NYO Day One….

The first day of NYO is finally over. I started my day out by hopping Doug Air at 8:00 AM. I was scheduled to fly into Nome then catch a Bering Air flight back to White Mountain. Tim who does all of the maintenance on the BSSD plane, and who also is a pilot does a lot of the scheduling for the BSSD plane. He made a couple changes, and set things up so I would be dropped off at White Mountain right away, which not only saved me a ton of time, but the hassle of dealing with extra luggage on Bering Air.

We took of in cloudy skies from the Unalakleet airport. Moments later we had left the clouds behind to find a bright blue sky over crisp snow covered tundra. The ocean is still frozen in most places. You can see the chunks breaking where the ocean is biting away at the pack ice. It looks like a giant jigsaw puzzle. As I’m flying to the 21st annual district Native Youth Olympic competition and looking at the pack ice. It made me think about how the Inupiat’s used to travel and hunt across that ice. There is one competition called the scissor jump where they jump across the gym crossing their one leg behind the other in the jumping process (kind of like a triple jump) to see how much distance they can cover. The sport originated from jumping from ice burg to ice burg over the near freezing water. It amazes me they were able to survive.

So I landed in White Mountain just 45 minutes after I left Unalakleet. For those of you who haven’t been to White Mountain. It is a small village nestled in the trees on the side of a small mountain. In the summer there is a river that flows right in front of the village. This time of year it is still covered with ice. The school is spread out in a few buildings in an area approximately half the size of a city block. It is a very pretty place.

I got all my gear dropped off in the gym, and then dropped off my bag up in the apartment I am staying in. Andy the principal pointed me in the direction of one of the buildings to steal some kids to help set things up. I was able to get two students who quickly helped me unpack all of my tubs, and get all of the gear set up. After-which time I had about 8 hours to kill before the competition started. So I worked on setting up a gallery for the pictures that would be taken to be uploaded to. If you are interested you can find them at www.bssd.org/gallery/.The events went really well this evening. We started off with the scissor jump, and then ended with the Alaskan one footed high kick. This is where they lean back on one hand, use their other hand to hold one of their feet, then they must jump up with the other foot, kick a ball that is hanging in the air, and then land on the foot they kicked with without falling over. Its amazing how high they can go. The winning boy this evening was able to kick a ball 80 inches off the ground.