Lindsey Wells |
NOORVIK—In early January 2010, our boys and girls basketball teams visited Yakutat for a tournament, but we experienced much more than just basketball. This amazing Tlingit village of about 800 residents lies about 212 miles northwest of Juneau and 225 miles southeast of Cordova in southeast Alaska. In Tlingit, Yakutat means “a place where the canoes rest.”
Our basketball team is from Noorvik, which lies above the Arctic Circle clear on the other side of the state in Northwest Alaska. Noorvik gets much less rain. Yakutat, which on average receives Alaska’s heaviest precipitation every year, was quite a change for us.
Noorvik has no Sitka spruce or Western hemlock trees, which grow to enormous heights around Yakutat. Two massive glaciers also sit near the village. In fact, the Malaspina Glacier is larger than the state of Rhode Island. Yakutat’s Hubbard Glacier is the world’s largest tidewater glacier. Just the melting of Hubbard has created the largest dammed lake ever recorded. Yakutat is world-famous for its many natural wonders.
According to Wikipedia, in 1805 the first settlers built a fort in Yakutat to harvest sea otter pelts. The Tlingits living there weren’t allowed to fish, so a war broke out that drove out the settlers. In 1884, an Alaskan company built a store there. In 1903, a cannery, sawmill, store, and railroad were built and attracted many people to settle there. During World War II, an aviation garrison and runway were constructed. This runway is still used today.
While we were in Yakutat, we got a rare chance to visit the beach. Fellow Noorvik student Joe and I sat in the back of a truck covered in big, fluffy jackets. The temperature was mild, unlike temperatures in the northern part of Alaska this time of year. On the way, we saw at least 30 eagles in the trees.
Once our basketball team arrived at the beach, we all jumped out of the truck and raced for an old World War II canon sitting in the trees. Next, we darted into the trees along a mossy path to an old U.S. Army tank from the same war. We climbed all over the tank while our coaches, chaperone, and tour guides generously snapped photo after photo for everyone with a digital camera.
Our coaches allowed my friend Joe and me to visit the beach. We walked on a stone path to a long and colorful stretch of sand with shades of pink, purple, green, orange, brown, and black. We also walked quite a ways toward the water before it reached at least to our knees. The massive waves kept crashing onto the shore. The sun also shimmered on the water, making everything it hit gleam. I thought how different the landscape is along the Northwest Alaska’s Kobuk River than almost a thousand miles away in Southeast.
I decided to run along the beach all by myself. I flipped off my shoes and headed for the water, its ice cold instantly numbing my feet. Suddenly my teammates appeared from the nearby forest. They all scurried towards the water and began to play with the waves. They would sprint towards the water when the waves receded; they’d scramble back away from them when each wave would crash onto the sand and rocks. I soon became exhausted and took a walk by myself. I wrote “Lindsey” in huge letters in the sand.
On the way back to the local school, our driver drove us around the village. He showed us the first totem pole, at more than 100 years old, ever made in Yakutat. This village offers a stunning view of Mount Saint Elias, an 18,000-foot monster that straddles the border of Canada and the United States.
 In the Eskimo culture, they don’t have cultural possessions like totem poles, which designate various clans. The Eskimos and the Tlingits differ in many ways. It was a culture worth learning about, and a culture worth experiencing.
Lyndsey Wells is a high school senior in Noorvik. She plans to attend the University of Alaska Anchorage in the fall. This story is distributed by Chukchi News and Information Service, a cultural journalism project of Chukchi College, the Kotzebue branch of UA Fairbanks. The project will publish its second anthology, “Purely Alaska: Authentic Voices from the Far North,” in June.
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