Sports reporter, Fairbanks, Alaska

Sell your car and buy a Piper Cub.

 

Did you actually fly to any of the remote sites for games? If so what type of aircraft did you fly in? I would think that the flights could be terrifying.

 

As far as traveling to assignments: I went to Minnesota to cover the junior hockey team play in the NAHL Robertson Cup National Championship, Anchorage for the high school state hoops tournament and all over Alaska for the Yukon Quest sled dog race, which required a couple Bush flights on a little Cessna.

A lot has changed since my departure, however, and I’m not sure how much traveling there would be. You definitely aren’t hopping on a plane to cover a high school game a few hundred miles away, though.

 

I remember waiting for a MARTA train at Five Points on a cold, windy evening in January, bundled up in a ski jacket, gloves and wool cap. And the guy next to me was wearing a polo shirt and shorts.

I asked, "Canada or Alaska?" He replied, "Just got off the plane from Fairbanks."

Beautiful country. Perfect gig for somebody out there who loves that kind of stuff. But just like Hawaii, Alaska feels so isolated from the rest of the country (and world, for that matter). You got to love the loner life to make it work.

 

Haha. I remember being in the Honolulu airport and seeing people wearing overcoats and fur jackets. When I stopped laughing I realized I had no idea where they were going, or where they'd just come from. They could have been traveling to or from Buffalo.

 

Yakutsk says "Hold my snowcone."

 

In Yakutsk, you don't catch cold. Cold catches you.

 

At some point in the past five years, I believe the Fairbanks paper was sold to a non-profit organization.

I'm not sure how that's impacted things like staffing and the budget for travel.

 

The News-Miner is owned by the Helen E. Snedden Foundation, which bought it from Dean Singleton. C.W. (Bill) Snedden owned the paper rather a long time ago before selling it to Lean Dean (but not to Media News), and the current iteration of the foundation developed from one that was first founded to create and beautify parks in Fairbanks.

Thoughts from the other time I saw a help-wanted ad from them: Daily News-Miner is a great name for a newspaper.

27 years later, same help-wanted ad. Except it’s online now instead of in the back pages of E&P. This time I’m not applying.

 

Maybe you could really create a brand. Ride with Ice Road Truckers from game to game.

 

When I was in La Crosse, I experienced 35-ish below and my apartment's furnace gave out. That was not a fun day.