Journey North Mystery Class Spring 2005

Introducing Mystery Class #8--Wales, Alaska, USA
( 65.608 N, 168.088 W)

Greetings from Wales, Alaska!
	Welcome and Greetings from the students from Wales-Kingikmiut School in Wales, Alaska.

Wales is located on the western tip of the Seward Peninsula and is about 595 miles west of Fairbanks.

As our clues told you, we are located on the eastern edge of the Bering Strait, where you can look west and "see tomorrow" because we are so close to the International date line.

Our School:
We are a multi-leveled classroom with 4th, 5th, and 6th grades. Our names are Molly, Alicia , Sean , John , Angela , Byron , Helena , Herman , Stacey , Ruben and Jessie. Our school has about 38 students K-12 and 5 teachers. We play basketball, volleyball, and participate in Native Youth Olympics in the spring.We are part of the Bering Strait School District.

On our school district website, we have a link to the "Strait Cam", which is a live pan-tilt zoom internet camera system that let's you see the live view of the Bering Strait looking west from Wales--and you can move the camera around too! Take a look at the Website and Strait Cam at: www.bssd.org

Our Town:
Our population here in Wales is about 170 Inupiat Eskimos. Our temperatures average about 40-70 degrees in the summer and as low as -100 below zero in the winter with the wind chill factor.

Some homes along Main Street in Wales

We have a small landing strip for bush planes to land and once a year we have a barge come in to deliver fuel and supplies. Most of our supplies come out of Nome. We have no restaurants or banking services here, but we do have a Laundromat and showers available. Most of our homes don't have running water, so we have to haul water and empty honey buckets for bathroom use.

A town church, Thornton Chapel, and its parsonage here in Wales.

We have only 2 trucks in the village and all of our transportation is done on 4-wheelers, boat, or snow machines.

Ootenna Community Center

We gather a lot of berries in the fall and hunt geese when they migrate through. In the spring, right about now, the men are getting their boats ready to go out to hunt whale and walrus.

We have a beautiful beach here and in the summer when the fish are running we put out our nets.

We wish you all the best,

Wales students