Mountain Village

     People have often wondered what it looked like where I first lived when I go the teaching job in Alaska.  Mountain Village is a small Yupik Eskimo village of about 750 persons located about 450 miles west of Anchorage on the north bank of the Yukon river in the Yukon Delta.  Mountain houses the district office of the Lower Yukon School District, a school district of 11 villages covering an area roughly the half size of the state of Louisiana.
     Travel in the summer is either by boat or plane, and in the winter by snow machine and plane.  There is only one road in the entire district which links Mountain Village to St. Marys, 18 miles away.  Pitkas Point is also along this road.
     The school in Mountain, when I was teaching there, had a staff of around 20 to 25 including all teachers and support staff.  The school had an enrollment of about 250.  The high school had four to five teachers.  I taught Business and Social Studies, there were also a Shop/Science, Math/Home Ec, and English/PE teachers.  Total enrollment in the high school had a low of 37 and a high of 86 during my seven years there. 
     The picture on top is a view from a plane when I was off to another village as the chaperone for the basketball team.  For orientation, the view is to the north.  The original runway used to be just to the right out of the picture.  The frozen river is at the bottom.  The line of houses to the left/west, is along the side of the "mountain" which is the dominant feature of the local terrain and is the last significant earth feature before the seacoast.  The location of where I lived is at the lower left point of the red line.  To the northwest of that location you can somewhat make out the school with the clearing in front of it.
     The other picture is the housing unit, duplex, of which I lived, sometimes with another teacher, sometimes not, depending on the number of other teachers that were single or with families.  We sometimes had to double up.  In our contract, this particular housing unit was classified as "B" and had a base price of $480 a month plus 10% of our salary.  In effect, the school district charged us about $2,200 a month for rent.  And this was from 1989 to 1997.  This did include all heating fuel, electricity and water.  Which actually was a pretty good deal considering that at that time regular gas was $1.75 a gallon, milk was nearly $6 a gallon, potatoes were $10 a bag, etc. 
     I still can't believe that I had the nerve to accept the job and fly sight unseen from Michigan all the way out there, but it was one of the best experiences ever.  The memories are really quite something.  I could type away for pages.
     There are a couple of other pictures that Bert and I have so I will try to find them and give some brief descriptions.
     Happy spring.  We are up to almost 14 1/2 hours of daylight but still only about 50 degrees.