Stephen King Novel?

Well last friday much to my frustration I showed up to work and was told to go home and pack a bag, I was going to be going to Cold Bay, AK again. I have been down there 5 times now and can pretty much teach most the people at the Air Station about it (most people only go once a year, I've been 5 times in 3 months) Lucky Me!! Little did I know that it would be one of the weirdest deployments I have been on.

We flew down to Cold Bay on a C130 and got there around 8pm friday night. After unloading all of our necessities (clothes, food, fishing gear, ect.) we settled in to what we were hoping was going to be a nice quite weekend waiting for the "big call".

Sidenote: We have lodging at the "Trooper house" in Cold Bay. We don't stay at the only lodge there anymore, we stay at the Alaska State trooper house where we have to cook our own meals, and get to drive around their truck. Quite entertaining since there is only 58 full time residents there.

Back to the trip, Saturday was quite nice, we organized the hanger for the upcoming deployments out here, and then relaxed and went fishing. We didn't end up catching the much sought silver salmon, but caught a ton of dolly varden. They're kind of like trout but fight more like a salmon. The rest of the crew managed to entertain themselves as you can see in the picture above. Sunday we ended up sitting around, thought we saw a plane crash (the winds were howling, 50kts) and mostly wasted the day away. About the time we were going to head out fishing again the phone rang. We were tasked with picking up an 80 year old lady that was very sick from a remote village. The kicker was that the village was 500 miles further down the Aluetian chain, and we had to take her 100 miles past there.

I remind you back to the 50kt winds, yeah they were coming from the direction that we needed to go. It was painfully slow going. We made a stop in Dutch Harbor (from the Deadliest Catch fame) and then went to Atka where we picked her up. The village was so small that the only lights visible in the village were from the runway. We picked her up with no problem and made it to Adak around midnight where we transfered her to guardian flight bound for Anchoarage.

Well Adak, that's where the title of this post comes from. Adak really shouldn't even be a town. It's an old navy base that the navy vacated back in 1996 and turned it over to the Native corp. The base used to house 6000 people, it's now home to 120 full time residents. They live in the old housing, and have turned over the highschool as the town center to include the post office, clinic, school, town offices, general store. Very weird. There's all this infrustructure and only 120 people. The houses all sit idle, and the story is that some of the houses look like the previous residents just up and left, coffee cups still on the kitchen tables. Many are beat up and the windows are broken, and the yards are drastically overgrown. It looks like the apocolyps happened and there is only a handfull of people left. It was very creepy, we kept waiting for the zombies to come out of the old houses.

We ended up having to stay until dinner time the next day as our helo was broke and parts had to be flown in. While we waited we explored the base, and pretended to run the Alaska Airlines counter. I think when the flights run, they actually have the flight crew do the booking and screening and then leave. Even they don't want to stay here.

Monday night we finally made back to Cold Bay and the trooper house. We were actually happy to be back there. To make the week even weirder, we rode out a 6.6 earthquake just prior to leaving where the house shook so much we thought it may fall down.

Luckily on our way home we got to see a pod(herd, group, whatever it's called) of walrus on the beach, and collected over 400 glass balls off the beach (usually you only find a couple at once). So after thinking that we were going to be forever lost in Adak, or found in Stephen King's newest novel we made it home and are very happy to be back. Hope everyone enjoys the pictures and stay tuned for more updates.

Jason