16 dog teams set to leave windy Bethel en masse for the start of the Kusko 300
Print article Volunteers on snowmachines hauled straw and other supplies while doubling as trailbreakers Thursday in preparation for this weekend’s Kuskokwim 300 sled dog race in Bethel. Strong winds buried both the race trail and the road that organizers planned to use to take supplies to a checkpoint being set up about 30 miles outside Tuluksak, race manager Paul Basile said. Thursday brought winds of 24 mph and stronger to the area, and Basile said the forecast calls for continued wind through the weekend. “It’s definitely changed our logistics the last couple of days,” he said. “We’d really been hoping to get a lot of our supplies and some of our volunteers to our Tuluksak checkpoint by truck.
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Thousands of Alaskans are playing a role in getting people vaccinated, Zink said. Curt Jackson used to employ his water taxi, the Orca, to shuttle tourists from the small city of Homer to villages across Kachemak Bay that aren’t accessible by roads. In late December, Jackson received a request to take three nurses across the bay to Seldovia, a town with about 450 residents, including members of the Seldovia Village Tribe. Planes couldn’t fly that morning because of weather, and the water was rough. When the women climbed aboard his 32-foot aluminum landing craft and took seats in the windy darkness, Jackson said, he noticed that the woman in the middle, Candace Kreger, was clutching a bright blue cooler.
Alaska, the state with the largest land mass in the nation, is leading the country in a critical coronavirus measure: per capita vaccinations.
About 13% of the people who live in Alaska have already gotten a shot. That s higher than states such as West Virginia, which has received a lot of attention for a successful vaccine rollout and has inoculated 11% of its people.
But the challenge for Alaska has been how to get vaccines to people across difficult, frigid terrain â often in remote slivers of the state? Boats, ferries, planes, snowmobiles â Alaskans will find a way to get it there, said the state s chief medical officer, Anne Zink, 43.