Where I Live

I'm living and working in Metlakatla, a small town on Annette Island (going on my 3rd week here now). "As of the census of 2000, there were 1,375 people, 469 households, and 338 families" living here. 9.53% white caucasian population, the rest are Native Americans of the Tsimshiam tribe. "Annette Island is an island in Gravina Islands of the Alexander Archipelago of the Pacific Ocean on the southeastern coast of the U.S. state of Alaska. It is about 18 km (12 miles) long and about 18 km (12 miles) wide. The land area is 332.573 km² (128.407 sq mi). Annette Island is located across the Revillagigedo Channel from the Alaska mainland on the east and across from Revillagigedo Island (where Ketchikan is the main town) on the north" (all data per Wikipedia).

The town is basically crammed into a tiny corner of the island, with everything in walking distance covering just a few blocks. We have 1 grocery store, which gets its deliveries from Seattle every Tuesday (you have to go Tues since all dairy and produce is basically gone by later in the week), 2 convenience stores, one of which has DVDs for rent, 1 gas station with just 1 old-style pump (there are cars here), a hardware store, a small inn (I think it's like a part-time bed & breakfast when needed), and 1 or 2 restaurants that serve sandwiches and hamburgers (nothing gourmet, or even worth paying for really), a school, head start program, firestation, police department with 1 or 2 cell jail, bank, huge wellness center with sauna, free-weights, and an olympic-sized saltwater pool (which has been closed all summer but should reopen before I leave), and the clinic where I work. Outside of town there's also a cemetery, old WWII airport that no longer operates, a fish hatchery, and a cannery which no longer cans the fish, but all the fishing boats bring their fish into here where they are filleted and packaged and shipped out (sutured a patient in the ER who had "filleted" his own finger-oops).

Employment here is basically fishing and commercial deep sea diving. Apparently the island has something like 60 or 90 fishing boats. Also since they are Native Americans, there are no legal limits to where they can fish and how much they can catch, unlike most of Alaska. The diving is to harvest sea cucumbers, "gooey ducks"-which I understand are some sort of large clam-like shellfish, and sea urchins.

The rest of the island is mostly uninhabited wilderness. It's pretty mountainous and you actually can't access most of it. There's one main paved road that runs the length of the island, with a bunch of random dirt trail-roads going off of it (some aren't established enough to be called roads). I haven't explored all of them yet, but one leads to a harbor where I've been kayaking, one trail leads through huge trees to a rocky beach where you can supposedly find sanddollars, and another trail leads up yellow hill. "Yellow Hill" and "Purple Mountain" are the main hiking spots. Yellow hill is an easy hike, and someone actually laid out a wood path complete with steps to the top. Even though it's not very high, there are great views of the ocean, mountains, and island from there (I'm posting a picture of purple mountain that I took from yellow hill). It looks like one big pile of large yellow-orange rocks, but I think it's naturally occurring. It's weird because I haven't seen any yellowish dirt or rocks anywhere else on the island. Purple mountain I haven't been up yet since the weather keeps covering the top in clouds. It's more like 3 attached mountains that have a twilight-purple tint to them, especially at dusk. Plenty of cool spots to explore, and I don't think I've even found them all yet.