So, the big surprise from last weekend was our trip out to St. Lawrence Island and the native village of Gambell. We flew out Friday afternoon with the intention to return back to Nome on Saturday afternoon. We were going to see Dave & Mitzi Shinen who are Wycleff Translators in the village. Dave & Mitzi are also family friends from my early childhood, they became my “Godparents” of sorts and we’ve kept up for the past 20 years. Dave and Mitzi have been involved with this translating project for nearly 40 years now and have just a few to go. We learned that hauling water to your house from a central water location a mile away and ‘honey bucket’ toilets really make Gambell life unique.

We had a great time talking and catching up. Dave showed us a video of a Gambell whaling crew from a few years ago… very cool. When Saturday afternoon rolled around there was no flight back to Nome. The Sunday morning flight got cancelled, as well as the Sunday evening, and the first Monday morning flight. We were marooned 30 miles from Russia for a few extra days than planned… but really enjoyed ourselves. We were even able to see across the dateline & view Russia on the plane ride home.

Today’s photoblog picture is of a group of cruise ship passengers that are getting a tour of an Iditarod dog lot. The lot belongs to Nils Hann and is just right across the street from KICY. There have been about four or five cruises that have ported in Nome this summer, and with regular tourism down this year the red carpet is rolled out for our sea-legged guests.

Lydia & I are headed out of town for the weekend….check back early next week for a full rundown & photos of our last adventure here in Nome.

I guess no one is going to pay for the myfamily site eh?

A week from now we will be starting our journey home and then on to Cascades, its hard to believe that our year in Alaska is almost come to an end… I don’t think its really set in yet that we’ll be living at camp, driving our car, seeing our families, and living a whole different life one month from now. I guess there are only so many ways to say that is a weird feeling and I don’t feel ready to leave while also extremely excited for what is in store. I’m sure I’ll do some more reflecting later, I’m not done yet.

We had a pretty good weekend, on Saturday we drove out to Salmon Lake Bible camp where our church was having a family camp. We just stayed for the afternoon but still had an enjoyable time. The camp is about an hour out of town and we left Nome around 12 or so. We had agreed with Jamie to caravan out around 11, he was going to be bringing the Community Center kayaks and Lydia agreed to “lifeguard” during their use. We woke up Saturday morning around 11:30 or so to Jamie at our front door….we must have been tired or something. W finally got out there and got the kayaks in the river that feeds into Salmon Lake. It was a blast paddling down river and then across the lake to a hiking spot. After a quick hike up to some falls, and then paddling back across the lake to camp we pretty much jumped right back in the truck and headed home.

Here is a picture of me getting some water out of a natural spring on the trip back ….real natural with the PVC and everything, huh? The water is pretty good though.

I’ve been working with the team of students that I went to Shaktoolik with on recording a CD down in the KICY recording studio, great project to start right before I leave, huh? After a handful of sessions over the past few days hopefully we will be able wrap things up tomorrow. I’ll be sure to post audio when we get things done.

There is lots of packing and general wrapping things up left to do before next Thursday evening when we high tail it out of here (hopefully, we are on standby passes all the way down to Seattle). Keep us in your prayers!

P.S. Stay tuned early next week for a report on what could be our last great adventure up north.

Last week I blogged over on extraordinary…. about my recent trip to the village of Shaktoolik (pop. 200). Now you can see the pictures! I went with a group of kids from our church here in Nome and helped put on a VBS. Hopefully our trip will renew a relationship between the Nome Covenant and Shaktoolik Covenant churches. Shaktoolik Covenant Church was for quite some time the only Covenant church in Alaska without a Pastor, its been a few years for them.

(click here) for Village Fun Photos.
(click here) to learn more about Shaktoolik

Its less than two weeks until we pack up and move from Nome, but things aren’t slowing down at all!

On Wednesday morning we had a pretty devastating fire here at KICY, as you can see in the photo above, one of the buildings at our transmitter site almost burned to the ground. The building up until a month ago housed our main transmitter, but at the time of the fire simply had tuning coils that were part of the main broadcasting tower operation. We have been knocked off the air during the day but hope to be back at a lower power within a few days, but our overnight “beam directly into Russia” broadcasts probably won’t be back online until a year from now.

At 7:20 or so Lon was hosting the breakfast club and right in the middle of one of my pre-recorded sports reports he noticed the audio getting choppy. Thinking it was probably just a computer problem, he put in a CD…but the same problem was still there. About 5 minutes after that KICY AM went completely off the air. Lon came into our studio and told us the problem he was having and we concluded power must have been lost at our transmission site 3 miles out of town. We have a computer system that dials the site and can tell us how much power we are broadcasting at, if the tower lights are on, etc… We connected to this system just fine, and that told us that power was still on, the problem was something else.

Dennis had come in a bit early Wednesday morning and was at the station when the problem started to occur. Lon relayed the message to Dennis that we couldn’t figure out why we went off the air and Dennis drove out to the site. When he got there he was greeted with flames shooting out the roof of the tuning building.

It looks like it will be a week or so until we can get back on, and luckily it looks like insurance will cover even costs to get us on the air even temporarily. Keep KICY and our listeners in your prayers as we figure out what steps to take next.

You can see additional pictures of the fire damage – (click here)

The 87-million acre wild fire in Alaska is causing quite a bit of smoke all around the state. Its pretty unbelievable how smoky it is here.

There’s no cloud cover today, that’s ALL smoke in the air.

Ok, so its been a million years since I posted last on what is going on up here in Nome land…but I’ve got some pretty good excuses. First off, Lydia’s Dad & Grandpa were here for 4 or 5 days and we were out of town and fishing and having lots of fun. Just when that ended and I was getting ready to record all of our adventures I leave the next day on a last minute trip to Shaktoolik to help a group from church with a 4 day VBS. I got home Sunday evening and have been recovering and collecting my thoughts ever since. I think I’ll work with Lydia on a back blog about her family’s trip up and we’ll post that in a few days…

Well I heard about a week in advance that there was a group going to Shaktoolik from church and that they really needed an extra male to go on the trip, as of then there was a couple going, along with 8 girls that are involved in a leadership class. I inquired about going because I thought it would be fun to spend some more time in a village, especially with the day we are moving from Alaska coming up in under a month. The only problem was that Lon was still going to be out of town and at that time Dennis was gone. It was just Irene & I running the station and I wouldn’t be able to find out about getting the time off until Dennis got back, just a few days before the trip…and if he said yes, it would be leaving him and Irene by themselves. I ended up (obviously) getting to go and was planning on a Wednesday Night/Thursday morning departure.

Tuesday morning I get a call saying “we’re going to have to leave tonight, weather might not allow us to leave any later”. I still was committed to hosting the morning show on Wednesday so I opted to take the chance and go after everyone else left. I flew out Wednesday afternoon on Bering air, on trade with KICY.

When I arrived in Shaktoolik (after landing at Golovin & Moses Point on the way) the airline agent gave me a ride in her fourwheel trailer from the airstrip to the church. There was a funeral and burial going on at the time and the kids from Nome were able help out with childcare. After getting settled and walking around town, then having dinner it was decided that we were going to put on a mini-VBS that evening.

The next day after I got up (slept in until 10:00!) I was having breakfast and Ernie Sagoonick came by to check on the group. Ernie is a church leader and a longtime covenanter. Ernie and I were talking about fishing and he offered to take me out on his boat. Nate figured out that he would be able to join me as long as we were back by 1:30 or so, because VBS was going to start at 2. We left town an hour or so later and after going up river for about 30 minutes we eventually found a good fishing hole. In 15 minutes I had hooked 3 huge silver salmon, and was able to bring in the first two…I would have gotten the third, but the fish wrapped itself around a stick underwater and that broke the line.

We headed back into town just in time for VBS to start. Here is how each program looked throughout the week. They started off with some singing, followed by a skit that starred yours truly. From there it was on to Games, then snack and a bible story. Then Angela Hansen had some wonderful crafts for the kids, and things wrapped up with an object lesson and some more songs. Pretty much every afternoon Nate & I would remember that we hadn’t picked out a game, but we were usally able to pull something off at the *last&* minute, however because of all my jr & sr high youth group experience it took a few rounds of whatever game we were playing for us to adapt it to an small aged audience.

In the evenings the kids watched “The Way of the Master” videos and a Nate & I tried fishing two other times. We were unable to head out with Ernie again on the river but tried going up out of town to “Bend 1″ and “Bend 2″ of the river. The first attempt didn’t go so well, and we ended up turning around after figuring out that it was going to take us quite a while on foot (it was the laughter of a local that taught us that lesson). The next night we decided to brave the 2+ mile walk anyway, but then ended up getting picked up by a guy on a fourwheeler. After catching 3 fish, we walked back most of the way. A similar thing happened the third night, we were given a ride out, only to realize they weren’t able to stay and so after an hour of no bites, we started walking back only to get picked up by a 11 year old that we knew from VBS on his fourwheeler.

It was a pretty great week and I’m glad I went. I’ve got some more writing to do over the next few days about what all is going on here. We’re down to just two weeks or so left in Alaska and while it will be sad to leave, we’re looking forward to getting home and starting our new life at camp. As we start packing and getting ready to go, I’d like to make sure that I’m capturing all of our final experiences.

On August 4th through the 9th Lydia’s Dad & Grandpa came up to Nome (making Jerry’s 3rd trip up in 10 months) to fish and to do cool “Alaska” things. We were able to fish a lot, although caught a lot less than we were hoping to! Check out select pictures in the “Dad & Grandpa Sommerman to Nome” gallery. For more pictures, you can check out the Sommerman’s Gallery, the link is on the right side navigation menu.

its been a busy weekend with family here, look for a photoblog entry coming soon….and then a blog entry not to long after that.

Well it sure has been a while since we got a nice juicy blog entry hasn’t it? Life in Nome can be a busy one, especially when there are so many things to do outside.

Today Lydia and I got a chance to have lunch with my Aunt who lives in Maryland. She works for the Alaska Congressman, Don Young’s office. Every year Mr. Young brings members of the Committee that he chairs up to Alaska and my aunt organizes it. Every other year or so they come up to Nome and this time we happened to live here! There were 12 members of congress and their wives at the lunch, along with several members of the Nome community. It was fun to see her and to have a delicious lunch!

The Silver salmon have just started their run and I’ve attempted to catch a few but haven’t yet had any success. I guess it was a couple weekends ago that we spent a few days out at a fish camp on the Niukluk River outside of White Mountain. I posted pictures and a quick recap out on the main page, but we had a really fun time. Everyone out in Western Alaska goes out to camp for the summer and I’m glad we got a little chance to experience a bit of what that’s like. Now, we were at a pretty posh fishcamp as it also doubles as a hunting and fishing lodge, but we got out there.

In the photoblog last Friday I briefly talked about the blueberries that are growing all over the place. Since then Lydia and I have become berry machines bringing home over 4 gallon Ziploc bags full. We decided that a noble goal was 10 and look forward to having these delicious tundra sweets all winter long. Cranberries will start popping up soon here as well.

Last week was Terry Reynolds’s last here in Nome, he has been here for a month working on the transmitter move and was able to finish everything up and head back home to Anchorage. Before Terry left, Lon took off for a two week trip back home to Rockford and a few days later Dennis headed down to Homer for a vacation. Right now its just Irene and I holding the fort down at KICY, but things are going ok.

We’re down to just a month left in Nome, its pretty crazy but we are enjoying our remaining days. We’re still trying to figure out what September will look like. We’d like to take a vacation to Mexico with free mileage tickets before starting work at Camp in the middle of the month, but after weeks & weeks of working hard to find a screaming condo deal we found out that there are NO free tickets to get us there. Maybe we can find something around Washington or Oregon. A nice relaxing week sounds good about now, especially before we have to move and everything. We will see.

Lydia’s Dad & Grandpa will be arriving on Thursday to fish and “adventure” for a number of days, we’re looking forward to showing them around and having a good time ourselves. The beauty of this area has really been hitting me lately as we get ready to move. Its a different beauty than back home in Seattle….but still really nice.