Road Tripping...

A road with ice...

I've been in Alaska all this week, conducting test administration fidelity observations of our assessment for kids with severe cognitive delays. Four days in Anchorage (where it has been snowing all week), one day in a tiny village, Kwethluk which is home to 153 families.  I visited the school, a building about half again as large as my house, which contained all ages of kids, kindergarten through twelfth.  The kids were lovely, primarily of the Yup'ik tribe. 

A sign on the front entry bulletin board declared a unanimous vote of the school board to cancel school on any day where the temperature was -40 degrees, or the windchill and temperature reached -65 degrees. Good to know. Kids, don't forget your mittens...

I worked all day with the teacher who works with kids who have severe disabilities. She was very nice, had been nervous about my visit for more than a month. I practiced the reading test with her before she administered the test to a student. The child was very cooperative and friendly, seemed to enjoy the extra attention (me), and did pretty well on the test. 

After the reading test, I spent another hour with her on the writing test, and wrote out fake student responses for her to practice scoring. I spent the entire day in her classroom.

The Adventures of Rural Alaska Travels: The flight to the village started with a 6:40 AM flight from Anchorage to Bethel, and then a transfer to a single propeller little plane that seated 6 passengers and room for cargo. For my 8:30 AM flight, I shared the plane with the pilot and co-pilot (I called shotgun, but was outvoted) and a clothes dryer and freezer in their shipping boxes, destined to Aniak, another little village. We were headed to Kwethluk (my destination), but detoured to offload the cargo in Aniak, because there were 5 people waiting to board in Kwethluk, but they wouldn’t be able to get to the chairs with the cargo still on board.

The “airport” in Kwethluk is a landing strip and a tin shed, a little larger than a barn. Not sure what is inside, but it isn’t a waiting room. The system is: the “agent” at the village meets the plane and drives the passenger/s to the village. Passengers leave their contact and return flight information with the agent, and he or she calls to tell you if the plane is arriving on time, late, or not flying at all (“weathered in”). If the flight is going to happen, the agent comes and picks you up to get you to the airport. You don’t want to go early, because you can’t get inside, and it is pretty cold outside. My return flight to Bethel was scheduled for 1:30, so I was to call at 1:15 if I hadn’t been contacted.

At 1:15 we discovered the planes were “weathered in” and not going to pick me up to take me from Kwethluk to Bethel. My flight from Bethel to Anchorage was scheduled to leave at 8:45 PM. So I needed a way to get to Bethel, about 50 miles away.

Finding Plan B: Apparently, the teachers and teacher aides in the class all felt a great protectiveness of me, and wanted to be sure I made it to Bethel for my flight. So three different people got on their cell phones and started calling around to discover if anybody from the village was going to drive “the ice road” to Bethel that afternoon. At first it was looking like that wasn’t going to work out, so then they started devising . . .

Plan C: Plan C was to ride on the back of a snowmobile to Bethel. Two snowmobiles would go, so that we’d all be safe (not sure what that means, or why two is safer than one, but they seemed pretty sure about the two snowmobiles being the minimum). I was hoping that we would be stuck with Plan C. But the snowmobilers wouldn’t be able to leave school until 5:00, so the Cell phone ladies got to work again, and finally located Myrna, who was headed to Bethel around 3:00 and had one more seat in her car.

The Ice Road

Did I mention that the “Ice Road” is the frozen Kuskokwim River? The river freezes in October, and starts to thaw in late April. The ice is currently about 6 feet thick. 

I rode in a car on a river yesterday.

The rest of the travel was uneventful. A long wait in Bethel, short flight to Anchorage, finally back to my hotel room after another 20 hour work day...