On Wednesday evening we had a wonderful evening at the home of the Glenn family. We heard lots of stories of life in Barrow and sampled mutuk (whale meat) both raw and pickled . Overall opinion pretty favorable although it doesn't have a strong flavor(except for the pickled version which tastes of pickle). The texture is a bit like eating octopus or squid -sort of chewy. The Glenns also took us out to visit their ice cellar and dressed us up in handmade parkas for fun and to brave the cold in the cellar.
The cellar was quite incredible- hand dug in their back yard, it goes down about 20 feet into the permafrost and at the bottom widens to about 10foot square.You climb down a ladder into colder and colder air.The walls are rock hard -of frozen gravel and mud- and of course stay frozen all year round so they can store the huge lumps of whale meat.The cellar is currently empty because Richard Glenn's crew didn't get a whale this spring.
Here are some of the Glenn family plus a frozen fish in the bottom of the ice cellar.
Today we had a tour of the Barrow Utility company and found out all about the water, sewage and electricity. The cool thing was another hole we got to climb down -this time into the Utillidor system which is the system of tunnels through the permafrost that carry the water and sewage pipes underneath the town.The tunnels are lined with wood from the trees that were downed by the Mt St.Helens volcano.
The tunnels have warm air pumped through them to keep them at about 40degrees so the pipes don't freeze and the water is a continuous circulation through the town also to prevent freezing. Barrow sits on a natural gas reservoir so heat and electricity is cheap but they still have power outages from downed lines and in the winter this can cause big problems if the power is out for long since the water pipes will freeze up since they can't be kept warm and the water moving. They have special heating trucks they use in the winter that blast hot air over the pipes they are servicing to prevent them from freezing. Water comes from one of the lagoons in town and is purified with state of the art equipment.Trash goes into a landfill which used to be just on the edge of town but now is further out.
It rained today and everywhere was mud.The roads are just gravel and are continually being smoothed out by graders.
On dry days water trucks come round spraying the surface to keep the dust down.
There are dumpsters all over the place that are painted bright colors. We learned from Joe who joined us for breakfast today and has lived in Barrow since he was a kid that his daughter had organized the program of dumpster murals painting to involve many of the Barrow kids.
Our final meal out was with Anne Jenson and Glenn Sheehan. We went to the Arctic Thai restaurant and had one of the best Thai meals I've tasted-all freshly cooked and served by just one man. Anne and Glenn entertained us with more tales of Barrow and the North slope region particularly about archaeology since they have been involved with most of the digs in the area including the Nuvuk dig we went to on Tuesday.
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