[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 130 (Wednesday, July 31, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5226-S5227]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                                 Alaska

  Ms. MURKOWSKI. My colleagues have been to the floor here for the past 
little bit talking about various road trips in their State and 
destinations, including their favorite destinations. When you think 
about where your favorite place is, it is like saying which son is your 
favorite son. We all have our favorite places all around our State.
  I got to thinking about road trips. I thought, well, road trips in 
Alaska perhaps take a little bit of a different meaning than in other 
States. We all know the State I come from because we talk about it a 
lot. Senator Sullivan and I come from a big State. We have over 663,000 
square miles, but within those 663,000 square miles, we don't have a 
lot of roads. Over 82 percent of the communities in the State of Alaska 
are not connected by roads. We are not part of the road system. So 
traveling in Alaska can be a little bit of an adventure. Flexibility is 
always key.
  More often than not, when you are in a big State, you move around 
from town to town, and you rely on the commercial carriers. You rely on 
Alaska Airlines. You rely on Ravn. You rely on some of the others. We 
pretty much move around by air.
  But sometimes it is impossible to get around by air all the time. 
Sometimes we have what I call ``forest road trips.'' It is not that I 
don't want to be on our roads, but once you get on the roads, you are 
on them for a fairly long time. Sometimes the jets don't fly. Sometimes 
the jets don't fly because you have bad weather. Sometimes the jets 
don't fly because you have a volcano that goes off.
  I was holding a field hearing in Fairbanks and needed to get down to 
Anchorage, and Pavlof blew. Pavlof is one of our more active volcanos, 
and it shuts down the air space. What was going to be a 45-minute trip 
home turned out to be a 359-mile drive home--7 hours--that evening.
  We had another trip going out of Valdez to Anchorage, and we needed 
to get back to Anchorage that night, but the fog and the wind in Valdez 
said there are no planes coming in to take you out, and they might not 
be there the next day and they might not be there the next day after 
that. There is bad weather. The pass is shutting down so you better 
move now. When that happens, you get in a car and 300 miles later--5 
hours later--you are in Anchorage.
  I had Senator Manchin with me just over the Fourth of July break. We 
were headed from Anchorage to King Salmon to attend a ribbon-cutting 
for a National Park Service facility. We got fogged out in the morning 
and waited for hours in the airport, and then we got word that the fog 
had lifted, and we were getting ready to get on a plane and they called 
a mechanical. If there is a mechanical, I am with you, and we just 
don't fly. Senator Manchin turned to me and said: I know it is a long 
way, but can't we just drive there?
  That was my opportunity to turn to my colleague in another learning 
moment and tell him: No, this is one of those 82 percent of our 
communities where there is no road. So Joe, we are not flying.
  Aviation really is our lifeline here. If you are not on Alaska 
Airlines, you are on one of our many bush carriers. This is a picture 
of a pilot I had an opportunity to fly with, Eric, who is the pilot and 
owner of Arctic Backcountry Flying Service. This is his Cessna 206. 
More often than not, these are the type

[[Page S5227]]

of aircraft that we are in. We are not flying in some fancy leased jet. 
We are in a small aircraft, what we call a bush carrier. That is when 
we have airstrips that we can land on.
  But we don't have airstrips in many of our communities. What we do is 
we come in and out on the water on our floatplanes. Some people call 
them seaplanes out here. We call them floatplanes.
  Here is a picture of me and Secretary Perry on Kodiak Island. We had 
flown over on Alaska Airlines. But to get around the island, you either 
take a boat or fly in a floatplane. We were flying over to Old Harbor 
there on Kodiak Island, but we got around on the water.
  Sometimes you don't have the water though. In a place like Alaska, 
what we do have in the wintertime is a fair amount of snow. You take 
your floats off and you put your skis on. You can see the wheels there. 
This plane can land in Anchorage and take off in Anchorage on the 
wheels, but when you are up on Ruth Glacier, as this Cessna 185 is, you 
are landing on skis. That gets your attention because it is a little 
bit different than a floatplane, but it gets you in and out of what you 
need to get in and out of.
  There are some places, though, where you don't have an airstrip, a 
floatplane can't land, and the only way to really get in and out is by 
helicopter.
  Little Diomede Island sits out in the middle of the Bering Straits. 
It is 2 miles from Big Diomede. Big Diomede is owned by Russia. Little 
Diomede is owned by us. There are about 150-plus people who live out 
there on Diomede. They have a school, and they have a community center, 
but how do they get the mail? People move in and out by helicopter. The 
mail is delivered by helicopter. There are a few weeks in the 
wintertime--maybe, sometimes, as much as a couple of months--when the 
ocean freezes over and they can make a strip where a plane can land on 
the ice. But most of the year, you fly in and out on helicopter. So we 
fly.
  The other way we get around when we don't have a lot of roads is on 
our rivers. One thing that Alaska is blessed with is a lot of rivers. 
We have 365,000 miles of rivers. That makes for a lot of roads because 
in the summertime, those rivers are our roads.
  This is a picture upriver in the village of Napaskiak. There are 
about 500 people there. We had Attorney General Barr with us in May. We 
took him upriver. This is how he traveled. These are the Bethel Search 
and Rescue boats there. They are not fancy boats. They are not yachts. 
These are functional. They have decent motors on them because these are 
workhorses. Yet how we travel in the summer is up and down these 
rivers.

  In the summer, it makes it possible to move around these communities. 
In the winter, you move around by snow machine. You have trucks and you 
have vehicles out there as well. When the rivers freeze, you then have 
your frozen highway, and you can have 100 miles of it. The Kuskokwim, I 
think, plowed out 250 miles of road on the river.
  This is a frozen river. This is actually a picture that was taken 
when we took Secretary Moniz from Bethel to Oscarville. We had with us 
about four other Members of the Senate because we had a field hearing 
for the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. We held it out there 
in Oscarville, and we had a motorcade on ice. It was basically about 
six trucks that went down the river, but the Secretary said it was his 
first official truck motorcade on ice. That really does allow us to get 
around when the rivers are frozen over.
  Down in the southeastern part of the State, where I was born and 
spent a lot of my growing-up years, they are all islanded communities. 
There are 32 or 33 islanded communities in the southeast. So to move 
around, we either fly Alaska Airlines, fly smaller carriers, or we rely 
on our Alaska marine highway system, our ferry system. This is our 
marine lifeline. This is how we move freight, how we move vehicles, how 
we move goods, and how we move people.
  Right now, our very system is threatened on a host of different 
levels, which really hurts my heart because, as one who knows how 
dependent we are on being able to move on the water, this is our road, 
and these types of vessels can move us in ways that are efficient. The 
marine highway system is our road. So we are working in the State right 
now to address it. Again, this is one more way that I do my road trips 
when I am back home in the State.
  In the interior, you have communities, again, that are isolated. 
There is no road system that gets you there. There are small villages, 
Arctic villages, that are about 500 people strong.
  I was in an Arctic village just in July, and this is how I was picked 
up at the airport. There are not many trucks. There are basically four-
wheelers. There are ATVs, and everybody just hops on. This was my 
driver for the day. Again, you just hop on the back and ride.
  Then, there are some communities in which, really, the way that you 
get around is not on a road and not on a sidewalk but on just a wooden 
trail, a wooden boardwalk. This is the village of Napaskiak. This is 
out in the Bethel region, in the Y-K Delta. These are just planks that 
are put down on top of the tundra because the area is so marshy that 
you cannot walk on it. You would need hip waders to be better able to 
travel through it. Just walking around on the boardwalk is the extent 
of your road trip in a place like Nunam Iqua or Napaskiak.
  Whether it is freedom to be on a frozen river or freedom to be out on 
the Arctic Ocean, wintertime gives us a little bit more freedom. This 
is a picture of me with a friend, off of Utqiagvik, which is on the 
Arctic Ocean. It looks like a lot of fun. We were going out snow-
machining. We were going out to work because the community had 
harvested a whale, and the whaling crew and the community were taking 
their snow machines out to load the muktuk onto sleds to haul back to 
the community so it could be shared as part of their subsistence food. 
So we were going out to help the community harvest that whale. This is 
not fun and recreation. It is your means of transportation. This is 
your workhorse.
  We do have a little bit of fun every now and again. Everyone asks: Do 
you ever travel around by dog sled? That is my dream. That would be the 
next career opportunity for me. I would love to run the Iditarod, and I 
would love to have my own dog team, but, right now, I don't have enough 
hours in my day. Yet, every now and again, you can hop on the back of a 
dog sled.
  I am looking forward to being back home and traveling around the 
State, visiting from Ketchikan to Barrow. It is 4,000 miles for Senator 
Sullivan, Congressman Young, and me to get back and forth between 
Washington, DC, and Alaska. I have kind of mapped out my trip for the 
month ahead. Once I get back to Alaska, in that first couple of weeks, 
I will have doubled that airtime, if you will. Then, with the 
additional travel that we have toward the end of August, I am looking 
at about 15,000 miles of travel within my State.
  I know many of my colleagues are going to exotic locations that will 
take them to places that will be a long, long ways away. Yet I am just 
reminded every day of the privilege and the honor of being able to 
travel through an extraordinary State like Alaska, where we use a 
little bit of everything to get us to where we need to go in order to 
visit some of the finest Americans whom I know and am blessed to be 
able to serve.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma.