Mekoryuk, AK

From Mekoryuk

One of the good things about my job is that it provides some really interesting travel opportunities. I have gotten to work in Craig, Petersburg, Sitka, Bethel, Kasigluk, and now... Mekoryuk. That's the name of a little village on Nunavik Island in the Bering Sea just off the coast near the Kuskokwim delta. The island is huge and volcanic, and Mekoryuk (pop. ~200) is the only settlement.

My job in Mekoryuk was to start up a small water treatment plant to provide water to the school (pictured above). Previously, the school distilled water to drink and used the murky brown stuff from the taps for cooking, cleaning, and flushing the toilets. Boreal Controls designs, builds, programs, installs, and maintains controls to automate, among other things, water treatment processes. That's our control panel for this project on the right (with all the buttons and switches).

From Mekoryuk

The insides of the control panel are shown below:

From Mekoryuk

This panel is programmed to control the pumps, valves, and sensors (like the ones that measure the depth of water in the various tanks) that make it possible to produce clean drinking water, and my job was to alter the control program and operator interface as necessary to get the plant running, and wire in some sensors and pump controls necessary to get the plant running. I hope these photos will help all my friends and relatives who are confused about just what it is that I do for a living.

Anyway, there was a bit of downtime, which allowed me to walk around and take some photos. Two of the first observations I made are that Mekoryuk is windy, and that the sunrises and sunsets are long and beautiful (thanks the flatness of the island and the sun's low angle so late in the year). The shot of the sunrise behind some fuel tanks is definitely worth clicking and seeing full size.

From Mekoryuk

From Mekoryuk

From Mekoryuk

There were other interesting sights to see, like a musk ox head that we found under the stairs to the water treatment plant. Later, we found another under the plant itself. The second one still had its flesh and fur intact.

From Mekoryuk

It turns out that the locals raise musk oxen and caribou on the island, and charge tourists big-ass cash money for guided hunts. Some of them are apparently also commercial fishermen:

From Mekoryuk

But what fascinated me most was the sea. With the constant north winds, the surf blew up pretty good and provided a hypnotic background rumble that was especially sweet at night. I think Nunavik Island might be an undiscovered surfing destination, just waiting for an intrepid trailblazer... Sommers?

Unfortunately, a blue-grey ocean under a grey-blue sky doesn't make for stunning photos. The situation is improved some by the black and yellow colors of the volcanic rock and withered fall grasses that line the sea shore:

From Mekoryuk

That reminds me of another thing that really struck me: the subtle undulations of the pillowy old lava to be found all over the island. It is really too bad that the village is too far away to see the volcano because, well, volcanos are cool.

From Mekoryuk

Though the village is only about ten feet above sea level, it turns out that they have to sink foundation pilings through permafrost. I would have thought that the volcanic bedrock was just barely hidden under the tundra. Anyway, that's all I've got for now. Thanks for sticking with me all the way down to the bottom here. Oh, yeah: happy birthday to me!