Seth Kantner gives us a glimpse of the harsh winter in Kotzebue in the Alaska Dispatch

It’s March now, how March should be-blue and sunny, twenty to thirty below in the morning with daytime highs rising to zero.  Winter is slipping into memory, but we still have the drifts around Kotzebue to remind us. January brought a longer-than-usual stretch of 30 and 40 below weather. We got restless, on the verge of cabin fever. We thought we deserved a break.  Then the storms came, blizzards after blizzard--so often that we might as well have painted our windows white.  Not that the paint would have stayed on.

Kotzebue is supposed to be stormy, but this year was more like drowning-we’d get a blow, and if we were lucky have a day to come up for air and shovel out, and then get hit with it again.

One night--the forth or fifth storm-it wailed all night from the northwest, so fierce and cold the school actually cancelled classes in the morning, a rare event here.  By 10 a.m. it was sunny and bitter cold, and the kids were smiling at their amazing fortune.  Twelve hours later it was 36 below and rising wind from the opposite direction.  Twelve more and it was a full-on blizzard from the southeast.  The radio was telling people to stay in their houses, and the town was shutdown yet again.

One morning I looked out at the nicest day in a week--two miles of gray, wind at 25mph (what we started calling “the new calm"). In the time it took to light a fire and make coffee, visibility dropped to a hundred yards and the wind doubled.  Arctic Transportation Services was on approach in a Casa.  It flew into the sudden whiteout. And crash-landed west of town on the ice.

Around the same time two snowmobilers left Kiana, traveling to Kotzebue.  The men left the village during a rise in temperature.  A 50-degree drop, combined with a whiteout on the trail lead to them becoming lost.  It took five days for Search & Rescue to locate the men-just ten miles from Kotzebue--but not before they had succumbed to hypothermia.

By then folks were on edge, not just suffering from storm fever, but also from true concern.  The winds had brought overflow out on Kotzebue Sound, and visibility remained so close to zero that few people ventured far on snowmobile.  Half the roads in town were one lane, the rest buried.

More storms lined up-one the worst I’ve ever experienced. Everyone in Kotzebue has a story a story from that blizzard.  I put my camera in the freezer to chill, then went out to take photos.  You could see your hand in front of your face, no problem, further than that and things started getting fuzzy. People were trapped in their trucks, lost only yards from their doors, stuck spending the night at their workplace and the school floor. Another tragedy: a person was found frozen after the storm, on the sandbar in front of town.  And again, we weren’t finished-at the post office and stores people were telling their stories, and warning that another storm was coming. See more here.