Back Post

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.  🙂

In the Sky’s Again

Well, I’m back up in the Bering Strait again after a very nice week in Valdez.  Erin and I flew up to visit my family over spring break.  We did a little flying and a little snowshoeing and Dad and I got all the cutting done on “The Chair”.  He is currently sanding it up and hopefully will get it all finished up and shipped down to me in time for my return back to Minnesota.

Rick Holt and I are currently in Koyuk.  We filmed at Highland Tech High in Anchorage for Monday and Tuesday.  It really is fun to see the standard based model working so well.  The students there really have a great understanding of how the system works, and take ownership over their learning.

The video we are shooting is showing how the RISC model works in schools.  This will allow Rick to show examples of the model while presenting at conferences around the country.

We’ve shot in Unalkleet, and Koyuk so far in BSSD, and we are heading to Golovin this afternoon.

Looks like its time to get ready to shoot..

More to come later.

Heading North

Its that time again…  Im sitting in the Minneapolis Northwest World Club waiting for my flight.  I’ll be flying through Portland on my way up to Anchorage.  Erin is flying out of Minneapolis tonight as well, but she is going through Chicago, staying the night, and then flying up to Anchorage tomorrow.  Seems like we never get to fly together.

Im looking forward to spending time in Valdez with my parents.  Erin and I will be driving over to Valdez tomorrow afternoon.  Its a 300 mile drive, but I really like it.  It has some beautiful scenery along the way.

For those of you who don’t know… I posted the first BWCACAST episode yesterday.  Jim is already an internet superstar with comments on the forum.  You have a few options for watching…

1.  Go to www.bwcacast.com and click on the video to play

2. Same website top right corner Subscribe to the High Definition 720p AppleTv feed.  This will launch iTunes on your mac or pc and let you subscribe to the show so that all new shows will automatically be downloaded to your machine.  A word of warning… The HD files ar VERY big.  This first one is 475 mb.  So you are really going to want to have a fast internet connection and have a way of playing it on a High Definition monitor or TV to really appreciate the file size.

3. Same website top right corner Subscribe to the Standard Definition 320×240 iPod feed.  This will also launch iTunes on your mac or pc and let you subscribe to the show so that all new shows will be automatically be downloaded to your machine.  These files are really manageable.  This first one was around 40 mb.  and will still look good being played full screen on most computer monitors.

4. If your not into the whole iTunes thing you can subscribe to the appropriate RSS feed and have it download in your favorite RSS reader.

http://www.bwcacast.com/feeds/bwcacast_hd.xml   (High Definition Large QuickTime File)

http://www.bwcacast.com/feeds/bwcacast_sd.xml    (Standard Definition Small QuickTime File)

Also its April’s birthday tomorrow.  So yeah… Happy Birthday April.

Here she is showing off her mad computer skills…

My Snap.com List-O-Rama Entry

My Snap.com List-O-Rama Entry.  The idea is to show off how much information you can add into your posts using Snap’s technology without forcing your users to leave your site.  Tell me what you think. The video and audio links will actually play in the snap preview window.

1. After living on the Bering Strait in Alaska for the last 4 years watching the Iditarod pass right through my village on their way to Nome,

2. I’ve learned to apreciate Cabela’s not only supporting the Iditarod, but also their winter product lines and pretty much keep their stocks in the green.

3. For those of you who haven’t heard of this famous dog race you should check out what Wikipedia has to offer on the subject.

4. You could also read Dogsong by Gary Paulsen. He has not only ran the race a few times, but his books are a great way to feel what its like to be on the cold isolated trail.

5. Now I don’t think WoW has a big Iditarod pull, but I was able to find something about an Arctic Wolf.

6. There aren’t many professional films out there on the Iditarod, but you may give this one a try.

7. If that doesn’t do it for you there are some semi-pro new media folks that have done some pretty nice work.

8. I was hard pressed to find a Myspace page for the few famous mushers I looked for, but I was able to find this person who seemed to have a genuine interest in the race, even though he was from the lower 48.

9. Now you can find a lot of Iditarod pictures over at Flickr, but

10. I implore you check out BSSD’s IditaProject site.

11. There you will not only find cool audio interviews with the mushers done by students as well as up to the minute race updates,

12. but you can also can subscribe to their many Iditarod photo and video gallery’s like this one.

I hope you all enjoyed this list of how Snap.com’s service can give you quick glimpes as many different Iditarod related sites.

If you’d like to make your own list on your blog check out the details and you might get a cool Snap shirt out of the deal.

15 Hours

After a very nice couple days with Rick, Tiff, Keegan, and Rohnan I was on my way back to Minnesota. The day I left Alaska I helped Rick cut up meat for his dogs to snack on during the Iditarod. It was amazing. We cut up 600 pounds of meat, and that was only half of what his dogs will need for the race. I can’t imagine how they could eat that much, but I guess the calories they would be burning they’ll need that much going in.After we finished there we met Tiff and the boys in Wasilla for dinner. We sat and visited for a couple hours and had some tasty nachos and burgers. My flights back down to Minnesota were uneventful. I tried to sleep on each one so I wouldn’t be to sleepy when I got home.

I put together this animated giff showing my flights in the Bering Strait Region. Here are 21 of the 29 flights on my trip.

When I got back to Minnesota Erin and I went out for dinner to a fancy resturaunt. It was nice to spend some time with her after being away for almost 3 weeks. After dinner I crashed out and ended up sleeping for about 15 hours. I guess I needed it. I hope I’ll be able to sleep tonight and get back on the central time zone.

Mushing with Rick

Its been a ton of fun hanging out with the Holt family the last couple days. Today Tiff and I visited and spent time with the boys. Rick had to go to work. Rohnan and I made chocolate chip cookies, and Keegan was working on adding some audio to a stop motion animation he had made.

This evening Rick and I took his dogs out mushing. He was kind enough to set me up with my own team for the evening. I had 7 dogs lead by Mits, and Rick had about 10 dogs.

Rick also let me borrow his nice headlamp. It really can put out some light. It also has a box that you wear inside your coat on your chest. It has a big button on it that turns it on and off. All you need to do is hit your chest and it activates the light.

you can see the little reflectors on the dogs harnesses behind me. We went out on a 20 mile run. It was amazing. The stars were out all over the sky. We were swiftly gliding our way through forests of black spruce and dropping down onto sloughs and racing across rivers. At one point we had stopped for a second and I had set “the hook” so the dogs wouldn’t take off until I was ready. I reached down to pull the hook and I bumped the button in my chest and the lamp went out. One thing about the headlamp is if its been running for a while it heats up, so when it gets turned off you need to let it cool down before you turn it on again or you might blow out the bulb. So I got to ride for a few minutes without any lights on. The stars were just beautiful. The dogs were just cruising down the trail and I was able to stand back on the runners and just enjoy the experience.

[QUICKTIME http://bbryson.com/bill/files/2008/02/mush.MOV 640 490]

It was a great way to end the day. By the time we got done feeding the dogs when we got back, it was about 1:30 in the morning. Time for some sleep. 🙂 I hope that I will get the chance to do this again in the future. A great experience.

The Sun Is Back!!

The last couple days have been amazing all around the Seward Peninsula.  As you could see from yesterdays post the sun was shining up in Shishmaref.  Well this morning when I woke up in White Mountain the temps were around -30 and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.  I decided to walk through town and shoot some video and then make my way up to the top of White Mountain to get some video of the sun rise.  As I walked through town it was fun to see the smoke rising out of each house.  It really looked cool on the cold morning.

I finally made it to the top of the mountain and as rewarded with a very beautiful sunrise.  Looking down over the river valley and the snow covered trees it really made for quite a picturesque scene.

As you know I like to take self portraits, it can be quite difficult when the temperatures are as low as they were.  You can see the bottom of my ruff building up with frost from my breath, and the sun trying to poke through the top edge.

Andy came and picked me up with the snowmachine and we stopped by one of the teachers houses to film what housing looks like in White Mountain.  As soon as we stepped in the door however the camera fogged right up.  They do fine out in the cold, and they do fine inside when they are warm, but when you take a cold camera inside you’ll need to wait about 10 – 15 minutes to let them warm up and defog.  So we left the camera inside and went to try out White Mountains new panorama kit.  When the school burned down last year their old panorama kit burned up in the fire.  So when Andy was making the order for the new one last spring I told him about the cool OneShot pano kit he could get from Kidan.  Its a half dome of optical mirroring glass that mounts directly onto the lens of the camera.  You take one photo and an entire 360 degree picture is taken.  You then take the photo into some software on your computer and it unwraps it and turns it into a normal pano picture or interactive Quicktime file.  Here is what the unit looks like.

We didn’t read the instructions before we went out, so we didn’t have any really successful results, but I can tell you this.  The very little time that we did take our gloves off to assemble the pieces to the camera and take the photo our hands went completely numb.  Man it was cold.  As soon as I could I put my gloves back on and jammed my hands into the little pockets on the chest of my parka.  It usually warms them up pretty well in there, but they were so cold it took us going back to the teachers house to warm them back up.

Here is a shot of the village of White Mountain from the top of White Mountain.  🙂

While I was shooting the sunrise on top of the mountain I looked over and saw a moose across the river munching on some willows.  I was able to get some pretty good video of him for quite a while.  Not super super close, but sill good video.  Then when we went to pick up the pano kit I looked across the river and saw another moose in a different area.

Sorry my little camera doesn’t have a better zoom, but if it did I probably wouldn’t have had it with me because those cameras are too big to take with you all the time.  But you get the idea from this picture.

Hageland picked me up from White Mountain and flew me to Nome.  We flew really low to the ground and saw two herds of muskox, and a herd of reindeer.  It was pretty cool.   I tried to shoot some video of it with my little camera.  It came out alright, but we were going so fast, you only get a glimps of them.

Hageland then flew me from Nome to Stebbins, putting my flight total for this trip so far at 23.   I came back to Stebbins because when I stopped there at the beginning of my trip it was very blizzardy out, and I didn’t get very good video.  Today was a different story.  The sun was shining and the snow was glistening.  Stebbins has some land features in the area that are very noteworthy.  On one side of the village is a very large cliff.

On the other side is a hill that drops down into the ocean.  Very pretty.  So just like the sunrise in White Mountain I was able to catch the sunset in Stebbins.  Here it is about to drop down behind the frozen ocean on the horizon.

I’ll shoot a little more here tomorrow and then head to Unalakleet in the afternoon.  I’ll do some shooting there, stay the night, and then head down to Talkeetna to see the Holts.

Video Misconseptions

This morning I woke up to some pretty chilly weather in Wales, Alaska.  After a quick breakfast of oatmeal, I bundled up and headed out into the cold.  It was about -20 and a slight breeze that really bites at your nose and cheeks.  I hiked around town a bit and shot some video.  Wales has some impressive drifting going on.  The snow builds up all around the houses.  While I was out I snapped this picture of Razor Back Mountain.

By then my hands were getting quite cold.  I have to take my gloves off to film, and even though I have the fancy bag that encases the video camera the folks at the DO failed to send me any of the hand warmers that fit in pouches inside the bag.  So it helps cut down on the wind, but its not any warmer inside the bag.

Around 1:25 Doug landed to pick up a BSSD school board member and myself.  We were the last two on the plane filling all 9 seats.  It was a quick flight up to Shishmaref, following the coast all the way up.  We flew over a few caribou, and I kept my eyes pealed for Polar Bears.  Unfortunately we didn’t see any.

The reason the flight was so full going to Shishmaref was because one of the BSSD school board members wife had just died of cancer.  He was from Shish, so the rest of the board and a couple DO staff went up for the funeral.

When we landed in Shish, it was noticeable colder than Wales  I shot some video as I walked into town, and then got into the school to warm up and check the temp online.  Weather Underground had Shish at -29 with the wind chill at -49.  So it was pretty chilly.  I warmed up a bit and talked to Erin on the phone, then went out and shot some more around town.  I was able to get some video of the sun setting over the tundra.

I didn’t stay out long.  The cold was making my fingers go numb pretty quickly.  The metal tripod was also a bit troublesome.  If I ever touched it with my bare hands it kind of burned them with the cold.  Any moisture in your fingers freezes instantly so you get a little freezer burn wherever you touch.

After the funeral was over Doug flew back to Shish and picked us all back up.   We went back to Wales and dropped off that board member.  As we were coming in for our landing I noticed another plane in the sky.  It was dark out, but you could see its lights flashing.  I thought I saw another one near by it.  The Russian have been known to fly over to see if the U.S.A is on the ball as far as intercepting their illegal entry into our air space.  Just a little while ago we had to scramble some fighter jets from Elmendor Air Force base to intercept a Russian war plane over Wales.  So I was thinking to my self… Great we are going to be caught in the middle of some international mid air relations.  Turns out the one plane was actually an Evergreen helicopter that was making its last trip off of Little Diomede for the night, and the other lights were from Tin City an Air Force radar site just on the other side of some mountains from Wales.  They are the ones that catch the Russians flying over and call in the fighters.

So we left Wales and flew directly to White Mountain.  Andy Haviland (the White Mountain principal) was waiting to pick me up.  I tossed my bags into the sled and hopped on the back of the snowmachine and he dropped me off at one of the school buildings to crash in for the night.  White Mountain school burned down last year, so they are in the process of rebuilding.  They currently have 4 or 5 building scattered throughout the village that they hold class in.  Andy was saying how nice it was going to be to not have to get the kids all bundled up to go to lunch or to the gym.

I’ll shoot around here tomorrow until about 12:30 when I hop a plane to Nome, sit for about an hour and a half, then hop a plane to Stebbins.  More to come on that tomorrow.  I hope the weather warms up a little bit.

OHH yeah the title of this post….

When its sunny out it looks great on video, but the viewers have no idea that its flipping cold out.  When its overcast and gray out, it doesn’t look that great on video, but its a lot warmer out.  So showing off these to hire potential teachers.  They are going to find out pretty quickly that the beautiful days are really so cold you think twice about going out and enjoying them.  🙂