Akutan

Here's how you get to Dutch Harbor from Anchorage, Saab 340 ... they hand out ear plugs instead of pretzels for the 3 hour flight. They stopped making this aircraft in 2005 because of poor sales. The Japanese military uses them for airborne early warning & control in the Senkaku Islands spat with China

Change planes in Dutch Harbor to the Grumman Goose and leave immediately 3 hours before scheduled as the weather is starting to turn

Here is Akutan ... a Volcano Island.. and Wikipedia tells us this Volcano is "typically moderately explosive, short-duration, and Stromolian, lasting for a few weeks. Hazards at the volcano include ash clouds, ashfall, volcanic bombs, pyroclastic flows, lahars, lava flows, and debris avalanches."

I remember a couple years ago there was a large population of Filipinos working at the Trident fish processing plant who had just escaped the Pinatubo Volcano in the Philippines. Well suddenly they were exposed to a large number of earthquakes and volcanic bombs on Akutan as the volcano woke up..... they demanded the Trident company to get them the fook outa there... and Trident told them that the geologists say there is no imminent threat so keep working the work.....the Filipino's said fook that and went on strike... the showdown lasted a couple weeks I think before the Volcano settled down..

Old lava flows meet Bering sea

The small village of Akutan on the right and the Trident Fish Plant on the left

The Grumman Goose...built in 1945...only about 20 left in the world and 10 in commercial operation. Pen Air bought two from Reeve Aleutian to service the East Aleutian islands but with the coming and goings of Akutan its having a hard time keeping up. A couple years ago one of these birds collided with a truck while landing in Dutch Harbor and smashed itself pretty good.

Akutan is a hard place to get into ... we keep the options open, whether we can find room on the Goose, Hitch a 6 hour ride on a fishing boat, or fly into a runway on a remote island and take a hovercraft across to Akutan.

We got in just in time as the wind has picked up..

Our project is to stake out and monument a conservation easement at the head of the bay. At first light we catch a ride from the village with Dmitri, a local skiff operator and expediter

The old Whaling station

The Conservation area

The new hovercraft landing pad from the conservation area.... runs from Akun island's 77 million dollar runway (to no where) to Akutans head of the bay ... and when you get here you still have to call Dmitri up on the VHF to have him come fetch you ... but yeah..the infrastructure is moving forward....someday the road from the head of the bay to Akutan will get built.

And here we have the new harbor. Last time I was in Akutan was a year and a half ago and this thing didn't even exist. The hovercraft landing site is there on the left... all built by Machine controlled GPS (topcon)

Beats Edward Tellers harbor building methods. He wanted to build Alaskan harbors with nuclear bombs, 3 small nukes for the channel and a large nuclear bomb for the harbor as part of the Plowshare program.