Adventures by Day Day 1: Heart Lake Day 2: The Cove, Finger Bay, and Lake Betty Day 3: The Ridge Day 4: Loran Station and Bering Hill

The view west from the Loran station

Day 4: Loran Station and Bering Hill

Sunday was our flight home, but thankfully the flight didn't leave until 6:00 pm so we had all day to play.  Our main goal was a return to the north end of the island to explore the old Loran station and beach comb along its more exposed beach.  On the way we stopped at the top of the hill just north of the town by a tank farm to take some panoramic shots of the area.  The view was unimpeded, the sky mostly cloudless.  We could see that the big volcanoes to the south that we’d spotted from the ridge top were, in fact, separated from Adak Island.  In the housing complexes below we could see buildings with manicured lawns and pickups, sharply contrasted with the wild and overgrown lawns nearby.

Adak proper from the nearby hill

Adak and the edge of Kulu Bay

Kulu Bay from the hill near the town (photo by Chris)

As we were exploring, Chris yelped and claimed that a bird flew right in front of him, disappearing into a nearby room.  I investigated and jumped when a dark song sparrow buzzed by and out a window.  After that we saw many song sparrows fly in and out of the building as though they owned the place.  Next door we entered a separate building, sodden and falling down, and absolutely cram packed with racks and racks of....well, I'm not sure what it all was, but I think you might call it a machine room.  There were gages and wires and all sorts of items, jumbled up all over the place.  Song sparrows came in and out the whole time we were in there, sometimes several at a time, sometimes singing.  They clearly knew their way around that room and were quite bold.  In fact, they appeared to be attracted to us!  Sparrows kept coming in, eyeing us, then hopping cautiously in our direction.  I think they may have been begging!  Several web sites I looked at about bird watching on Adak suggested sprinkling bird seed to attract birds; although it seemed like an out-of-the-way location for a bird watcher to target, I can't account for the behavior of these sparrows any other way.  In fact, I felt rather bad that I had nothing for them, they seemed so eager.  The song sparrow of Adak, called the Aleutian song sparrow, is apparently a year-round local, isolated from song sparrows on the mainland.  Song sparrow songs are notoriously diverse across the continent (sharing the characteristic song sparrow trill at the end), but these songs were the most distinct I'd ever heard and I may not have recognized them as song sparrow songs if there had been any other similar common bird on Adak.

Outside, the sparrows flitted from one tall lupine stalk to another.  Chris and I headed down the long grassy slope to the beach below, winding up among waste-high hummocks of grass and ferns where it leveled out.  Beyond was a beach of basket-ball sized round red metamorphic rocks (I think), punctuated with flotsam washed up from the ocean.  Chris headed to the right to beach comb up to the nearby point, and I looked around where I was.  We both found big plastic buoys, but I didn't see anything else very interesting.  When Chris came back, though, he showed me a non-descript plastic bottle, like many lying around.  I was unimpressed, but based on the look on his face I inspected it more thoroughly.  The cap had Japanese script on it!!!  He'd found a Japanese bottle.  It hadn't even occurred to me to look at the plastic bottles, but I scoured the beach for them from that point on.  We walked along the beach back to the area below the car, inspecting all debris along the way.  We each found about three really neat bottle caps with Asian writing on it and Chris found a Russian bottle cap as well.  We also found a bottle of Japanese shampoo (or something like that) that still had product in it, a Japanese soy sauce bottle, the wrapper for Japanese rubber gloves, a hard hat, buoys, ropes, and lots of other refuse.  Additional wildlife included a charming group of mystery sandpipers and an Aleutian Pacific wren--another regional variant like the song sparrow.  More song sparrows inhabited the vegetation at the edge of the beach and foraged around the kelp-strewn rocks at the water's edge.

The cliffs at the beach where we stopped was a near-vertical wall of vegetation which we climbed up hand over fist.  The weather was partly cloudy and the scenery stunning--we could even see some of the reef at the edge of the beach through the water.  Clutching our washed-up treasures, we made our way back to the car and headed south for one more adventure.  I wanted to drive to Shagak Bay on the western shore of the island (across the island from the town).  A long sand spit nearly enclosed the lagoon and it sounded like a neat place to explore.

Orphaned fire hydrant	Looking down on the cove	Parked near the cove and Loran station
The Loran station	Generators	View out the station window
Hallway inside the station	Song sparrow on lupines	Song sparrow on the roof
Chris inspecting the machine room	Friendly song sparrow in the machine room	Looking out from the buildings
Beachcombing	Song sparrow in the seaweed	Mystery sandpipers
The beach looking west	Beach rocks	Japanese gloves wrapper
Colorful rubble	Looking back toward the Loran station	Asian bottlecaps
Beach flowers	Chris and a hard hat	Chris climbing the slope
The end of the beach from above	White flowers	The complex near Clam Lagoon (note the sign)

On the drive past the runway we stopped for a bald eagle perched on a post at the side of the road.  Adak eagles are pretty easy to approach and, given the lack of trees, tend to perch and fly low to the ground; this one let us get within about ten feet before flying off.  We also passed a sturdy building with seven bays surrounded by barbed wire that, we were told by our telecommunications friend, were build to house nuclear bombs.  We soon got into some trouble following a long-unused road which had washed out on the top of a knoll behind the runway, then retreated and found a better road that led around White Alice.  The terrain to the right of us sloped down to the bottom of a valley and on the other side we could see the lower slopes of Mt. Moffett.  The gently sloping land was cut with many branching channels, carrying water down to the stream at the bottom.  It was the most obviously volcanic terrain I've ever seen.  Unfortunately, once we got to the hill, we were unwilling to continue on the existing roads.  After trying several routes around it, we eventually gave up; the roads were too bad for our comfort, some of them half full of soil from a large ditch being dug alongside them (we assume it was related to the telecommunications work at the top).  Unfortunately, the only way to access the other road to the lagoon was back in town and we were out of time.  We wound up on a different road heading south, stopping on the way to explore another bunker.  There were caribou jaw bones on the ground outside.  Continuing on, we wound up turning and approaching the town from the southwest, passing through a whole community we'd never seen before.  It was Bering Hill with its two of churches, what appeared to be barracks, a community center, etc.  It looked like the place I'd like to live if I was stationed there. 

Instead of going straight back to the duplex, we made one last stop at the black sand beach near the end of the runway.  I’d stopped there in 2006 and found an intact sand dollar (which was later broken by a window washer at work) and I hoped to find more.  We parked and entered the beach where Airport Creek drains into the ocean and started walking.  Chris found the first sand dollar and I found the second (and last).  The afternoon sun made the scene in the bay dramatic and the smooth black sand beach was undisturbed and beautiful.  We found a few crab shells and other flotsam and romped around some of the sand drifts before turning around and heading back to the creek.  There we watched a lone salmon scurry up and down the shallow channel through the beach (I think it may have been trapped there for the duration of low tide) and saw dozens of fry-sized fish there as well. 

Unfortunately, we then had to head back to the duplex to pack up and make our way to the airport, our luggage considerably lighter without all the groceries.  The flight back was gorgeous; we passed over more of the Aleutians, one of which was covered in clouds that piled up behind a volcanic cone hidden beneath..  We over-nighted in Anchorage and took the early flight back to Juneau, thoroughly pleased with our vacation.  Adak is fascinating on two counts: the military ruins (and current community) and the wild Aleutian island it inhabits.  Either one is worth a visit in itself.  The military ruins are endless, so many of which have doors hanging open inviting exploration.  Nowhere did we see warnings or signs prohibiting entry (with the exception of the boarded up doors at one complex that were closed by orders of the CO!).  In addition to the obvious military complexes and bunkers, there were random buildings all over the place, some of which may have simply been weekend getaways for families.  We could picture bored men stationed on Adak with limitless time and ample resources building recreational cabins anywhere they liked.  The roads outside of town provide access into the original Adak Island, the lush and pristine hilly tundra open to endless exploration or a different sort.  As Chris said while hiking the ridge, there was really no bad place to set up a tent!  A person could tramp around and camp in the refuge forever.  Not only would you be unlikely to find people beyond the roads, but you wouldn't run the risk of stirring up any bears or other wildlife either!  I'd like to go back and track down the caribou in their summering grounds on the southern end of the island, eating trout from the lakes and streams.  If you find either or both of these topics interesting, I highly recommend a trip to Adak!

Grove of spruces	Rare view of Mount Moffett from the north	Nuclear bomb storage
The slopes of Mount Moffett	Bunker in the landscape	Entering Bering Hill
Strange bunkers at Bering Hill	Old church at Bering Hill	Bering Hill community center
Black sand beach on Kulu Bay	Wind designs	Our living room