Beached Whale Sighting

There was a beached whale reported just outside Alakanuk the other day. You might ask yourself what the blazes a beached whale was doing up the ice-covered Yukon River. Well, I’ll tell you—she was stuck in waist-deep snow. Seriously. I should know—I was there—and I was beached.

We were skiing along a couple of days ago, and Keri decided we should take a slightly different route. Well, that slight difference just about put me 6 feet under—under the snow, that is. I hit a soft spot, and my skis sank in and came to a dead stop, but my body kept on going. I tried catching myself with my poles, but they disappeared up to the handles. I know this, because I could see the handles sticking up a few inches from my face, which was now planted firmly in the snow. I tried getting up, but every time I moved, my skis sank in further and my legs got more twisted. And I couldn’t reach my feet to pop my skis off. I resembled a pretzel.

That’s when a plane just about ran us over. You see, I happened to get stuck at the end of the airstrip, so the plane buzzed our heads as it came in for a landing. (And this wasn’t one of our bush planes, it was a big one. It must've held twelve people, maybe more.) How embarrassing.

Keri popped out of his skis and waded over to me—the closer he got, the more he sank. After much grunting and nose scrunching (he always scrunches when he’s concentrating), he was finally able to get my skis off. But now, I didn’t want to move. When he yanked my poles out of the snow, I could see through the hole—and it looked like a long way down. Turns out we were skiing on top of a mess of bushes and scraggly trees. Since I didn’t want to crash through and be stuck ‘til spring, I decided to try and roll over to where it was packed solid. (We knew it was solid because there were fairly fresh snow machine tracks.) Problem was that it was slightly uphill...and there was nothing to grab onto...and I could hardly move because my snow clothes were suddenly restrictive...and they felt like they weighed a ton. So I did the only thing I could think of. I laid there and laughed—hard. The whole situation just hit me as being ridiculous. And the harder I laughed, the less I could move.

That’s when the plane took off—again, right over our heads. I was lying on my back, and had such an up close and personal view of the plane’s underbelly that I could count its rivets.

But that gave me incentive to inch myself to solid snow and get out of there. I didn’t want to be around when Search & Rescue, the Coast Guard, and the Marine Animal Rescue Society show up in response to a pilot’s desperate plea to help save the beached whale. THAT would have been embarrassing.