawaii. And she's got lots of pictures to show us and lots of stories. So welcome to the show, Mary. It's just great having you back. It is fun to be back again, Ken. The thing about, you know, I think a lot of people in the audience don't think of necessarily of Alaska and Hawaii together, but we are what I call sister states. We have so much in common. For instance, we're the two only non contiguous states in America. We both have a great ancestral heritage here that we call upon. We're both very interested in helping people and protecting our environment. In Hawaii, we call it the aloha spirit. And in Alaska, they call it the frontier spirit. There's just so much, especially the beauty. You know, I've been in Hawaii, like I said, a long time and I spent a lot of time on the islands that we can go to. And I've seen a lot, but there is so much I haven't seen. And I'm guessing that's the same for you, Mary, because I know that Mary's been, you know, all over the state. And she's going to take us on a joy ride to see all those spots. And I'm really looking forward to it. So, Mary, let me turn things over to you. Thank you, Ken. Yeah. Alaska too being, you know, much larger than Texas even. So, yes, there's a lot to see. And there's very few, that's very little access. The road system is very small compared to the entire state. So there's lots of traveling around via boat and airplane, small airplanes. So it's been really wonderful because after I have retired, I've been able to go to some of those farther outplaces that I had never been to before. So just a little bit background. I landed in Alaska in July of 1982 and in Northway, which is 50 miles over the Canadian border. And then I moved to Fairbanks from 1986 to 1989, which is smack dab in the center of the state. And then we moved out to King Salmon, which is at the top of the Alaska Peninsula, that peninsula that goes out into the Aleutian chain. We lived there till 2001. And then we moved back to Fairbanks and I'm still here. We retired in 2016 and it was time to see more of Alaska. So if you want to show that first picture, I can kind of talk about my journey. This is a picture of me in 1982. This was my Christmas postcard to everyone, but I'm at a roadside and I'm looking over the Tatelyn National Wildlife Refuge and way out there is Northway. And I was trying to decide, is this where I can live? Because when I thought I, when I was coming up, I said, oh, I'll live in Anchorage. That shouldn't be such a big adjustment for me. But I ended up in Northway and I have friends from there, from that period of time till today. I was totally immersed in the Athabaskan culture. The town was mostly Athabaskan natives and it was a town of 150 people and I taught preschool and speech therapy. So that was my first spot that I was at. So we might go to the next slide and this is where I live today. We have a little house, not, not but five miles from Fairbanks. This is our front yard and we like to feed the animals and once in a great while we have these great big moose come in and decide that they're going to eat the bird food. We love Fairbanks. It's a university town. It also has a couple of Army bases here, Army and Air Force base. So it's, it's kind of a hub. So it has lots of opportunities for culture and, and shopping, shopping for your needs and things. So and then we spend a lot of time camping and hiking and canoeing and this picture happens to be in Tangle Lakes. It's about 200 miles south of here and a series of lakes and that's kind of the vegetation you see. And this was in June when we got snowed on on that trip, but we spend a lot of time camping. So it's a kind of a scenery of that one of our trips in the, in the middle of the state. Snowed in June. Wow. Yeah. You could expect it. And I had a friend who was so excited because he's, it's never snowed on his birthday before and it was August 23rd, I think. So yeah, we, we can have snow. It didn't stick around, but we have snow probably in the interior, you know probably the end of September all the way through April. And I think what people don't, when they think of Alaska, they they don't realize that we have so many different climates. I mean the southeast they rarely get snow and it's rainy and the way north it's always snowy. So it's very, very different. So it's very interesting. The one thing that I really liked about being in the interior and I was a station at a small mountain just north of Fairbanks and the one thing I loved about the climate change was that the fact that the cold was very cold, but it was a dry cold and I don't do too well with windshield, but in Fairbanks or above Fairbanks, even though the year I was there it got to 59 below zero, you were comfortable and they told me when I went in that that was dangerous because you could stand outside and you could feel fairly comfortable and you could just sort of go to sleep in 15 minutes and die because it was so cold. So I made sure that I had at least six layers of clothes on me when I went outside, but I loved the dry cold, but that was terrific. Yeah, it is really pleasant. We lived out in Bristol Bay in the Aleutians and it was very windy there and I was more uncomfortable and cold in that climate than I ever was in the interior. And a story I learned in a tip I learned in Northway was I always walked to school. We rarely started our vehicles because it was really a cold spot. It was a sink and I always knew it was 40 below or colder because when I blinked my eyes they would freeze shut and I'd have to hold them really, really, really tight to belt them and then open them wide and hold them as wide as they could for as long as they could. That's amazing. My temperature gauge, yes. Yeah, yeah. So if you want to go to the next slide I can continue. We're only about 90 miles north of Denali National Park. I'm sure a lot of people have heard of Denali and we can actually see Denali in Fairbanks many, many days, but here we were able to drive into the state and a lot of people come to see the mountain but only 30% of the people, you'll have a 30% chance of seeing the mountain on any given day and this is what we got to see it one day and it was a lottery day where we could drive in and Ken you got to take one of those trips with us. Yeah, for sure and it was just incredible. I also took a trip down there in 67 when I was there and in 67 we could get a lot closer and I did have one day that I could see the top Denali is so high. It used to be of course Mount McKinley but Denali's a much better name for it it's so high that it always has a cloud cap on it and you know, but those few days when it's open it's spectacular. It's just amazing. And as a local you always want to be as you're heading to Anchorage you want to be on the right hand side of the plane because they fly by it so if no one else on the ground can see it, you can see it in the air and likewise when you travel back up you want to be on the left hand side to see it and it's you never get tired of it. Never get tired of it. Yeah, so I'm sure there's places in Hawaii too that are like that. Well, I drive out to Mount Kahala you know when I'm coming from North Shore to the South Shore I go central and I'm always headed straight toward Mount Kahala and most of the days that's got a cloud cap on it too and it's only less little less than 4,000 feet so but we get lots of clouds as you do too so I sort of think of Denali when I see Mount Kahala with its cloud cap and think yeah, okay. Something you always want to get a glimpse of. Yeah. Yeah, so I'll go on to the next slide. Subsistence is very important to Alaskans. We do a lot of fishing and hunting and berry picking and gathering of vegetation and stuff and this is a picture of my daughter Katie and we're on the Copper River and the Copper River is oh I think it's I think it's like an eight hour trip from Fairbanks and you go down and you have this huge net which is probably about two and a half feet circumference and you dip it into that water when you can't see a thing and you wait for it to bump and you pull up a fish and she had pulled up this fish and if you can see she has a life vest on and she's also tied off with a rope because if you fall in this river as you can see it's pretty rapid you would be gone in a second. There's no survival so this is kind of a challenging fishery but we usually get 20 to 30 fish a year and very much instilled that lifestyle with our children who both moved back here but that's a picture of Katie with a Chinook salmon. And then again subsistence is really important and here we are down by Ketchikan on Prince of Wales Island and there's Halibut and Coho and Cod there. Friends of ours took us out fishing and that was really wonderful because that's really down on the Panhandle. It's the last city or the last city in town in Alaska as you're heading to Seattle on the Panhandle. Beautiful. We hit a lot of blue days. It's usually pretty gray and rainy though. I think I'm thinking they get like 60 inches of rain a year so it's a pretty rainy area. The southeast is very different different Native groups, different history different lifestyles very very different than the rest of the state. And the capital is down there too right? Juno yes, Juno is. That always seems strange to me but Juno is the capital being so far away from most of Alaska How did that, well any thoughts on that? Well I think that's where the Russians were at Sitka and so it was kind of the central part of the state at the very beginning. There was mostly commerce. It was an easy place to get from from Seattle and so I think that's where it ended up being established that's where the first territorial governors were and and then Anchorage kind of came about later so I think the population was down there to begin with and then everything started moving more north especially because of the gold and you know the military etc yeah so yeah and they have tried so many times to move it and it just it just never did and now that we have such good communication there's no attempt at all to move it anymore Well politics is very slow moving wherever you're at. That certainly makes a lot of sense to me yeah well and when I first moved here Alaska was in four time zones Juno was four hours different from way over in Nome at the other end of the state yeah and then they changed it shortly after I moved here in the 80s because of our sunlight because it's so dark in the winter and so light in the summer daylight savings time one place to the next it didn't matter so we're all one time zone now and it made it really hard for politics and business so that's why that's part of the reason they changed it those are two areas that drive everything that we have basically the politics and the business yes and the next slide is another picture of the panhandle this is at the very top in Haynes and our daughter Frana lived there for a while and we went down to visitor several times and we're out kayaking out on the gets a chill cat bay so and the mountains are all around and this is that skyline that dark gray is much more characteristic of the panhandle people living on the coast have a very different type of subsistence lifestyle and much more tuned into tides so and when we were in in Bristol Bay and I don't have any pictures of Bristol Bay and King salmon we used to subsistence fish too with a net you stick out a net and low tide and then the tide would come in and it would get socked with fish and then the tide would go out and then you'd have your fish so very different as one thing I've always admired about you and Jeff and your family is that when you go out with your fishing or hunting it's all subsistence there's no hunting just for the sport it's hunting for to eat and you eat everything that you you know it comes back with you and that's always you know I think that's just great you know it just never made any sense to me to hunt just for the joy of eliminating fish or animals or whatever so and you share when you get a moose you share it you know because it's you know it's you get a lot of fish you share it yeah that's part of it too so okay next slide this is now we're going to kind of go around the stated up to the top but this is we were fortunate enough to be a friend of ours has a small plane and you travel a lot around a small plane in the state and this just happens to be in a March it was in March beautiful spring weather and we're flying out of Valdez and this is the Chugach range which is not too far from Anchorage and we flew all the way over to Columbia Glacier but it's pretty spectacular to be flying on the mountain tops and seeing this is all glaciers up here this is an ice field so we felt very fortunate to have such a gorgeous day that day. What's an ice field like I mean it makes me think of a skating rink but I'm sure that's not the case. Ice field just means it's total glaciers and so then the fingers of the glaciers are going down between the mountains so the Columbia Glacier comes off an ice field so really it's just a huge plate of ice that's thousands and thousands of years old. But you're not likely if you're on top of it if you're not likely to break through and drown in the you know like the pictures we see in the movies you know if you're somebody skating on the ice and the ice breaks and they fall down and die I assume that this ice is pretty thick and pretty strong well this ice is made from compaction of snow it has nothing to do with water it's mountain tops underneath so it's just compacted snow you know it just weight of the snow turns it into an ice field which is the glacier. I'm sure you'd land on top of a mountain that exactly. There you go. Okay and the next stop is this is in Prince William Sound this is South East of Anchorage it's one of the most beautiful sounds that I've ever been in it's huge this is where the oil spill was so long ago outside Valdes all this area was very much impacted by that oil spill but this is the town of Cordova and we've been there a couple times visiting friends fishing it's a gorgeous area rode a ferry over to this one. So it's pretty well recovered from the oil spill? Yes people can still see some evidence all the fish and the animals are back yes the economic part is just about there they've exxon Valdes has pushed all the giving out of money for so long that many of the people have passed away that should be getting it so it's still in the courts but yes it was quite an impact and the next slide see we're getting down in time this is the Matanuska Glacier I'll show you that that glacier should have been where I was taking the picture it's just slowly receding and this one we were able to walk all the way up to the toe of it and glaciers just are amazing and this glacier does go up to that same ice field that I was flying above several hundred miles away but it's the same ice field and the next picture slide now we're down in the Aleutian chain we had the fortune to fly down to Dutch Harbor which is halfway down the Aleutian chain and the Aleutian chain is long I think it's a couple thousand miles long and almost goes to Japan and we're on the ferry and we had beautiful skies and this is a tiny little village in the Aleutian chain called Chignik and the Aleutians are all volcanic so a lot of them are pretty cone-like or like this one obviously had blown at some point in time but it was a beautiful trip and the next slide now we're way up in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and a friend of ours who guided up there forever now only goes up there once a year and he takes a bunch of friends and you land in the middle of nowhere it was probably like an hour or small plane to Arctic Village and then another small bush pilot came and picked us up and we flew another hour and a half up into the Brooks Range and we spent ten days here just hiking around and we saw quite a few caribou but it's very you know very little vegetation lots of mountains that have no vegetation just straight rock and the next picture is the antlers tell us about the I love the picture of the antlers in front of that those are caribou I assume yes caribou both the male and female have antlers and they drop them every year so you see antlers all over the tundra thank you and the next one this is actually the Hall Road and if you could see way off in the distance that's the infamous pipeline and over that hill it goes into the Arctic slope which is like a hundred miles and then you hit the Arctic Ocean and it's Proudou Bay the oil fields are up there but again this is the Brooks Range so there's no trees and just tundra and a lot of bare rock but this is in July so there was no sunsets here it was just sun all the time so it was spectacular it's hard to imagine you know with how beautiful a place can be without trees because I love trees they're one of my passions but the Brooks Range was always very ethereal you know the pictures I saw but I always wanted to go up there and never had a chance so I'm looking to my next lifetime to spend some more time in Alaska and see the Brooks Range because it was incredible I thought it's very exciting it's very fun to hike around there because you never get lost because you can always see everywhere and you can see the bears from far away so you know know to be prepared how do you prepare for bears? well you get your bear spray out you give your with a group of people you get together so you look like you're a large group of people or you try to go in the different opposite directions so terrific in the last slide was my most recent trip which is pretty exciting it's out it was out in Kotzebue a small NUPEC village of Kotzebue and we were out she fishing and this is actually the Kotzebue Sound which is right on the Bering Sea and this is in Maine you can actually be running snow machines all over the place and we got about 115 pounds of she fish people were out subsistence fishing so I'd never done anything like that before but it was just amazing to have such expense flat expanse of snow and it was pretty warm I mean you had to have gear on but it was mostly for the speed of the snow machines so that's my Alaska all right well when I was in the Air Force you know I was a weapon control I worked with planes and we flew them all over the state including out to the Bering Sea and I was going to ask you because that's the reason we were out we were sending our aircraft over to the Bering Sea was to watch the Russians and the Russians were on the other side watching us sometimes we went a little bit over there and sometimes they went a little bit over here and luckily it was the 60s and we were on friendly terms with them nobody was shooting at anything we were just taking pictures of each other but I was wondering on that last slide can you see the Bering Sea from Katsubu I mean the the Russian side of the Bering Sea no no because it would it would just be a diameter the two diametes that you would actually see Russia and that's a little farther north you know we're pretty far from Katsubu it's it's maybe about it's about I think it's about 20 miles or so over the Arctic the Arctic Circle but then and then there's probably another 100 miles to the the ocean and then farther up is where Russia is closer you want to go there and wave at the Russians you have to go much further than north and you do Mary we're running short of time and my last question for you was a real quickie you've seen so much but if you're like me you want to see more of you know your state that you love if you're going to take it when is your next trip into places in Alaska that you haven't been before and can you describe what's on your wish list for those new places that you haven't seen yet I'd have to go to Nome which is a little farther south than Udavik because there's a lot of good birding there I've never been to Udavik which is the whole name used to be Barrow, Pactovik those are all way up on the north you know there's the Kobak Valley which wasn't too far from Katsubu that I never knew about I'd love to go there I wouldn't mind going back down to the Aleutians oh my goodness there's too many places Ken we're just about out of time so I just want to thank you so much for bringing your pictures and your stories and yourself to tell us a little bit about Alaska a place that I really love as well and I just thank you for sharing all that wow thanks for bringing me I sure enjoy doing these encounters with you and I want to thank everybody at Think Tech of Hawaii of course I want to thank Michael and Jay and Haley and Carol and everybody and most of all I'd like to thank the people who are listening in and are watching this and I hope that you really enjoy this because I certainly did my next show is going to be in 2024 the first week of January will I'll be on and back again to talk about finding more happiness in the times that well finding more happiness in 2024 I'll see you then aloha