Polar bears lure adventurous tourists to remote Barrow on Arctic Ocean

BARROW, Alaska — Bunna Edwardson loaded the last of his passengers into a Ford van, pointed it toward a strip of gravel that passes for a road and broke into a toothy grin.

"Let's go see some polar bears," he said.

We didn't have far to go. Just a mile or two beyond Barrow's busy boat launch, a mother bear was snoozing while a pair of 400-pound cubs cuddled close and kept watch.

We continued driving toward the end of a gravel spit that juts into the Arctic Ocean, the farthest north point of land in the United States. At 72 degrees north latitude, Barrow is as close to the North Pole (1,311 miles) as it is to Ketchikan, Alaska's farthest-south city.

Barrow is one of America's most remote towns. Established long ago as an Inupiat village, Barrow has only a few roads, and they quickly end in the boggy tundra that surrounds the village. Alaska's only highway to the Arctic, built to serve the Prudhoe Bay oil fields, is 250 miles to the east.

Since Barrow has no oil, a highway was never built — so most visitors arrive by air, during summer when the sun never sets, on twice-daily flights from Fairbanks, 500 miles to the south.

They come to experience the Arctic or, as I did last September, to see the polar bears.

"Look at that monster," said Joe Sage, our driver on another tour the previous evening. "That bear is so fat that it's uncomfortable lying on the beach — so it scoops out a pothole for its belly."

We all strained to see through the thick, murky fog, but we had to take Sage's word that we were, indeed, looking at the world's largest land carnivore. It looked more like a beached iceberg to me.

Three-quarters of a ton of bear

Sage knows polar bears as well as any American. He shot a polar bear during a recent hunt, 30 miles out on the pack ice. Inupiats such as Sage are allowed to hunt polar bears, as well as whales and other wildlife, for subsistence. He said the brute we were watching was 9 feet long and 1,500 pounds, three times heavier than a grizzly bear in Denali National Park.

Fortunately, the fog lifted for my second tour with Edwardson the next evening. So we began counting polar bears.

Eight were crawling around a pile of whale bones, part of the Inupiats' quota of 22 bowhead whales. The bears were eating putrid whale meat from the spring hunt, but they didn't seem to mind.

"Don't worry," Edwardson said. "You can't poison a polar bear. Enzymes in their livers let them digest anything."

The liver of a polar bear is so potent that a number of early European explorers died from eating small bites of one.

Scanning the horizon with binoculars, we spotted three bears walking along a lagoon, a couple swimming in the ocean, several more lying in the sand. Some rested in comical positions on the beach, while others scratched their behinds by rubbing them in the gravel.

When we finished counting, we had tallied 23 polar bears from our vantage point near the whale bones. By the end of the two-hour tour, a 10-mile drive from the center of Barrow, we had counted 31 bears. Even though the bears ignored us, the tour guides maintained a distance of 100 yards because polar bears are unpredictable and dangerous.

"This is the largest concentration of bears I've seen in 15 years," Edwardson said.

A few minutes later we heard Sage's voice crackle over our radio. For safety's sake, Alaskan Arctic Adventures uses two vans during its polar bear tours.

"Let's head back to town," Sage said. "There's nothing to look at here but snoozing polar bears."

'I just love this place'

Barrow usually makes the national news twice a year — when the sun sets in early November and when it rises again in late January. In between, Barrow has two months of near total darkness, broken only by just enough twilight to photograph bears for an hour each day.

Barrow natives such as Edwardson and Sage say they wouldn't live anywhere else.

"I just love this place," said Edwardson, gesturing to the tundra to the south and the ocean to the north, which together make Barrow one of the flattest spots on Earth. "The flatness, the open space, the fresh air, the northern lights, the coldness, my family, my friends. We don't have 10-mile traffic jams. Heck, we barely have 10 miles of roads."

Despite its austere setting, Barrow attracts a steady stream of tourists. Many make the trip so they can brag to friends that they crossed the magic latitude of 66.5 degrees known as the Arctic Circle.

Barrow greets them with three motels, a branch of Wells Fargo Bank, several well-stocked grocery stores, a city bus system and nine restaurants, including one with a Mexican menu, one that serves Japanese cuisine, and a pizza parlor with a view of the Arctic Ocean. Don't look for a beer, though, because Barrow is dry.

Taxis roam the town of 4,000, even though it's easy to walk from one end to the other in a half-hour. Walking is pleasant during summer, when the temperature nudges 60 degrees, but the same walk can be deadly when the mercury plunges to 50 below zero during winter. The taxi fare is the same anywhere in town — $5.

Northern exposure

The town's houses are clustered close together around Isatquaq Lagoon to ease the difficulty of providing water and sewers in the frigid environment.

Visitors often have their photo taken beneath the whalebone arch on the shore of the Arctic Ocean. Some even go for a dip in the ocean to earn membership in the Polar Bear Club.

Many visitors attend a performance at the Inupiat Heritage Center, the community gathering place where the language and culture of the native people are kept vibrant and alive. The drumming by men and dancing by women, to songs called "The Polar Bear Shake" and "A Beautiful Swan," are as memorable as the famous blanket toss that follows.

A walk through the streets of Barrow reveals a lifestyle few can imagine. Strips of caribou meat dry in the sun next to junked cars and snowmobiles kept handy for spare parts. The town's only traffic light is at the entry to Fred Ipalook Elementary School.

Check out this gas price

The price on a gas pump reads $3.14 a gallon. A 20-ounce bag of Lay's potato chips sells for $9.95 in a grocery store, a 19-ounce box of Kellogg's Rice Krispies for $7.92.

The natives have a simple way of beating the high cost of food.

"I can spend $20 for a pound of meat, or buy a box of cartridges for $20 and take home 600 pounds of meat," Edwardson said.

Tour company owner John Tidwell arrived in Barrow from Seattle in 1986 and never left. He founded Alaskan Arctic Adventures to take tourists to the site of the 1935 airplane crash, Barrow's most famous event, that killed Will Rogers and Wiley Post. He also shows them the incredible bird life of summer in the Arctic, the giant herds of caribou, the arctic fox and the great bird of the north, the snowy owl.

Tidwell never dreamed he would strike it rich with polar bears the way he did last summer. He used the opportunity to expand his fleet of vehicles and hire native drivers. He knows where five pregnant females are denning and expects to leads tours to see newborn cubs this spring.

A few polar bears usually show up outside Barrow in October when the pack ice forms. But Alaska, in general, isn't famous for large numbers of polar bears like Churchill, Manitoba, which claims to be the polar bear capital of the world.

The bears usually live far offshore, hunting seals among the ice floes. But last year, in early August, a windstorm unexpectedly blew the pack ice to Barrow. An estimated 70 polar bears rode the ice to town, then were stranded on Barrow Spit when the ice blew out. The bears could either swim 30 miles back to the ice, or wait until it returned with winter.

Most waited.