This quote in the visitor's center is worth reading and remembering
We planned our standby flights out and hoped that with the Obama speech being over we would easily be able to make it back to Anchorage. We were wrong. We were once again foiled on standby and were in Kotzebue for another day.
Being that the town is literally four streets there wasn’t much left to explore our do.
e didn’t have a lot of options in terms of things to do, so we headed back to the visitor’s center. We had already completed our Junior Ranger badges and gone through all of their interpretive exhibits. We learned that they have a plethora of nature films that we could watch.
We watched numerous films. One was called the People of the Feather and was about Canadian native tribes that hunted ducks. Another was about Antarctic toothfish how they are being overfished; you would recognize their alternate name, Chilean Sea Bass that was created simply as a marketing tool because consumers don’t want to eat a ‘toothfish’. There was a film about a guy who hiked and rafted 1,000 miles in Gates of the Arctic. Interestingly enough there wasn’t an actual film for Kobuk Valley. We could watch nearly any nature film that we wanted to, but we couldn’t watch anything about the actual park The most exciting part of the films, for me, was seeing a pilot who looked almost exactly like me!
One of the more striking things about the visitor’s center was the park ranger who was working there. We asked her about Kobuk, about things to do or see and experience and she had never been to the park! She was a new employee, but had been there the entire summer. I suppose that when you have such a rural office it is difficult to get enough coverage to have your rangers go out and explore, but I still found it very strange that you could work in a park without having ever visited it.