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I just was going through my pictures and found a couple that needed posting.

When Rick was getting more video taken of him by the Discovery channel, Keegan, Rohnan, and I hopped on the snowmachine to head out on the trail ahead of them.  We were a little concerned about the snow conditions and wanted to have an outlet to get the Discovery guy back to the yurts if the trail was poor.

So we drove out to the half way point on the trail and waited to see if they’d make it.  There weren’t any problems, and the boys and I were killing some time.  I got this nice photo of the boys on the snowmachine.

We didn’t want to start up the machine as soon as they went by because they were activly filming on the sled.  So we had some more time to kill.  I talked to boys into doing snow angels off the snowmachine…

[QUICKTIME http://bbryson.com/bill/files/2008/04/snow_angels.mov 320 260]

It was fun haning out with them.  Its nice to feed off of their engergy.

Home

Well, I’m back in Minnesota again…  The funny thing is I recall three weeks ago when Erin and I were getting ready to leave she told me that when I came back from my trip it would be spring.  Well let me tell you…  Right now we are in the middle of a pretty healthy winter storm.  Forecasts say we should be getting up to 13 inches of snow by Saturday morning.  Excellent spring weather don’t you think?

I’ve been trying to get caught up on sleep.  When traveling around rural Alaska its pretty tough on your sleep patterns.  If you stay in the school, your sleeping on a classroom floor in which case you need to be up and packed up before the teachers come in the next morning.  Regardless you usually are flying the next day and have to be packed up anyway…

I was weathered in Breivg Mission for a few days, so I was able to visit with the Rudstroms..  I guess my last post kind of summed up that experience.

Anyway its nice to be back at home.  Nice to hang out with Erin again.  She’s been sick the last couple days 🙁  poor girl.  I hope that the district here decides to close school for tomorrow so she can rest up.  The downside to that is they have already canceled a couple of times and that in turn pushes the last day of school later into June.

So now that I’m back I will be hitting the video editing super hard.  I’d like to have all of it done before summer break.  I’ll keep you posted and will put finished pieces up for you to ridicule and critique.  🙂

Storm Bound in Brevig Mission

I was going through my iPhoto library to get photos for this post, and came across a picture of Sandford and Drum that Erin and I took on our way back from Valdez.

A few days ago I was in White Mountain filming a cross country ski race and a biathlon competition. It was a beautiful sunny day out and really not that cold which was a nice change from the last time I was up here and had sunny weather. I shot some video of the start of the biathlon race and got some video from different parts of the trail. I then made it over to the shooting area.  It was really fun to watch the kids ski up to the range huffing and puffing.  Lay down grab a rifle, slow their breathing down and hit 5 out of 5 on the target.

I left White Mountain and flew to Nome on my way to Brevig Mission.  I stopped over at Fat Freddies for a little lunch since my flight wasn’t leaving for another few hours.  I had a bacon cheese burger and a peanut butter milk shake and killed time watching movies on my laptop.  Lance Macky came in to eat just after finishing his latest sled dog race.

After a little food and a couple of movies I was off to Brevig Mission.  The usual rout when flying to Brevig is you leave Nome, fly to Teller, then to Brevig, then to Wales, and then back to Nome.  Well on this trip we went first to Wales then to Brevig and then they were heading right back to Nome.  So I got a little longer flight out of the deal.  While in Wales I snapped this picture of Razor Back mountain.

When I landed in Brevig the local Frontier agent gave me a ride to CO and AnnMaire’s.  CO and I visited for a little while… AnnMaire was on her way back from Unlakleet with Doug the BSSD pilot.  So when she was about to land I got to watch Harold while CO went to pick her up.  In the few minutes that he was gone the little guy crashed out.

The next day CO and I headed over to teller to get the video I needed for the BSSD recruiting video project.  It didn’t take very long, so we decided to go out for a ride around the mountains behind Brevig.  Here are a few pictures from the trip…

[QUICKTIME http://bbryson.com/bill/files/2008/04/co_slide.mov 320 260]

I was supposed to fly back to Nome to get to Savoonga the next day.  The weather however had different plans for me.  There was freezing rain in Nome, and both Bering Air and Frontier Alaska (who just merged with Hageland) canceled all of their flights for the day.  This gave me some extra time to play with Harold and visit with CO and AnnMaire.  It was very nice to have the extra time to spend with them.

[QUICKTIME http://bbryson.com/bill/files/2008/04/harold_laugh.mov 320 260]

So this morning it wasn’t looking good for me to get out of Brevig.  The weather was still pretty bad in Nome, and it was going between rain and snow in Brevig.  Really not the best flying conditions.  I got a call around 10:00 letting me know that Frontier was sending a plane out.  So I got all packed up and hopped on the plane.

I am now sitting at Airport Pizza in Nome waiting for my flight out to St. Lawerence Island.  I’ll be going to Savoonga tonight.  Then my plan is to go from Gambel to Savoonga in the morning and then Gambel to Nome in the afternoon.  I hope the weather will allow this to happen.  🙂