Once again, great photos.?ÿ Thank you!
What is the story on Adak?
They say it is good to laugh.?ÿ I watched back to the shovel ninja - still giggling......
Ken
?ÿ
Somebody got a new toy, great shots
Adak was a former remote Navy base...strategically located to push back against a Japanese invasion during WW II then a pushback ?ÿagainst the USSR during the Cold War years... had up to 90,000 people at one time... now its just a handful of caretakers. Was decommissioned in 1998 and abandoned. A ghost town.... I had to do a large asbuilt out there...
I was building a bid for a remediation project there a few years ago, and learned Adak has 8 days on average of sunshine.?ÿ And is a huge UXO and ground water remediation nightmare.?ÿ
Used to be very popular for birders too, now difficult to even get people to take you out there.?ÿ
Very beautiful none the less!?ÿ Thanks!
Great entertainment!
thx for sharing.
Christof.
At one time, all my enlisted 1st and other assorted cousins were at the same Alaskan military base at the same time. Brothers and cousins of one another, they rarely even got a glimpse of one another for being attached to different military groups. Being from Texas, they were completely out of their native element and all were glad when they returned to warmer climates.
I, however, was on my own mission and saw the more exotic backdrops of the world in what I can only describe as locations off the well-beaten paths in life and rarely caught sight of anyone I knew personally.
A forest of monitoring wells pretty much everywhere and the UXO is still being searched out and destroyed by a couple teams there. Some areas of the island are so littered with bombs...you just can??t go there...
there is a barebones store ....a bar ($8 can of Coors Light)...and a liquor store ($68 case of bud) that serves the tiny populace...
only two flights a week from Anchorage and those are pretty much empty flights...certainly not a money maker for Alaska Airlines...prob subsidized in some manner.
I didn't realize Adak was abandoned, when I was serving ('83 - '87) it was a pretty major base. The old joke was that if you screwed up bad enough your next orders would be to Adak (or Diego Garcia).
Daryl, thanks for posting.
I remember Adak as it was in 1969. The firm I worked for was doing an evaluation of the pavement on the runways.
At that time there was still some barbed wire on the beach, placed there to guard against a Japanese invasion that never happened. Scattered around the hills there were the remains of hundreds of small Quonset huts where the WW2 troops had lived. The commanders had wanted everyone spread out in case of air attack.
The Quonsets had been set up in pits dug in the ground, with the excavated material piled around them in berms. This arrangement was no doubt intended to protect the men in the Quonsets from fragmentation bombs that might be dropped nearby. The Quonsets had all been burned at some time after the war; reason unknown.
A dozen or more abandoned WW2 hangars were still standing in 1969. They were all built out of wood, that having been the quickest way of constructing them, and were covered with peeling tar paper. The hangars were something like 150 feet wide by 600 feet long by 50 feet high. The roofs were supported by huge timber trusses.
On a hillside about a quarter mile from the airport, you could see half a dozen little hemlock trees, perhaps six feet high. They had been planted by the troops during WW2, and were referred to as the Adak National Forest. Not a single other tree was visible anywhere.
Hundreds of bald eagles lived on and near the base. There was an eagle roosting on every other utility pole, and there were usually eight or ten perched on a cliff above the garbage dump.
At that time Adak was a base for radar picket planes patrolling the Bering sea, shadowing Soviet planes that were doing the same thing. It was said to be very risky duty, since they stayed in the air as long as weather permitted, and the weather could turn bad in minutes. There was no GPS, of course. Aircraft returning to base in thick weather had to approach on instruments, and hope that they were lined up with the runway when they broke out of the soup.
There were two runways which met at an angle of about 135 degrees at the base of a hundred-foot cliff. The burned-out carcasses of a couple of crashed aircraft lay alongside the runways.
