On the northern tip of the country, 330 miles above the Arctic Circle, hockey players take over the open-air ice rink twice a week, no matter what the weather. But a few years ago, on one of the coldest nights of the winter when the temperature dipped to 40 below, the game ended when someone hit a slap shot and the hard-rubber puck — brittle from the subzero temperature — hit the goalie’s mask and shattered.
“I was spitting out pieces of the puck for five minutes,” said Bob Bulger, 36, the goalie. “We laughed and decided it was too cold to be playing. Things like that are just a part of life up here.”
Welcome to Barrow — the country’s ground zero for cold. Friday marks the first full day of winter, and no community knows how to survive freezing temperatures like people in this icebound town. Barrow, with a population of 4,500 (57 percent of them native Inupiat Eskimos), holds the record for the lowest average temperature in the United States.
When it’s 40 below, you can make ice cubes outside in 14 minutes. If you don’t cover your earlobes, they will freeze solid. People learn to breathe slowly, because the frigid air can frostbite the lungs.
Car tires flatten. Breaks fail. Steering wheels snap in drivers’ hands. Local computer technicians recommend Apple laptops because, they say, biting temperatures make other brands break.
“In other places, cold is a novelty,” said postmaster Charles Keizer, 57, who was wearing a handlebar mustache and a bolo tie made of walrus teeth. “Here, cold is a way of life.”
This is a place where people put on cross-country skis, hook a harness to a husky and let the dog pull them to work. It is a place so cold that Earl Finkler, 66, was walking down the street on a 30-below day when the lenses of his eyeglasses cracked.
Such strange events are common in the extreme cold. To prove it, Dave Anderson opened his back door and tossed boiling water in the air. The water never hit the ground. It vaporized. A puff of smoke, and it was gone. “Winter is here to stay,” said Anderson, 48. Winter here means two months of unrelenting darkness; The sun goes down Nov. 18 and does not rise again until Jan. 23. Streetlamps glow around the clock. The moon shines in place of the absent sun.
This vast, dark landscape looks a lot like outer space, and in a gesture of understanding, students at the alternative high school are circulating a petition to reinstate Pluto’s status as a planet.
“Pluto is millions of miles away,” said Becky Crabtree, 53, the general-science teacher. “In Barrow, we can relate. We, too, are remote and isolated, in a place that is dark a great deal of the time.”
Desolate and flat, Barrow is the largest town on Alaska’s North Slope, 90,000 square miles of Arctic territory about the size of Minnesota. It is an unlikely place for a town as one could imagine: a white tundra of ice and snow that stretches to the horizon. Trees do not grow. Polar bears wander the coast. The cold feels like needles.
The town itself looks like a temporary outpost, a wind-blasted village of one- and two-story, wood-frame homes, doublewide trailers and barracks huddled along the edge of the Arctic Ocean. A tiny downtown includes a few utilitarian office buildings, none taller than a few stories, constructed in concrete and corrugated steel.
Improbable as it might seem, people have lived on this icy edge of Earth for more than 4,000 years. The native Inupiat hunted whales, ate frozen meat and lived underground in sod houses.
European explorers came in the early 1800s, followed by commercial-whaling vessels. During the 1950s, Barrow — about 400 miles from the Soviet Union — became a Cold War listening post. The discovery of oil in Prudhoe Bay in the 1960s brought money. Flush toilets arrived in the 1980s.
Polar-bear mittens
Today, it remains one of the world’s largest Eskimo villages. People still hunt for caribou and wolverine. Women make mittens out of polar bear hides.
But old traditions are disappearing. Few young people speak the native language. Fewer know how to live off the land.
Amid the changing customs, cold remains the constant. The roads are gravel because asphalt would crack. The houses are built on pilings so they don’t sink into the permafrost. Natural gas is piped from the gas fields five miles away.
There are no roads in or out of town. Everything — from diapers to dog food — is delivered by plane or, in the summer, shipped by barge. Prices are high: $7.75 for a gallon of milk, $4.50 for a gallon of gas, $3.45 for a can of soup, $2.50 for a cucumber.
Nature wages a constant assault. Huge snowdrifts would swallow the town if not for a series of 10-foot fences that form a perimeter. Last winter, police officers had to chase the caribou off the runway at the airport. Three years ago, a polar bear ate a dog next to the local bank.
Despite the conditions, the place draws people from all over the world. Scientists come to conduct research. Koreans run the restaurants, and Thai and Filipino immigrants drive the taxis. Some people come to work in the oilfields.
Others come looking for a place to hide.
Several years ago, for example, a clerk at the probation office turned out to be a convicted murderer, wanted in Virginia for skipping parole. William Adams, 37, arrived in Barrow wearing a rabbit-fur hat and a bandito mustache. He worked at the courthouse for eight months until someone found out he was the notorious “Parakeet Killer,” who strangled a woman in suburban Washington, D.C., and ripped the head off her pet bird.
“I imagine there are a lot of people living here who are wanted by the law,” said a woman working at the parole office, who did not want her name printed. “Who’s going to find you in this part of the world? It’s a great place to go get lost.”
But few outsiders have the strength to settle here. The native Inupiat people remain the majority. Most others stay no more than a few years, and then move somewhere else — anywhere else.
“This is one of those places, you love it or you hate it,” said Randy Crosby, 57, a resident for more than 30 years. “You’re adaptable, or you’re not.”
Living in the Arctic remains an exercise in survival. The North Slope Borough Search and Rescue averages about three rescues a month. Bob Sommer, 61, a local resident, is matter-of-fact when he said, “We’ve all known people who froze to death.”
Ice on the power lines causes outages. Snowstorms and shipping delays cause shortages. It is not uncommon to go for two weeks without a bread delivery.
On a recent day, the grocery store was nearly out of milk. The cashiers were running out of coins and dollar bills, and were about to stop taking cash transactions because they couldn’t make change.
Sean Murphy, 26, the grocery manager, summed up the experience of running a food store in the Arctic with one word: “Horrible.” The bananas come in black, and potatoes arrive frozen. Forlornly standing next to a section of empty shelves, he said, “I hate it here.”
Natural beauty
Yet Barrow remains a place of awe-inspiring beauty. With tundra swans, snowy owls and red-throated loons, it is renowned for bird-watching. Caribou wander through town, and bowhead whales swim along the coast on their yearly migration.
In the winter, people go stargazing outside of town on Fresh Water Lake Road; in the darkness, they stand back-to-back and count dozens of shooting stars.
In the same way small communities have always handled adversity, people in Barrow pull together in the face of the cold. After the annual whale hunt, the meat is distributed to the entire town. When anyone goes missing on the tundra, 250 volunteers mobilize for a massive ground search. “The severity of the environment is softened by the relationships you make,” said Tavia Barr, 42, who has lived here for nine years.
And the weather — for all its disadvantages — provides insulation from modern life. There are no traffic jams; the average commute, according to the U.S. Census, is 8.7 minutes. Geoff Carroll, 56, a biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, pointed out that he works “500 miles from my nearest boss.”
In the end, longtime residents say they prefer the winter. Everything is covered with thick white ice. A spectral ice fog lifts off the roads and buildings. The town is quiet, except for the howls of wind, the buzz of an occasional snowmobile and the scrape of the snowplows.
At night, the aurora borealis sends sheets of light across the night sky. And every day at noon, although the sun does not rise, the horizon turns pink and the sky brightens into a deep blue. A strange twilight swaths the frozen land.
“The light is different here. There is a spectrum of colors you don’t see anywhere else,” said Craig George, 54, who moved to Barrow three decades ago. “It’s unearthly.”
The sun will rise again in Barrow Jan. 23. On that day, the children at the elementary school will put on sunglasses and sing “welcome back, sun.” The teachers will make sugar cookies topped with yellow frosting.
Winter, however, will not end until March 21.
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Cold, dark Barrow facts
10 (degrees)
Coldest average annual temperature in the U.S.
-56 (degrees)
Coldest temperature without wind chill (Feb. 3, 1924).
-81 (degrees)
Coldest temperature (with wind chill) in 2005.
FROM NOV. 18 TO JAN. 23
the sun never rises above the horizon.
$7.79
for a gallon of milk
Prices are high because everything is delivered by plane or barge. No roads lead in or out of town.
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You can’t buy a cold one … and other facts
Location: The most northern community in the United States, 330 miles north of the Arctic Circle, and 1,200 miles south of the North Pole.
Population: 4,581. About 57 percent of residents are native Inupiat Eskimos, making Barrow one of the largest Eskimo villages in the world. Fifty-two percent of residents are men and 48 percent are women.
Median household income: $67,000 (compared with $42,000 in U.S.).
Number of bars: Zero. The sale of alcohol is illegal in Barrow.
Crime: Burglaries/domestic violence rates increase in winter.
Language: Nine percent of households on the North Slope speak Inupiaq as their the primary language.
Average commute to work: 8.7 minutes.
Largest employer: North Slope Borough (county government) gives jobs to 46 percent of workforce. The school district employs another 20 percent.
Sources: National Climatic Data Center, Encyclopedia Americana, 2000 Census
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cmastony@tribune.com
Upcoming reports will include the restaurant owner who bridged the gap between Barrow and Chicago; the last dog sled in town; and the beards of Barrow.
