W00h! I grew up in Whittier, AK. Ask me Anything! Haha, seriously, I moved to Whittier at the age of 2 in 1974 and lived there until 1986.
The big change there since I left has been the tunnel. When I was there you had to drive your car up onto a railroad flatcar (and pay a steep ticket price) to get out. Anchorage is only 55 miles away, but really it's two mountains away. The railroad sold passenger service only as a requirement of the state and prioritized it behind freight. Between that, avalanches and assorted weather problems, you could wait hours and hours for a train. Winter service wasn't even daily, back then. We didn't even have cable. Just PBS and one channel that mixed shows from the three big networks. It was strange.
Yes, most residents live in one big 14 story high-rise in rural Alaska.
I most definitely do not miss it. I recommend this book if you want more info:
I was in Whittier in 1991, two years after the oil spill. I'll say that even then there was other housing and not everyone lived in the one building. You can easily see housing dotted around the area and the building sits back a bit from the water. The pictures in this article shows a remodeled building but when I was there it was in some disrepair. And as fishermen from around the prince william sound used to say, "There's no place shittier than Whittier.'
I was told the main reason Whittier exists is because it's the only port deep enough to dock warships. I was fishing out of Cordova which you can only get to by plane or boat but if you wanted to go to anchorage, you could take a small car ferry to Whittier.
> I'll say that even then there was other housing and not everyone lived in the one building.
When I was there last in `86, there were a few dwellings (maybe 8-12?) at the Sportsman's Inn and two old shacks right down by the railroad owned by one family of three. On google street maps I can see two or three new freestanding houses. The Shens who ran the better bar lived there. The vast majority of people live in Beggich Towers. It looks about the same now as it did then, and does not seem to have been renovated much. Are you perhaps thinking of the Buckner Building?
> There's no place shittier than Whittier
Not that I have found so far ;)
> I was told the main reason Whittier exists is because it's the only port deep enough to dock warships.
Supply ships to support the war effort, more than war ships, per se.
That is really impressive. The first thing I noticed looking at the building is how well it looks for 1956 construction and particularly given harsh environment. I suppose it's a testament to the great work of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Most of the Army's engineering in Whittier was pretty amazing. For example, Begich Towers is built on three sections with a gap of six inches through the full height. The gap is closed in with steel, accordion-shaped baffle so that in the frequent earthquakes, they could move independently instead of breaking.
On the other hand, hip-roofs simply weren't in the Army handbook, so everything was built with a flat roof. In a town that may get 400 inches of precipitation in some years, most of it snow, it's a recipe for disaster. Many of the smaller buildings roofs (including the school) were destroyed that way. Begich Tower's roof leaks. I mean, you can be on any floor and have your roof leak due to the capillary action through the cracks. The plumbing sucked. You let the water run until it was clear before you started drinking.
OK, history/geography lesson... The Kenai peninsula hangs down into the Gulf of Alaska and sort of separates those two areas. The landscape around there is very mountainous. However, Whittier has a low mountain pass to "easily" travel between Passage Canal (not an actual canal) on the east side to Turnigan Arm and Anchorage (more of a muddy tentacle) on the West side. Portage Pass was where natives would portage their kayaks through there back in the day, and European explorers adopted the route. Fast forward to World War II, and the US Army developed the site into a town, building pretty much everything bigger than a shack that you see there today. The Japanese were taking US islands in the Aleutians, and we needed to be able to get war materiel up there. You can't take it directly to Anchorage because it's a horrible port, with huge tides. So the Army built two big docks and a tank farm for petrolium. They connected it to Anchorage with a railroad. Unforunately, the old native portage was over Portage Glacier, and impassable in the summer. So they built one of the longest tunnels in the world through the mountains (also a second quite long tunnel). After WWII built Whittier's big residential buildings, Beggich Towers pictured in the article and the abandoned, Buckner Building. The Army pulled out of Whittier in the 50s, only a few short years after the two big buildings were built. Whittier survives as a town today as a port, and on top of that Army infrastructure.
> 2. What are the most jobs? Is there any production?
Most of the jobs are at the port, the railroad and the tank farm. In the summer, there's fishing and tourism. Everything else pretty much hangs off those.
> 3. How did it feel to live in such a small community?
I hated it. Other people liked it. Imagine having 0-4 other kids in your grade. Those are all of your friends. Pick your best friend and your girl friend from that pool. The weather was shit. Summer was SHORT and muddy. Winter was long and DARK. Absolutely everyone is absolutely all up in your business all the time. The views were real nice when it wasn't raining or snowing. It was usually raining or snowing. Opportunities for doing anything beyond school or work were pretty narrow.
Is there a doctor in the town? A hospital? What happens if someone has a medical emergency - you said the only way to Anchorage in winter was by a train that often didn't come daily.
I just don't understand how these kinds of towns keep any residents. They seem downright dangerous to live in. In Russia, I can understand it, but these are US citizens who can get a flight down to a whole host of warm, easy towns and get any minimum wage job and still quite easily be better off than before.
Generally speaking, there are some EMTs around. Mostly the same crowd as the volunteer fire department. They get some minor training and they do what they can. For anything big, they just transport you to Anchorage.
Back in the day, when I lived there, there was no road, just the railroad. But we had an old Army ambulance that had train wheels that it could deploy to travel to Anchorage on the train tracks. My dad actually took that trip twice IIRC for a heart attack and a stroke (I was pretty young and don't really remember it).
These days there is a road. It closes at times, but the cop has the keys, so they can open it for emergencies.
But yeah, living in the bush, emergency medical care may be a ways away.
What's odd about the place in the article is that they're all in the same building, which is probably not what most people who want to 'get away from it all' are seeking.
Actually it was built in WW2 after the japanese attacked the Aleutian Islands---the Americans were desperate to be able to defend US soil, and Whittier was perfect from a military standpoint: constantly clouded over (some insane number of days a year they get precipitation) deepwater port, surrounded by mountains.
I can answer #1 it is a major cruise port. Many Alaskan cruises start in Whittier. If you ever take an Alaska cruise you'll likely take the train into Whittier then get on the ship without spending a lot of time there.
I'm from Cordova and sometimes my dad and I would dock the boat in Whittier during closures. I remember playing connect four with Irma at the Sportsman and drink Roy Rogers (which is also where I learned how to play pool, I was between 7-14 then)
Fished the sound in one way or another until I was 20 and moved away.
Oh man, I remember Ross and Irma, but I got my Roy Rogers and pool from the Anchor Inn. If I recall correctly, the Sportsman's is actually older than either the Buckner Building or Beggich Tower
I guess there's not much to do besides studying and learning new stuff for a young, smart, introvert person in such small communities. The best and hardest working students I knew came from the tiny towns in the middle of nowhere.
I wish. Maybe that would be my story if I was a kid there now. But I left in `86. There was no Internet. There was no cable TV. Radio came in poorly. Gawddamn telephone calls were prohibitively expensive. I knew two kids that had computers at all. I played some Kings Quest on one of them, and tried to help the other with the Hitchhikers Guide game because I kind of remembered the TV movie that played out of order the year before.
I have wondered how different my life would be if I'd had wikipedia then.
Public libraries were Wikipedia of these times, not sure if you had one there though? I'm not talking about CS specifically, source of math, physics and other sciences are (were) easier accessible, even small school libraries usually have some extended books on these topics. Of course, it's easier to access information these days, but on the other hand, it has drawbacks too as most of youngsters waste their time on online games, social networks, 9gag etc.
Doubtful that Whittier had much in that department. I was in Cordova (with ~1300 people) and our public library wasn't much. I mostly read old sci-fi novels that my dad's crew would leave behind in the bunks.
I never actually lived there, but I was born in a small town across the Prince William Sound called Cordova. I came from a fishing family so we would spend much of the summer bouncing around between just anchoring up in the PWS and (often) spending fishing closures at the bar in Whittier.
I moved away when I was 20 and after a great deal of bouncing around, I've been living in New York for the last seven years. Some people just find their place, I suppose.
Yeah, we were down at the Anchor a fair bit, too. Man, that was a long time ago. I remember my dad getting pissed with me for spending so much of his money on the Pac-Man game, so he gave me fifty cents and a milk crate, and taught me how to shoot pool.
Nice to see a fellow Alaskan kicking around on here.
The Anchor Inn had the nice arcade. It had Ms PacMan, Defender, Burger Time, Tempest, Space Invaders, Time Pilot and a couple pinball machines including "Playboy," oh my! Oh and a decent jukebox, even.
The Sportsman's had Mario Brothers and Galaxian tucked into different corners.
And yeah, the arcade at the Anchor was way better but the Sportsman was much more chill about me taking up one of their pool tables, if I recall. Sportsman also had Goonies, I think. Not that I was any good at it.
I remember being super fascinated with collecting old railroad spikes from the trainyards as well. That and putting pennies on the tracks when we were waiting for the train to Portage. And I remember those old drive-on cars. When I had to pee my dad would make me wait until we were in a tunnel and then I'd open the car door and pee over the side of the train.
I live in NY now. That seems like another world entirely.
Railroad spikes (and assorted railroad spike art projects) and flattened pennies, check. The very best things to collect/scavenge though were the glass floats lost from Japanese fishing nets.
It seemed to have about the same crime as anywhere. I could easily imagine a drug epidemic really getting out of hand there, though I never saw that happen.
When I was there, some Alaskan religious group would rotate some "nondenominational" preacher through for a year or three and serve up basic Sunday School type Christianity out of an ugly room in the big building pictured.
There seemed to be a high-ish suicide rate, and working in the fishing industry is fairly dangerous.
Were there people moving in to replace the deceased? Is the building shown in the article at maximum capacity? And finally, I'm extremely curious about the criminal justice system. The brief article mentions a Sheriff and I assume there may or may not be a deputy also. It also mentions a pot bust. What happens to people arrested? Are they detained until they can be transported to a nearby town with a court system, or do the police just hold them for what they deem to be an appropriate amount of time or until the cell is needed to house the next arrest? I imagine since everyone knows everyone, the police would know anyone they arrest (and their family) quite well.
Sorry for the barrage of questions, but I found these points very interesting.
Re the pot bust, it seems the constitutional backdrop may have forced both sides into a tacit understanding that pot is fine so long as it stays at home:
Dave Schofield is the chief of police in Whittier. He is also the only officer who lives in town. Alaska’s laws often reflect the needs of a sparsely populated state, which presents challenges for policing within Begich Towers. For example, the state constitution has written into it a right to privacy; if something is occurring in your own home, you have the right to keep it private. This means that although there is a pervasive smell of marijuana in Begich Towers, the police can do little about it. “The law says you can’t have drugs within 500 feet of a school; there’s not a unit in this building that’s 500 feet from the school, but we have the right-to-privacy issue.”
The pot bust itself appears to have stemmed from this event:
A few years ago, a pot grower on the 10th floor had just finished a harvest and decided to get rid of some of the evidence by flushing it down the toilet. In the process he stopped up the plumbing on the floors below him—a neighbor called city management to complain that someone had flushed large amounts of dog food down the toilets, but it turned out to be pellets of grow medium.
> Were there people moving in to replace the deceased?
The population has varied considerably over the years. It looks like it's somewhat lower than when I lived there. In a lot of ways, Whittier is not a nice place to live, so people where always moving away, but it had certain appeals that always drew new people in as well.
> The brief article mentions a Sheriff and I assume there may or may not be a deputy also. It also mentions a pot bust. What happens to people arreste?
This is a bit of a change from when I lived there. Back then, there was a separate building that housed the police department (not sheriffs), the fire department and a court room. A judge would come through once a month or so. That building is gone from Google Maps now though, so it must have burned down or collapsed under a heavy snow load or something (that happens). Any serious crimes would be sent off to Anchorage. I would imagine that is how it still works.
> I imagine since everyone knows everyone, the police would know anyone they arrest (and their family) quite well.
Probably? We all pretty much knew who was an alcoholic, or who beat their wife. There seemed to be plenty of petty theft and vandalism to go around. I still wanna know who stole my Big Wheel!
while i can see that appeal for people who want to get away from it all, but i can't fathom that those same people would want to live in the same building with 200 other people. it seems like the worst of both worlds.
For a more extreme example of crime in this kind of very isolated place, I found what happened on Pitcairn island fascinating (and tragic). The criminals had to build their own prison to serve their sentences in, because the island didn't have one. Can't find the original piece I read, but e.g. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/evil-und... .
Well the Army installed great heavy-duty double paned windows that you could totally open and close. However, they were kind of bulky and ugly, so many people (especially on the North side with a view of the Sound), have replaced them with big unopenable picture windows. Whittier is really not THAT cold most of the time.
I'm curious as to why people choose to live in a place like that. There are far more hospitable places to live in around the world - why would a family choose to live in a frozen remote place such as this. How is it like growing up? Did you have friends to play with? What's teenage life like? As a teenager I'd be devastated if the girl/boy ratio was skewed.
Rent is very cheap. It's low speed and relaxed. Lots of people like those things, even if I m not one of them.
On a side note, it's not really quiet. The railroad hauls shipping containers off huge barges, places then on train cars, connects train cars together into huge trains (I have seen a train with six engines) and hauls them out. They build trains all night long, banging cars together, honking horns, diesel trucks straining.
How much does it cost to live there? Like that guy who is running a grocery store? Seems like he could spend his whole day with browsing the web given the customers to expect!
I live in Alaska and have visited Whittier multiple times. Every time we go, my wife and I comment about how great of a setting it would be for a zombie apocalypse movie.
"Oh it's only accessible by water or the main tunnel, it's easy to secure"
"oops we forgot about securing the old train tunnel"
"oh no they're in the apartment building, let's go hide out in the creepy old abandoned building down the street"
... clearly I'm not going to be writing the screenplay, but the location has a lot of potential!
It would be a great place to hold out with a large group if you had a way to obtain and import supplies and you cleared the building first. You'd probably be able to spot anyone coming or going (living or undead), and it would be likely that very few zombies would be in the surrounding land.
Also, of course zombie fiction requires a major suspension of disbelief in this regard, but the damp/cold weather would cause the zombie bodies to freeze (at below zero) or decay faster (at above zero, though I suspect it is rarely if ever above zero)
The Whittier temperature averages [1] seem to indicate a 6-9 month period where highs are above freezing. That would make for some exciting daytime zombie interactions. By comparison, McMurdo Sound, Antarctica [2] does indeed appear to be below freezing on average the vast majority of the year.
To hide out from the zombie hordes behind an impenetrable wall of freezing air, you would just have to set up shop at some place like Amundsen Scott South Pole Station, Antarctica [3]. Once the jet fuel (what they use for power) runs out though, it will get unpleasantly cold, fast.
Given that zombies usually don't obey the laws of thermodynamics, if I lived in a place like Whittier I'd probably try to harness them to some kind of hamster wheel driving a generator.
I don't think there's enough evidence to claim that zombies don't obey the laws of thermodynamics specifically. Perhaps zombie-ism transforms something in their core into a nuclear reactor that slowly converts atoms into a near-endless supply of energy. It's apparent that they don't obey physical laws, but which ones specifically depends on your interpretation.
Contrary to popular belief, while temperatures do go down on average as you go further north, the really pronounced difference is how much it varies between its extremes. Realize that in the summer in these northern places, the sun is shining (or at least in twilight) past midnight, and comes back up very early in the morning, only a handful of hours later [1]. It actually gets quite warm [2].
This arrangement looks a lot better than the norm in that area. The typical 200-person remote Alaskan town is more of a shantytown, a depressing collection of low-quality single-story shacks. This at least looks like solid construction, probably more weatherproof than the norm, and with some indoor community spaces. Seems like a decent solution for such a town, in the rare case where the capital to build such a building is available (in this case it was only because the U.S. military built it).
It would be interesting if someone tried this in one of these larger cities with high rises like Singapore. You'd create a smaller groups with a sense of community while still giving members the benefits of living in a large city. The reason I thought of this is it reminded me of a strategy of using small bible study groups being employed in a large church that was part of my alma mater. The idea is that it was easier and more intimate in these small groups, so they'd have the ability to hold more personal sutdy sessions. Of course, they still belonged to the main body and had those advantages, such as a larger number of volunteers, etc.
Something like that could create the "small town atmosphere" many city dwellers seek without destroying the city.
This is essentially what college campuses do already, to some extent. My current apartment complex also hosts activities, movie nights, brings in nurses so residents can meet and ask about health problems. This is in addition to the playground, tennis/basketball court, computer room, gym, small theater, and other amenities that help to create a "community" atmosphere.
Also, I think a big reason this model is so "successful" is that people don't have much of an alternative. Really, would you _prefer_ to go to that sketchy-looking grocery store with the mayonnaise next to the cereal, if you had the choice of going a few blocks to a large supermarket? To be honest, I've never spent any time using my own apartment's amenities. I live in the city, because I want to be with people like me, not because I want forced socialization with people who just happen to live together.
Only if you assume that physical proximity is the most significant attribute two people can have in common!
Aside from my housemates, I don't know so much as the first name of any other person on my block; but I live here because dozens of my friends live within a mile of my house.
> It would be interesting if someone tried this in one of these larger cities with high rises like Singapore.
In Singapore, 80% of people today live in what are called HDB flats. These are government subsidized housing projects (with few of the downsides that phrase entails in the west). These HDB buildings (or just "HDBs") are each, eventually, integrated as part of an "estate" which usually comprises one or two grocery stores, some restaurants, maybe a salon or barber shop, hardware store, etc.
Given Singapore's population density, there are often several HDBs near each other in one "town." But if you want, you can find one that lets you live in relative isolation, with shopping and eating downstairs, and perhaps a direct connection to the metro to get to work. The playground will be outside, but otherwise you could live almost entirely indoors if you wanted...and some people do, since it's 30 degrees Celsius every day.
This was the concept between some subsidized housing in the mid 20th century, and was for the most part a failed experiment in architecture.
The two significant differences here are 1) government officials and law enforcement are part of the housing complex and not external; 2) since they aren't housing projects, the buildings don't have automatic class stigma.
> was for the most part a failed experiment in architecture.
More like a failed experiment in social organization. The same model works fine in Singapore because the government aggressively routes around social problems: for example, they assign ethnic and income quotas in each building in order to maintain a mostly even distribution of population groups, impeding the rise of ghettos and basically forcing different people to get along[1].
The failure of '70s/'80s "projects" in most countries was due to an excess of faith in the ability of mankind to live together given communal spaces, and incomplete information in terms of social dynamics likely to develop in such settings (and around them, e.g. "white flight" was in full swing but it was not completely understood at political level [2]).
[1] Singaporean housing policies are not entirely benign: they are also used to break out political organizations and silence critics of the government. Central planning, as usual, is a double-edged sword.
[2] ... to be kind. A more unkind reading is that upper echelons knew perfectly well what was happening, saw the future coming, and just let it be.
"The Ethnic Integration Policy (EIP) was implemented to promote racial integration and harmony. The policy also aims to prevent the formation of racial enclaves by ensuring a balanced ethnic mix among the various ethnic communities living in public housing estates.
[...]
When the ethnic group proportion or SPR quota or both have reached the block/neighbourhood limit, a buyer will not be allowed to buy a flat as it will lead to an increase in that ethnic proportion or SPR quota or both."
Large cities often have apartment buildings for 200 or more people with units connected by concourses to their own shops and community facilities. Difference is, people there have alternatives.
Sounds like Park Hill, one of the early council blocks in Britain: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Hill,_Sheffield . (Mostly a failure, but that Wikipedia article is much more positive than other things I'd read about it, so shrug)
Whittier is also home to the Buckner Building. 250k square feet, abandoned after the 1964 earthquake and left to rot. In other words, a perfect place for indoor skiing. http://vimeo.com/50860740
Why do they build such tall buildings in an earth quake area? Why is such an destroyed inhabited building still around 50 years later? In other parts of the world there would be many smaller buildings and inhabited ugly buildings would be removed.
I like the creative use of the building in the video, great work!
Why do they build such tall buildings in an earth quake area?
The basic answer is that they had no idea what kind of earthquake was possible there. That earthquake is #3 on the list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_earthquakes#Largest_ea... and was the second megathrust earthquake recorded since the geological knowledge existed to figure out what they were. (The first being Chile in 1960.)
This article makes it sound like some remote wilderness where you would freeze instantly when you go outside. The climate there (according to wikipedia) isn't that cold, right now it's -12c with a high of 3c over the next few days - there are plenty of European cities with colder climates.
Still an interesting place none the less. They have an official website with more details: http://begichtowers.com/ - there is a unit for sale for $40k if anyone is interested :D
> The first thing we noticed when we arrived in Whittier was the wind—we were barely out of the car when a powerful gust pushed us down the hill. People in Whittier get out of their cars carefully; the wind has been known to shatter windshields and bend car doors backwards. Because the weather can be so extreme, kids often walk to school via an underground tunnel. The town averages around 250 inches of snow annually, but some recent years have seen closer to 400 inches. Two winters ago the snowdrifts near Whittier School were piled so high that the principal let students go outside to take pictures of one another hanging from a street lamp.
Coastal Alaska isn't nearly as cold as everyone thinks. The ocean keeps it mild. It snows a lot, and it's often windy, but the actual temperature is rarely below ~ -20C.
I'm in the Yukon, away from the ocean. I rode my bike to work at -37C this morning :)
I read somewhere that Whitehorse has the highest number of bicycle commuters per capita. I rode my motorcycle through there a few years ago, and it was quite beautiful.. but I don't get why so many bike commuters. I guess compared to a big city it has no transit or less transit? But less spread out than a typical suburban area?
The statistic would have surprised me in an area with mild weather year-round; nothing about the area seemed particularly well- (or ill- , for that matter) suited to bicycle commuting. A fairly compact downtown but plenty of rural housing.
The cold winters just made the bicycle commuting stat mind-blowing.
Any feedback about this statistic? Is it like a "yeah, but.." kind of thing? Or does the area really take pride in bicycling? Some kind of history I'm not aware of?
The vast majority of people that live here do so because of the amazing array of wilderness outdoor activities on offer mere minutes from town. I've lived in a lot of places in Western Canada, and none of them hold a candle to Whitehorse in this regard.
I don't know for sure, but my guess on a bike riding stat is that there are a lot of people living here that are outdoor/fitness freaks. Most of them are super freaks.
Also, anyone that doesn't like the winter leaves. So those of us that stay love it, and we don't care if it's +30C or -30C when it comes to doing awesome outdoor activities :)
That's indeed true. My sister lives in Whitehorse, and she says that pretty much everyone who lives there is an outdoor enthusiast. If you aren't, you just won't fit in.
We did the drive from Washington to Anchorage when I was 6 or 7. It was a very beautiful, to say the least, and I have many memories of that part of Canada (BC and Yukon) etched into my head.
The coldest city in Europe is Helsinki. According to Wikipedia, the average high is 9 C and the average low is 2.9 C. For Whittier, the average high is 7.3 C and the low is 1.7 C.
Can you give some examples of these many European cities that are colder, on average?
Not sure where you got that Helsinki is the coldest city, I'm not even sure it's the coldest capital. There are plenty of colder cities, take a look at Kiruna as an example (which was also featured here a few weeks ago):
Edit: Ah I think I understand, my original comment was referring to being cold in the depths of winter, not the average temperature. Right now I'm in Vilnius the capital of Lithuania, it get's colder than Whittier (and Helsinki) in the winter but a lot hotter in the summer, so the average isn't that bad:
Just as a little fun fact Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongola is the coldest capital city in the world. Right now Accuweather says it's -18°F (0°C). It regularly dips below -40°F/C in the winter.
If the comparison is winter temperatures, rather than year-round averages, it would make more sense to compare the coldest month (otherwise you mix together the effect of cold winters and cool summers, which are very different experientially). Helsinki has colder winters than Whittier does, though not by a huge margin. Whittier's coldest month is January, with average high -0.4 C (31 F) and average low -5.1 C (23 F). Helsinki's is February, with average high -1.9 (29 F) and average low -7.4 C (19 F). Whittier has a lower year-round average because it has cooler summers (highs around 60 F / 15 C, versus Helsinki's ~70 F / 20 C).
Helsinki is a pretty temperate city for Finland, though, being on the southeastern coast. Oulu and Tampere are a lot colder!
I wouldn't mind living there. I've been dreaming about moving somewhere remote and just do freelance work. The only requirement is a good internet connection which sadly excludes a lot of cool places.
The thing is, this town is not only remote, but during the winter you have to pretty much dug in and stay inside. No going anywhere. It's not the same as just being somewhere isolated and remote, and you have to take that into consideration. Some people might enjoy it anyway.
Huh? Why would you stay inside when you live in such a beautiful place? I live in the Yukon - it's -37C today and it's absolutely beautiful outside. I rode to work today, and just did a 1 hour round trip walk to the library to drop off some books. I'll go for a ~2 hour snow shoe tonight in the dark with my headlamp. I saw the Northern Lights last night, so I'll take my camera tonight.
I went to Iceland in February and we went to Gulfoss (the Golden Waterfall). It wasn't that cold, maybe -5 deg c, but with the winds (probably gusting at 100km/h) and the frozen rain it was the single most unpleasant place I've ever been. Coupled with all that was the fact we were trying to look at a waterfall which had rain and ice whipping off it directly into our faces.
It did, however, stop raining that night and we spent about an hour watching the northern lights out in the fresh snow which was magic.
Well in the full article they talk about the constant hard winds that sometimes shatter windshields and such. Also the poster who grew up there mentioned the constant rain that gets wind-blasted in your face. And so I'm thinking about somebody who was never accustomed to these things suddenly moving there because they seek some solitude.
Might not be as great as she/he imagined, that's all.
Reminds me of Harbin, on the bus trip from Changchun in the winter I watched the mercury fall from -20 to -35. It wasn't really that bad (my digital camera battery failed me at the ice sculptures, however).
Do you have a thermometer in your car? I was surprised that the buses in north east china all have this (displayed up front), as if trying to tell us how much colder it was getting :) My only experience of making that trip is in the summer.
What is weird thing about china, however, is that both Changchun and Harbin are huge cities with millions of people. How could so many people live where it is so cold...the entire huge songhua river is completely frozen over. Surreal.
For the first time in my life, yes. I just bought a new (to me) 2007 Jeep, which is why I was driving from BC to the Yukon - vehicles are much cheaper in the south.
> What is weird thing about china, however, is that both Changchun and Harbin are huge cities with millions of people. How could so many people live where it is so cold
I know what you mean, though when you live there, you live there. The Russian city of Murmansk [1] is in the Arctic Circle and has a population of 300k.
>the entire huge songhua river is completely frozen over. Surreal.
In Dawson City, Yukon they're driving across the Yukon River right now - it's part of the highway and the only access to town for the hundred or so people that live on the other side. The river doesn't freeze in Whitehorse because of the dam, though we can drive across any lake around here for the next 3-4 months no problem. Last year my 3 foot ice auger was not long enough to drill a hole for ice fishing :)
Every single new car has a thermometer built in and displays the current temperature outside on the dashboard. It's not that uncommon. I actually think it's a great safety feature for when you are driving to work in the morning and you are not sure if it's quite freezing yet or not - if your thermometer says it's less than 4C then I am more careful, but if it's above 4C then it should be fine to drive.
I've been out of the states for 10 years and haven't bought a car since '98. You don't normally see these on an intercity bus, but it was deemed important enough to have on the bus to harbin in winter, like a Chinese bullet train bragging about its current speed.
>how often are the winter weather good enough for you to venture outside?
I've never had, or ever heard of the winter weather being bad enough to stop people going outside to do activities in Whitehorse, Yukon.
I was Caribou hunting last year near the Arctic Circle at -48C, my friends were back country skiing on the weekend when the wind was severe and likely the windchill was past -60C. I ride my bike or walk to work/town literally 365 days of the year. Friends were Bison hunting a few winters back below -55C - and they were sleeping in a wall tent :) They had to wake up every hour to stoke the stove, and it took them a full day to get their snowmobiles running so they could ride ~100km on them back to the world. Not the kind of place you want to make a mistake.
It doesn't snow much here (semi-arid) so we don't get whiteout conditions.
Our local community ski will close when it's past about -30C - so we can't go skiing on the chair lift then - on those days I go snowshoeing or ice fishing usually.
Friends up in the Arctic Circle in places like Iqaluit [1] have told me they have 20 or 30 days a winter where it's impossible to go outside - it's such severe whiteout and wind you would get lost and literally die if you went outside. Nobody leaves their house for any reason on those days.
That doesn't happen here - or at least I've never heard of it ever happening, and have not seen it in my 5 years.
I actually spend some time now and then in Kiruna (see other comments in this thread about the coldest cities in the world) so I have no problem with harsh winter. I think it's amazing. The rain and winds don't sound so nice though.
I had pretty decent 3G (good enough for most dev work and better than the crap I get in Toronto) everywhere I went in Vietnam (even the tiny ethnic villages). US$1.50 for every 500mb. It was probably the low density of users but there are probably lots of places in the world in a similar situation.
Anyone notice there are no outlets on the walls with the current unit for sale.(ref: word doc) Cannot help but envision 12-months of this personally to finish project, better yet turning say one section into a serious satellite ycombinator incubator.
There is fiber cables landing in Whittier as part of the Alaska United cable system. Granted, that doesn't mean it's accessible there but still... It's pretty sad to see those speeds reported when there's only one building to wire up and it's so close to a fiber route.
I've never been to AK but it's interesting as a small ISP to hear about the environmental and incumbent issues that competitive providers have to deal with up there.
This reminds me of Fermont[1], a remote Canadian city in northern Quebec that I visited when I was young. There is this 1.3 km long building shaped like a wall with all services, shops, restaurants and apartments in it. The wall protects the rest of the city from northern winds.
Literally just signs by the side of the road. Even the Top of the World Highway has a Customs inspection shack (which is farther north and seemingly more remote).
Related: I worked as a geologist in the area and our helicopter ran out of fuel while doing some recon far from civilisation. Imagine our surprise when we spotted a 4x4 with a fuel tank below us, out in the middle of nowhere (more or less). We landed on the dirt road next to the truck, fuelled up enough to get back to the base and had a good laugh + beer to end the day.
And I lived in a city with about 14 million people, where one building had about 3 thousand people living in it (it has its own zip code). So different it made me want to visit this town in Alaska.
It would be interesting to see what these people do for a living. Why are they there? There are children, so there must be families who have decided to move there.
> In the summertime Whittier is bustling. Seasonal workers come for jobs on fishing boats, charter boats, or in the cannery, and cruise ships bring hundreds of thousands of tourists to the harbor. But thriving harbor industries—freight, fishing, tourism—don’t seem to translate into growth for the city. Over 700,000 people visit Whittier annually, but most tourists don’t stay in town for longer than an afternoon, if that. Instead they go directly from the cruise ship to a train that takes them to Anchorage. Residents sell food and crafts to visitors, but most of the tourists’ money goes straight out the tunnel. The Alaska Railroad Corporation is the majority landowner in Whittier, but it doesn’t pay property taxes, and it employs few residents. A supply barge comes into town once a week, but most of the workers who unload the freight commute from Anchorage. Not everyone who tries to live in Begich Towers can take it—a newcomer from Florida compared it to jail—and there simply isn’t much space on which to build alternate housing
It's a good port. Alaska depends on tons of stuff shipped in from other places. The Alcan is a pretty shitty drive for trucking stuff up. Alaska's biggest city is a very poor port, and second biggest city is inland, so freight comes in on barges through Whittier, and then around the state via the railroad. Anchorage elites park their boats in Whittier's small boat harbor. In the summers, fishing and tourism are big.
Witter has historical significance as being an accessible ice-free port in winter. This is why the train tunnel was cut, to support a navy outpost and shipping. Prior to the tunnel it could only be reached by sea.
Nowadays i'm sure the primary industries are tourism and shipping.
>In summer, cruise ships, charter boats, and commercial fishing vessels bring thousands of visitors to Whittier’s harbor on the west side of Prince William Sound.
It seems the tourists mostly disembark and take the train to Anchorage[1]. Though I suppose out of 700000 that visit every year even if 5% make purchases it might sustain the population along with the grant they get from the Alaska government.
[1]http://reedyoung.com/project/whittier-alaska/r-young-whittie...
We took an Alaskan cruise last year on Princess. We left from Vancouver and our last port of call was in Whittier. Then we had to take our turn going through the train/car tunnel to Anchorage for our flight home. If you mistime your ride through the tunnel you can miss your flight. We had a really late flight so we had no problems.
Zillow lists possibly 4 homes for sale. (It says 5 but I think one is a duplicate.) As well as the tower which others mentioned, apparently there also a condo called Whittier Manor.
Funny how that works. I saw somebody mention this city in a thread on Reddit yesterday. He talked about visiting somebody there and having to wait 1.5 hours because the one-way-tunnel changes "direction" every 2 hours...
I googled the location, expecting it to be in the far north of Alaska, given the description. But it's just southeast of Anchorage. Is the weather really that much worse?
I grew up there! The weather is a lot different than Anchorage. Anchorage is colder. Whittier gets a TON more precipitation.
The Army actually built Whittier during WWII because it was a good deepwater port (ironically, Anchorage has huge tides that make it a horrible anchorage) that was always overcast, making it hard, they thought, for the Japanese to bomb.
I was there doing some geology this May, and one of the AK geol. survey guys mentioned that the previous summer, some of his colleagues were working directly across the fjord on the hillside on a clear, sunny day. A snowstorm sprang up pretty suddenly and they got stranded for several days. IIRC one of them had a little deployable shelter but the other had to hide under some boulders.
As a side note, Whittier has a huge tsunami risk, not from typical undersea earthquakes but because the mountainside on the north side of Whittier Sound is unstable and some very big blocks of rock (100s of m) are slowly breaking off from the bedrock. If (when) these fall, they could create a pretty massive wave that could devastate the town. [1]
"Anchorage climate similar to northern Midwest
Now let’s talk about the winters. The truth is, they aren’t as bad as myth would have it. Anchorage actually has a warmer climate than other cold-weather cities like Chicago or Minneapolis because it’s on the ocean. Southeast Alaska stays relatively warm for the same reason. The Interior, however, does get very cold. Without the regulating influence of the ocean, temperatures in interior locations like Fairbanks can drop to minus-30 for weeks at a time (though it’s a dry cold, which doesn’t feel as cold as it sounds). Just remember that temperature is microclimate in Alaska. No matter where you are, a one- or two-hour drive in any direction can result in a 30-degree temperature change."
"Abundant snow creates winter wonderland
Likewise, there’s a large variation in snowfall across the state. An average of 79 inches of snow falls on Anchorage every year (the same amount as Burlington, Vermont). But Talkeetna, only two hours north, gets considerably more snow due to the higher elevation, and Alyeska — just an hour from Anchorage — receives an average of 178 inches annually!"
> A pot bust on the tenth floor led to the police donating hydroponic equipment to Whittier’s school for a vegetable garden, which Joey Lipscomb oversaw through eighth grade.
It's not one of Eric S. Raymond's talking points, but the backwoodsman aspect of hacker culture seems really important, and also, probably, fatal to its long-term spread.
Well, first of all it's not a geographical description. The nature of "hacking", which is a self-reliant activity of producing provisional solutions, has a lot in common with the ethos of life in remote areas or on a frontier. Even the word hacking evokes chopping firewood or doing some other woodwork task in a rough, ad-hoc way. This is combined with a sense of mutual aid which is often present even in (maybe especially in) thinly-populated areas. Gabriella Coleman might be a good source for more insight into this. Just why hacker communities behave as if they are isolated even in an urban environment is not something I understand, but from personal experience they are self-selected groups of people with particular traits, who often have difficulty being accepted by mainstream culture, or who scorn the mainstream.
As someone who repeatedly and often rails against political articles here, I would say this is on-topic because it's simply interesting. It's easily ignored if you don't find it interesting, and it doesn't seem to be generating boring discussion of rehashed political debates or something else untoward.
I upvoted you though because I am glad I'm not the only one keeping an eye on what's posted, and it looks like you already got plenty of downvotes.
Hell most jails in the U.S dwarf this complex. Dear lord I hope an EMP never hits any of those towns. Sure hope the gov hasn't taken away the ability to protect yourself.
To my knowledge, EMP has killed precisely zero people in human history. I'd be curious as to why you think people living in a high-rise can't defend themselves.
Probably because an EMP would fry most electric devices? I'm not sure it would affect the heating (there's likely electricity involved, but I'm not sure how an EMP might affect it precisely), but the GP might have thought along those lines.
The big change there since I left has been the tunnel. When I was there you had to drive your car up onto a railroad flatcar (and pay a steep ticket price) to get out. Anchorage is only 55 miles away, but really it's two mountains away. The railroad sold passenger service only as a requirement of the state and prioritized it behind freight. Between that, avalanches and assorted weather problems, you could wait hours and hours for a train. Winter service wasn't even daily, back then. We didn't even have cable. Just PBS and one channel that mixed shows from the three big networks. It was strange.
Yes, most residents live in one big 14 story high-rise in rural Alaska.
I most definitely do not miss it. I recommend this book if you want more info:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1578331919/