Brian
Administrator
I was interested in the origin of the name "Hallo Bay". What I found was not what I expected:
Alaska musings and wanderings
- Thread starter Troy Hamon
- Start date
Brian
Administrator
Troy -- Great photos, as always. Thanks!
BananAppeal
Instrument Training
Oops. We know that upside down feeling. Tundra tires would not have saved the T210’s nose gear.
Troy Hamon
Private Pilot
Interesting. I missed that detail from when Landis wrote that.I was interested in the origin of the name "Hallo Bay". What I found was not what I expected:
A lot of the place names in our region are Russianized versions of native names. Usually an ending of -ak,-ok, -ik, or -of are hints to the Russian contribution.
Troy Hamon
Private Pilot
Uploading these a little larger so the bears show up…there are a lot of bears. Moraine Creek at the Funnel Creek confluence.
Troy Hamon
Private Pilot
Flying down the Aniakchak River. Spent a lot of my early years here as a scientist on this river. One of my favorite places.
MRC01
In the Clouds
When something like that happens, how do they get picked up / rescued? Airplane radio? Handheld? ELT? PLB? Mobile phone? Also they might get stuck there overnight, better be prepared for that.
Troy Hamon
Private Pilot
Depends on the location and timing. In this particular case, there were already airplanes on site and some people that saw the entire event. The folks were offered assistance but were unharmed and elected to stay for the day and fish or view bears, I am not sure which. The higher res photos I posted with all the bears in the creek also includes the airplane on the tundra. Beyond the plane, you can see the small lake where most people arrive and depart via floatplane. There are usually more than 60 people in the area, and sometimes over 100, throughout the time frame from July 15 to September 1. This event was in the middle of that time frame, and it would have been difficult to find a time when there would not have been people on the ground in the immediate area.
However, I regularly go there and stop during June while we are doing surveys. In that case, you might not see an airplane all day, and there would be nobody on the ground. So any event would require some sort of communication. Usually the ELT initiates calls from the Rescue Coordination Center to our office and I would get sent out to investigate. If I am unavailable, then they might try our sister agency USFWS to see if they could borrow their pilot. Then they would check with the state troopers. And then back to RCC to see if they can get response either from USCG or the National Guard, usually the coasties deal with water rescues but we are close to Kodiak so sometimes they would be the responders.
If the ELT is not activated then it just depends what resources they have. The pictured plane had both radio antennae broken off so there was no likelihood they could have gotten a radio call out.
In our federal fleet, we have active satellite tracking that uploads our location every two minutes. And I carry a satellite phone in my emergency gear. So our response to incidents within the fleet is pretty targeted and rapid. But I don’t get in a plane without my bag. Which is mostly just clothes. Really warm clothes. And we have -60F Wiggy’s bags in the plane in addition to the entire required set of emergency supplies.
MRC01
In the Clouds
When we flew through Alaska I carried a PLB with GPS (attached on my person), a hand held aviation radio, and the recommended Alaska gear: tent, sleeping bags, mosquito head nets, hatchet, water, multiple ways to start a fire, a week of food for everyone, etc. Fortunately, we never needed it but I was still curious.
We got stuck at Gulkana GKN overnight on the way back and they told me about a couple that one of their pilots dropped off at a nearby glacier earlier that year. The couple was highly experienced and had all the right gear. Several days later they didn't check in, a multi-agency search was initiated. Turns out they tried to cross a river, got swept away, lost all their gear, and were found a week later, having died of exposure.
Troy Hamon
Private Pilot
Exposure is a real threat here if anything goes wrong. And it is amazing how far away you can be when you think you are close. A friend of mine got swept into a tree in his boat within 20 miles of town. He ended up on the wrong side of the creek so no trail to walk. He may as well have been trying to walk back from the moon. Lucky for him a boat came by eventually.
Aeromot
Superior Pilot
Even zoomed-in on my 12.9-inch iPad, I could bearly make them out.
Troy Hamon
Private Pilot
I have had trouble linking to other hosting sites so I started just loading them here but I try not to make them huge because I don’t want to put too much storage demands on the server. But I probably should put in a big one so you can see what I was referring to. So here is the full resolution image for the best of the three in terms of bears visible. 
MajorTurbulence
Private Pilot
- Joined
- Oct 3, 2019
- Messages
- 537
It is amazing to me that the vertical tail structure collapses enough to take out the ELT antenna. I took very seriously that emergency bag that Canada and Alaska sources advise to be filled up with goodies. It weighed about 42lbs. Besides the PLB and aviation radio, I rented a SAT phone for the journey also.
Troy Hamon
Private Pilot
I didn’t mean the ELT antenna failed, in fact the ELT activated and was reported to us by RCC. But the radio antennae were jammed into the tundra when it flipped on its back and they broke off as the airplane slid a few feet after flipping. So you were asking about how they would communicate, and in a case where this might have occurred without people around, they would not have been able to make a good transmission on the aviation radios.
Troy Hamon
Private Pilot
Iliuk Moraine visible in front. Some of our class G VFR weather.
On this flight I was tasked with looking for an overdue boat while I was headed home after dropping off staff. Didn’t find the supposedly missing boat (they had already boated off the lake by then) but encountered a number of boats out and about on the nice day.
On this flight I was tasked with looking for an overdue boat while I was headed home after dropping off staff. Didn’t find the supposedly missing boat (they had already boated off the lake by then) but encountered a number of boats out and about on the nice day.
BananAppeal
Instrument Training
Glad they were okay
Brian
Administrator
Troy, I should know this and maybe I did know it at one point but I don't recall it now. What is thrust of the research you folks do up there?
Aeromot
Superior Pilot
Less than a month until Fat Bear Week!
Brooks Falls bear cam:
explore.org
Fat Bear Week 2023 hasn’t even started but these burly bears are already winners
Katmai National Park and Preserve’s brown bears have been bulking up all summer, but not just for Fat Bear Week.
www.usatoday.com
Brooks Falls bear cam:
Bear Cam - live from Brooks Falls in Katmai National Park | Explore.org
Watch LIVE as hundreds of Alaskan Brown Bears descend on a mile-long stretch of the Brooks River to feast on the largest Sockeye Salmon run in the world.
explore.org
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Troy Hamon
Private Pilot
Sorry to be slow to respond, things got super busy again and then I was off hunting moose.
The answer is sort of complicated by a few things...such as who 'we' is considered to be. And also whether you are interested in the flight operations in general or only the ones supporting research. So here is a quick broad overview.
Out here in the office in King Salmon, we have a natural resource staff of 3-5 permanent employees at any one time and 4-6 seasonal employees each summer. Our local staff in the NR division focus on documenting the number of animals in the park, primarily bears, moose, and bald eagles, with numerous other smaller efforts including caribou, ptarmigan, and wolf, as well as documenting seabird and sea otter die-offs by surveying beaches for carcasses, and marine debris surveys to document the amount of material brought in off the ocean. The bear, moose, eagle, and caribou surveys include aerial counts and are done from CC-18 cubs. Also in the case of bears, we have locations where we have people on the ground and they document bear activity from standardized locations and times each year. The other surveys are ground based as well. We fly them to the locations to do that work and then leave them on the ground to conduct it, and occasionally help out.
In Anchorage, there are a number of shared support staff for NPS and most of their work is based on going to locations to work on the ground, including vegetation plot monitoring, weather station maintenance, and water sampling.
We also have cooperators that help us and occasionally we conduct more exotic projects with their input and assistance such as the ongoing work on dinosaur footprints in Aniakchak. Again, that project is ground based so we are just supporting with logistic flights.
We have a cultural resource crew here in the park, and for them we are providing occasional aerial overviews of project areas, but mostly we provide them logistics flights to get them to the locations where they need to work.
For our maintenance crew, we are generally flying them to Brooks Camp to open camp in the spring, and then around to the backcountry cabins to provide work on those locations in the summer for maintenance. There are four primary backcountry cabin locations they are usually trying to access, we don't have a huge number of remote cabins.
We have a wilderness ranger team that spends most of the summer in the backcountry and we get them in and out of the areas they are working.
We have law enforcement rangers, we fly survey flights with them as well as logistics when they are going to be on the ground for a while.
We have planning groups that make decisions for the park, or consider actions such as repairing or replacing cabins when needed as well as large scale management plans for the park. We try to get some of those folks into the areas they are dealing with so they can have real knowledge of the resources they are talking about in the planning process.
We occasionally have meetings in villages with concerned citizens, and often access those villages with our aircraft.
Brian
Administrator
Very impressive! Also, it sounds to me like very important work that's getting done. 