Return to Adak
By Craig Hoyt, CTMCS (retired)

This summer my brother Mark and I returned to Adak, him for the second time, me for the third.  Mark had not been there since 1965 when we both were in school and our dad CTMCM Carl Hoyt worked at Shotgun. I had not been there since my second time on the rock, as an adult that time (1979-1981) when I too, worked at Shotgun.  We are excited to be going back to the “Birthplace of the Winds” once again.  

We fly out of Anchorage on Alaska Airlines, sitting in the rear section of the Boeing 737 cargo hauler.  We are amongst a mixture of fishermen, seasonal scientific workers, and an advanced party of security folks who will be looking over the island’s situation in preparation for the new X-band radar platform that will soon be floating in Kuluk Bay.  During our quick stop in King Salmon, the pilot comes to the rear to chat. It turns out he was a former P-3 pilot who had done two deployments on Adak.  We couldn’t be in better hands!

We fly down the Aleutian chain “in the soup”.  I know we are close as we begin our initial descent above Great Sitkin’s volcanic crater.  We are on short final as we clear the soup and our first glimpse of Adak is Zeto Point and Candlestick Bridge.  It’s late June and the tundra is beginning to green up.  Moments later we are feet dry and taxi to the old Reeve terminal.

As we unload and go inside, we meet the locals.  The “rental car” agent greets us.  He is also the mayor and shows us out to our rental car which is a 1985 former-Navy S-10 Blazer, rusted to pieces and held together with duct tape.  Coincidentally, it’s 85 bucks a day!  We are also met by the housing manager who gives us the key to our 2 bedroom quarters in Sandy Cove.  We are staying for a week…that’s $1000 in housing terms.

There are currently 70 permanent residents on the island, about 12 of them Aleut and 13 of them children.  There are two teachers in the school.  Classes are held in one room of the Bob Reeve High School which also serves as the community center, small library, housing office, and small snack bar/store.  This is one of two places on the island to eat out…eating out consisting of frozen short order grill items.  Later we find the other (bigger) store run by two sisters.  We end up calling this the six dollar store.  Loaf of bread – six bucks.  Jar of peanut butter – six bucks.  Twin pack of paper towels – six bucks.  Bag of cookies – six bucks.  You get the picture…  

We also discover there is another place to eat out and get a drink.  It’s the old Caribou Club and it’s now known as the Aleutian Sports Bar and Grill.  Seems like a strange name since there is nothing sports oriented about it, but I can’t resist the adventure of eating at a place known as the ASBAG.  While there, I talk the bartender out of three blue and white Chief’s Club coffee mugs sitting in the back of the kitchen.  Major score!

We discover the local residents don’t go anywhere on the Island except to the ASBAG which they consider “out of town”.

Gas is over $4 a gallon and the pump is open twice a week for a couple of hours.  The pump is located by the fuel pier near where Old and New Roberts housing USED to be.  Amulet housing is long gone as well.

Over the next week we go everywhere on the island from stem to stern, exploring both wild places on the island and all the old cold war facilities.  Here’s what we find:

•	All the facilities we knew are going back to earth.  Buildings with little or no ambient sunlight are growing black mold and the floors are weeping.  The air is unhealthy and we find that spending longer than an hour inside them at any given time will produce headaches and mild nausea.  But we can’t resist.
•	Bering Hill is a shambles.  Kids have broken and destroyed everything.  Every window inside is broken.  The swimming pool is filled in with all kinds of junk including dead rats.  There are two foot high buckles in the gym floor and the peeling paint hangs off the ceiling like stalactites.
•	The nuclear storage site is wide open and we get to explore that for the first time ever.  How many of us were run off by the Marine guards for stopping on the lower Mt. Moffet road over the years?  Now you just walk right in.  The Marines left behind a lot of local art work on the walls.
•	NAVFAC is also wide open and is pretty much empty except for the chain of command board.  The names of those that were there when it all closed are still on the board.  There is less mold in this facility than most others but the air is still nasty.
•	The ELF transmitter site on Moffet is wide open as well and stands completely empty.
•	Shotgun is completely devoid of all antenna parts except for the concrete pads of the Wullenweber.  Outside, the pyro lockers provide colorful contrasts to the greening tundra and wildflowers now growing everywhere inside the old antenna field.  There is still a small amount of furniture inside and we find names on circuit breaker panels, lockers, and desks.  There is also some art work on the walls here.  The door to the First LT’s shack has some nice artwork as does the old Collection and Analysis space (Semper Fi).  There is one office with a pink wall and a picture of Super Mario.  It has several names scrawled on it with various messages…it has all the markings of handy work done by a group of prospective boot Chief Petty Officers!  The mulcher is still intact and the instructions still hang on the wall.  The Wideband and Narrowband spaces are empty, with outlines of different posits on the floor being the only clue as to what went on here.
•	The SECGRU support facilities are still standing and we were able to get inside all the different barracks, chow hall, post office, gym, etc.  Mold is growing here and the gym floor has the same buckling we observed up on Bering Hill.  Of great interest here are the walls of the old Ptarmigan Club.  It looks like those that closed the place down were given free reign to draw all the graffiti they wanted as the doors were closed for the last time.  My attention is drawn to the message scrawled by Dawn Wamsley, (daughter of my friend retired CTMC Jack Wamsley) a CTM herself.  Her area reads: “Mayor of Adak - Dawn Wamsley”.  Below that are the dates of her four tours on the island, as a dependent and as an active duty sailor.  I add a list of all the CTM Hoyts (my dad, myself and two brothers) to the wall.
•	The Wizard spaces are about the same as the others – moldy, putrid air, and not much left inside.
•	Candlestick Bridge is doing fine.  We crossed it several times with no problems.
•	Finger Bay is completely devoid of all signs that humans had ever been there with one exception:  a concrete pad near where the pier used to be.  Other than that, every single structure including the pier is gone.
•	The dumps as we knew them were completely cleaned out, covered over, and seeded.  There is one active dump down by the old contractor camp where local resident burn their garbage.
•	Bald eagles and ravens have left the island for the most part.  We saw less than a dozen eagles and only a handful of ravens.
•	Lake Betty, Heart Lake, Lake DeMarie, Shagak Bay, Adagdak, Loran Cove, and Clam Lagoon were all as beautiful as ever.   Well, almost (see disappointing discovery below).
•	Mt. Moffet was in the soup the entire week.  We never once got to see it the whole time we were there.
•	The 70 Department cabin was still standing.  An interesting note was that the old carpet was, itself, being carpeted by moss.
•	The seaplane hangar has finally fallen down.  It lay in a big weathered gray heap.
•	The Lake Andy Rec Center is still standing but going back to earth as well.  Just beyond the building, the road to the Lake Andy seawall was completely blocked off and posted as off limits.
•	I was quite surprised to see that on the road to SECGRU, the old S Curves had been straightened out and Command Car Hill had been flattened and widened.  Someone ruined all the fun of a good road Condition Alpha by doing that.  However, Marine Ravine was still alive and well, ready to claim a poor Marine guard every now and again.
•	The most disappointing discovery for me personally, was that some bonehead (and I truly hope he is reading this) decided at some point, to import grass seed and make Adak look like a MK1, Mod1 Naval Base instead of the beautiful wild island it was.  Whoever you were, I want you to know that the island is now overrun with dandelions.  Gone are the yards full of Colter’s Lupine, ground dogwood, and tundra, choked out now by thousands and thousands of dandelions.  Every place humans go, dandelions grow.  Lake Betty, Lake DeMarie, Heart Lake, Shagak bay, Clam Lagoon, Lake Andy…your legacy lives on forever.

While we were on the island we were invited to a lecture in the community center given by a team of archeologists that were excavating 6,000 year old Aleut earth houses and fishing sites.  They had been working on several sites near Clam Lagoon and Zeto Point that had eroded from the hillside and one that was discovered on the tiny island in the middle of Clam Lagoon.  They make reference to the fact that several sites had been destroyed by heavy equipment on the seawall road going from NSGA to Zeto Point.  I also inform them that the seawall had been breached by Mother Nature in a violent storm in the late 70’s which probably added its own damage to the sites.

At first I was saddened that so many of the facilities were in ruins and going back to earth.  As we boarded the 737 back to Anchorage I came to realize this was just part of the cycle.  Whether we are talking about ancient Aleut earth houses, WWII Quonset huts, or those magnificent cold war facilities, this is, simply, our turn.  Some day, thousands of years from now, our buildings will erode from a hillside and be discovered by a future generation.  To everything there is a season.

We roll down runway 05 and make our rotation.  Feet wet, we punch through the soup above Great Sitkin and settle in for the ride back to Anchorage.  It’s true what they say – you can never go back…but that’s OK.  The memories of Adak I choose to carry forward are the ones from my days as a child and as an active duty sailor during Adak’s glory days.  After all, that’s when the bonds of family and camaraderie of shipmates were at their strongest.  Birth place of the winds?  Indeed.  Birthplace of memories?  Absolutely!