Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
— 49 —
Kotz
I ATE KING CRAB
fresh out of the water, I walked on the sands of a mini-Sahara Desert forty
miles north of the Arctic Circle, I saw a snow machine speeding across an unfrozen lagoon,
and I went to bed at midnight with the sun still high up in the sky.
And that was just my first day in Kotzebue, to which friends Lynda Hadley and Sarah
Scanlon have invited me to celebrate the Fourth of July holiday, along with their husbands
and kids, at Sarah's sister Red's house on the Kotzebue lagoon.
Aside from me never turning down an invitation to the Bush, I have a personal agenda.
Kotzebue is where you go to get to the Great Kobuk Sand Dunes. A mini-Sahara created by
eons of glacial grind in the middle of almost two million acres of Kobuk Valley National
Park, it was a place my father, a bush pilot, and I had always planned to barnstorm across
country to visit. He died before we could, so when Lynda and Sarah invited me up the first
thing I asked was, “Who can take me to the sand dunes?”
It turns out that Kotzebue is why God invented bush pilots. Literally the moment I get
off the jet from Anchorage, Lynda steers me through the maze of airplanes and air taxi out-
fits at the Kotzebue airport to Northwestern Air, run for umpteen years by bush pilot and
certified Alaskan old fart Jim Rood. Jim says hi and without further ado bundles me into a
Cessna 206 on tundra tires with my pilot, a tall, cool drink of water named John St. Ger-
main, and we're in the air heading east five minutes later. I barely have time to pee.
We cross Hotham Inlet and the delta of the Kobuk River, a tortured tangle of ever-chan-
ging channels between sandy, silty banks, and fly down the southern edge of the Kobuk
Hills. It is unmistakably Arctic terrain, taiga (with trees) and tundra (without), all of it go-
ing on forever. John regales me with stories of villagers who head out on snow machines in
