After a month in Barrow and a quick trip to Peru, I shipped off to Kotzebue, Alaska, my new “permanent” pilot base. Kotzebue’s native name is,
Qikiqtaġruk. Good luck pronouncing that. Kotzebue is ethnically Inupiat. I was scheduled to fly 18 days, but since I was burnt out on travelling, it was the best time of year to fly, and I wanted to grow my beard out I picked up an extra shift in Bethel which would make it 46 days in a row working in bush Alaska.
We have 5 planes scheduled to run at any one time in Kotzebue, 3 caravans and 2 navajos. So we have 5 pilots to fly those planes. Most recently the captains have been me, Zac, Sam, Andy, and Brent. We stay at the pilot house and spend 24/7 together. It is quite rare for there to be an issue between the pilots as we are all inherently relaxed people.
The entire 18 days in Kotzebue were nothing but sunshine and good vibes. There were no flights in billowing clouds, no icing, and no approaches down into the grimey bush tundra.
My copilot Jake and I worked our little pilot butts off and flew over 100 hours and delivered countless metric tons of pop to the surrounding villages. We also delivered all of our passengers safely and (mostly) happily.
However, being bush Alaska, we got to fly our fair share of whacked out passengers and got to play, “drunk, or just that way?” most days with help from the girls behind the counter. As pilots we cannot legally take passengers that are intoxicated so if we figure that they are we leave them behind for them to sober up. We carried a stab victim and caught countless bags stacked with drugs and booze being shipped to the villages. In Alaska it is illegal to have alcohol in a lot of the smaller villages so people can buy a $10 bottle in Anchorage and sell it for upwards of $300 if they can get it to the village.
One very defining feature around the Kotzebue area are the, “Gread Kobuk Sand Dunes.” They are enormous dunes seemingly in the middle of nowhere, formed by the glaciers of the last ice age. They are the largest active dunes in the arctic.
Because planes break sometimes there was a good 2 days in the middle of shift where I had the only working plane, so I flew from sunup to sundown grinding for the people of Alaska.
My favorite destination around Kotzebue is Red Dog Mine. We fly the miners in and out of the zinc mine there on charters and they give up donuts when we stop in!
Towards the end of my stint in Kotzebue, the clouds started forming, we had our first dusting of snow, and I was happy to head down further south to Bethel to continue my 46 days of work.
