Wes & Steph in Alaska Update

by Wes

We went to the bluegrass festival in Anderson, AK. I don't know what you think of as a bluegrass festival, but I was under the impression that there would be a lot of country folk with corn cob pipes strumming on the washboard, keeping time with two spoons taped together while a banjo plays and people dance the softshoe in the dirt. In reality, a bluegrass festival is a grateful dead concert....with country music. It's composed of rather dirty groups of teenagers, varying in age from 14 to 68, wearing lots of tye-die, and doing lots of drugs. When the fireworks at the end of the music went off, a full 75% of the crowd was giggling at what they thought was a great, but private, hallucination. Now, you must realize that it never really gets dark here, which helps the all-night party to go on at full speed and full volume. We set up our tent in the "quiet" area, but it really didn't get quiet until around 6:00am, when it started to rain, although you could still here the occasional group of people reliving the woodstock mud experience. Then another phenomenum erupted: the older RV'ers who could not sleep because of the noise, decided to exact their revenge on the passed out revelers by leaving early and blowing their horns while driving all the way through the camping area. Note to self: pass up the next opportunity to go to a bluegrass festival.

From there we travelled down to Talkeetna, the center of aviation for the Mt. McKinley flying tours. We met the owner of one of the operations that evening, he listened to our qualifications, including our hours of flight and told us: "You are in the right place at the right time, we need pilots!" He asked us to stay around til the next day to get a check flight with him, and we would have a job. Yay! We stayed in a B&B to the tune of $170 and dinner for $100 (Alaska is really expensive). We arrived early, studied the airplane manual, sat in the plane to familiarize ourselves with it, and then waited.... This lasted until 2:00pm when the owner's wife came over to tell us we didn't have the minimum hours for the insurance...good day. ARGHHHHHHH!!!!

Now we are in Anchorage, we had a very succesful interview yesterday, and were offered jobs flying freight and mail out of Bethel (a fly-in community with no road access) into the native villages, pretty much the kind of flying we are looking for. However, after looking at the cost of living in Bethel: milk at $6.50 a gallon, cell phone service at $1.00/mn and rent at $1,600 per month we calculated we would be living at a net loss. So, the adventure continues....