Barrow, Alaska: Cold Frontier

TIME Correspondent Karsten Prager, based in San Francisco, journeyed to Alaska for a look at the nation's biggest, frostiest state. He stopped in Barrow, the northernmost city in the U.S., 330 miles above the Arctic Circle. He found it in some ways startlingly unusual, in others oddly like any other American town of its size.

IT is dark now and the bitterly cold wind drives waves of snow across the flat, white landscape that is Barrow, Alaska. In mid-November, the sun dipped below the southwestern horizon, bringing winter darkness that will last into January. The city lies wrapped in a frigid cocoon of Arctic night. Beached boats of varying sizes dot the snow-covered ice pack that runs along the shore of the Chukchi Sea. That is the limit of Alaska's North Slope, the last land between America and the North Pole.

Barrow in winter is mainly a scattered group of frame houses covered by layers of frost. Much of the time "20-20" weather prevails—20°-below-zero temperature and a bone-rattling 20-knot wind—making the chill factor 70° below zero. During winter in Barrow one does not walk more than 1,000 ft. before taking cover. To go farther would invite painful frostbite.

Some 2,300 people live in Barrow, now Alaska's ninth largest city. Once it was a small Eskimo village. Then, in the late 19th century, Charles Brower set up a whaling station; he stayed on for 57 years and became known as "The King of the North." Today about 90% of the people in Barrow are Eskimos. They and the few whites in Barrow form a tightly knit community. There is not much money in the settlement's treasury. But when a new emergency fire vehicle was needed, the residents chipped in to help the town buy a $30,000 fully tracked fire truck that can go anywhere in any weather.

There are no roads linking Barrow to the outside world; ships can get in and out only two months a year. The only year-round connection to the outside is by air, and every day a Wien Consolidated Airlines Boeing 737 jet puts down on an airstrip just outside the settlement. The community's leaders say that the remoteness of Barrow is probably the main reason for one of the area's most perplexing problems—excessive drinking. Of the 700-odd arrests made by Barrow police over the past year, almost all were related to drinking. An important police chore during night hours in Barrow is getting drunken townspeople in from the freezing cold. "They're simply bored," says Mrs. Sadie Neakok, 51, the district magistrate in Barrow. "There's nothing better to do than get drunk." Recreation is limited to basketball at the school gym, unreliable cable television, movies at the Polar Bear Theater (with special weekend showings of X-rated films), bingo and a week of Eskimo sports between Christmas and New Year's.