Getting There is Half the Fun!

This past weekend, I had the pleasure of making a winter-time visit to the islands…. Okay, the islands of southeast Alaska anyway. Specifically, I traveled to the village of Hydaburg on Prince of Wales Island.

Each year, I volunteer with a program based in Anchorage which provides free tax preparation services to the residents of rural Alaskan villages. I have been lucky enough to visit several rural villages that most people will never have a chance to experience. Among these are the villages of Grayling, Holy Cross, Hooper Bay, Chevak, and Newtok. Last year, I spent a week village-hopping around Kodiak Island and visited Old Harbor, Akhiok, Port Lions, Larsen Bay, and Ouzinkie. This year, I’m scheduled for 2 weekend trips: this one to Hydaburg and a trip to Mekoryuk on Nunivak Island in a couple weeks.

If there are universities offering a degree in Logistics, I think one of the degree requirements should involve making a weekend trip to Hydaburg in the winter. Our journey began early Friday morning at the Anchorage airport. My tax-preparing travel companion and I met at the check-in desk at 6:30am only to discover that portions of our flight had been cancelled and we wouldn’t actually be departing till 10am. On the plus side, this meant we would be flying directly to Ketchikan, bypassing stops in Sitka and Juneau due to high winds (VERY common for those cities). But, on the other hand, had we known about this, we might have slept a couple more hours instead of waking up at 4:45am! Oh well.

Once our flight departed (finally at 11am), it was a couple hour flight on a 747 to Ketchikan. With the rapidly changing weather in that region, it’s usually hit or miss whether you’ll make it in there or not. Our pilot announced early on in the flight that the conditions in Ketchikan had improved a bit. They weren’t nearly as “crappy” as they had been a couple hours before. Now, they were just the “normal crappy conditions for flying into Ketchikan”. Comforting.

In the end, we made it into Ketchikan smooth as silk. The folks there claimed they hadn’t had that nice a weather day in a very long time. It was our lucky day! And, a good thing, too, as upon landing, we immediately boarded a floatplane to take us over to the little city of Craig on Prince of Wales Island. From there, we were met by our Hydaburg village contact and driven by car the remaining 35 miles to our destination.

It should be known that I get motion sick on elevators if I’m going up more than a couple floors… So, for a trip such as this, I make sure I’m well drugged and carry extra along, just in case!

We spent about 38 hours in Hydaburg. During that time, we had the opportunity to explore the village on foot. We visited the village store, the City Dock, the carving shed, school, and totem pole park. Hydaburg has the largest collection of Alaska Native totem poles. I met a couple of totem pole carvers there. They told me that totem poles were used as documentation when the Haida tribe didn’t have a written language. A totem pole may be carved for a potlatch, or to commemorate some other important person or event.

The village of Hydaburg came to be 100 years ago when 3 other Haida villages further south on Prince of Wales Island were relocated and combined into a single village. The Haida population had dwindled from close to 15,000 down to a few hundred. And, to make better use of resources, including a school, the small populations were combined. The current population of Hydaburg is around 400.

Early Sunday morning, we were driven 45 minutes away to the Inter-Island Ferry Terminal in Hollis. Since the weather is often not conducive to small plane flight, the 3-hour ferry to Ketchikan is a more reliable, if slower, alternative. The problem is, once you figure out that your flight can’t fly, you’ve already missed the morning ferry by several hours. In years past, the volunteer groups have always gotten stranded without a flight out and been obligated to stay another night in beautiful southeast Alaska. This year, we just booked the morning ferry right from the get go to eliminate the chance of getting stuck on the island. As it turns out, the weather was fine for both the ferry ride and small plane flights.

Once back on the mainland in Ketchikan, we had a few hours before our evening flight back to Anchorage. We explored the town by bus and on foot. Ketchikan is a cruise ship destination. So there are a multitude of touristy shops. But, on a Sunday in the off-season, none of these are open. The fact that it was Super Bowl Sunday meant that at least every bar in town was open for business. Upon the referral of the bus driver, we settled ourselves at Annabelle’s for some yummy food and football.

We only got to watch about the 1st quarter before making our way to the airport. We actually caught the half-time show while we boarded our return flight to Anchorage. Ideally, our flight would fly directly from Ketchikan to Anchorage. This would’ve taken about 2 hours. Unfortunately, the weather was good enough in both Sitka and Juneau for us to make the scheduled stops in those cities. So the flight home was more like riding an oversized bus with wings where people got off and on at various stops. What might’ve taken 2 hours stretched into a 5 hour saga of pretzel-like dozing and perpetual seat swapping.

In the end, we spent about 26 hours in transit so we could spend 38 hours actually IN the village of Hydaburg. But you know what they say, “getting there is half the fun”!

If you'd like to see more photos from this trip, you can find them at:

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