A visit to Quinhagak after Ex-Typhoon Halong

Dec. 10, 2025

By Alice Bailey

The morning after Ex-Typhoon Halong hit Western Alaska, I texted my friend Sarah Brown in Quinhagak to see if she was okay. 

“We were up ‘til five a.m. Water was around my house. Scary,” she said. “All the fish racks are gone at the boat harbor. Mine floated in one piece toward my niece’s house.”

The following Saturday, I got a Facebook message that read, “Hey Alice, we need volunteers if you’d like to come join us in beachcombing for prehistoric treasures.” It was from Rick Knecht, an archeologist who was on the ground in Quinhagak assessing the damage to a long-term archaeology project there. 

Like many Alaskans, I wished I could do more than donate to relief funds. When I got Rick’s message, I immediately booked a ticket and headed west.

Salmon Surveys

I first visited the Bering Sea community of Quinhagak in 2009 when I worked for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game conducting post-season subsistence fishing surveys throughout communities in the Kuskokwim River drainage.  

Asking about fish harvests is deeply personal—what’s in someone’s freezer and on their drying racks is the city equivalent of asking for a winter’s worth of Costco shopping lists. I was amazed at how accurately people, especially the women who cut the fish, recalled how many of the different species of salmon and whitefish, as well as blackfish, burbot, and pike, they needed to feed their families for a year. 

Even though I wasn’t enforcing anything, merely accounting for the communities’ food needs, not everyone was thrilled to see someone working for an agency. I especially appreciated those who invited me inside, and shared some dry fish and tea. And I cherish the time I spent with Elders. In those instances, the survey quickly went by the wayside and I just sat and listened to their stories—as one should do when an Elder speaks.

It took two months of traveling village to village to complete the surveys. I settled into the rhythm of each place, often collecting an entourage of kids and dogs. 

One frigid October day in Quinhagak, I went to the house of someone named Sarah Brown. She let me in. 

“Your hands are cold,” she said. I tried to play it off like I was fine, but there’s no fooling Sarah. 

“Where are you staying?” she asked.

“The school,” I said.

“What are you eating for dinner?”

“Probably ramen.”

“You come back here to eat.” 

I tried to decline, not wanting to impose, but she insisted.

Sarah fed me every evening that week, and many other times in the last 16 years. She is a busy person, always doing whatever subsistence activity is in season—berry picking, gathering other plants from the tundra and beach, and preparing birds, fish, and whatever else her boys caught. We share an interest in cooking; it was easy to become friends. 

I returned the next year with the same job. I don’t know what she said in Yup’ik on the VHF radio, but the next thing I knew I was flying down the street on her 4-wheeler, visiting households on my list. Once I was done, we got to the real work of the day—gathering wild food and cooking dinner. 

Photography and Archaeology

In 2011, I began spending summers in Bethel as the Kuskokwim River Salmon Management Working Group coordinator. In the evenings, I explored Bethel with my medium-format film camera. 

The midsummer sun, best around 10:30 p.m., cast a light that transformed buildings and the trappings of everyday life into gorgeous sculptures. I captured these fleeting moments of light and shadow with film, then spent the winters back in Fairbanks making the images into etchings though a process called copperplate photogravure. 

I continued to visit Sarah, carrying camera equipment with me instead of my aluminum survey clipboard. She has always been patient with my picture taking. I have developed a sense of when it’s time to stop and start helping. 

During the summer of 2013, Sarah and I drove a 4-wheeler down the beach to a large hole in the tundra. A few years prior, the local village corporation reached out to Rick Knecht, who is an archeologist known for collaborating with Indigenous communities. Due to accelerating coastal erosion, artifacts from an ancient house site were being exposed, and the village wanted to learn more about them before they washed away.

The site was named Nunalleq—“the Old Village” in Yup’ik. Sarah and I walked up the wooden stairs to where a group of people were digging. She had been there before, as the community was very much part of the project. 

Sarah introduced me to Rick, who was examining a 400-year-old wood ulu handle. He also showed me woven grass, an ivory earring, numerous spears, and dozens of other objects they had dug up that day. I was surprised at how well the permafrost preserved them, but also how closely they mirrored modern Quinhagak designs. As an artist, I appreciated how everyday objects became art pieces through perfect craftsmanship and symbolism. 

I was shocked when Rick said I was welcome to help dig, especially since I had no archaeology training. He showed me how to gently scrape layers of dirt with a trowel and catalogue the artifacts. I was hooked. 

From then on, every visit to Sarah included volunteering at the dig site and later at the local museum that the village corporation, Qanirtuuq (Q-Corp), built to house the artifacts.

I very much appreciated Rick’s even-keel and down-to-earth personality, as well as his unwavering respect for the community.

Once I was digging and discovered an intact kayak paddle. My childlike curiosity, and affinity for kayaking, took over and I quickly extracted it and waved it in the air to show Rick.

“Look!” 

As soon as I uttered those words I realized that I was supposed to have left it “in situ” so it could be photographed and plotted. 

“Oh no! I’ll put it back,” I stammered. 

“It doesn’t quite work like that,” Rick laughed.

In October of 2025, Quinhagak Elder John Smith held a similar kayak paddle that was exposed by Ex-typhoon Halong. John told Rick and I that he recalled carving the same design with his grandfather, the blade approximately the width of his hand.

Nalaquq and AOOS

During a visit to Quinhagak in 2023, I learned how Q-Corp was creating its own science subsidiary, drawing on lessons from years of working with archaeologists like Rick. Named for the Yup’ik phrase meaning “we found it,” the mission of Nalaquq, LLC, is to ensure that research is a shared effort between Indigenous communities by blending local knowledge with technical expertise. 

At the time, I was nearly a year into my new role as Director of Outreach at the Alaska Ocean Observing System. AOOS was gathering information on the needs of coastal communities in preparation for a call for proposals for funding from the Biden Administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act. 

I had seen Sean Gleason training locals to use drones as part of remote sensing projects, so I asked Rick to introduce me. Sean, who works for Q-Corp and is faculty at Hampden-Sydney College, told me that they had been experimenting with using drones to observe salmon runs on local clearwater rivers. They wanted to empower locals with the skills to monitor these species since aerial surveys conducted by ADFG were not consistent. 

Sean had been mentoring Yup’ik teen Bryan Jones to program automatic flight paths, pilot aircraft, and produce high-resolution maps highlighting erosion. They needed funding to compensate local technical experts to continue collecting data on their lands. 

“When Bryan flies the drone, about 30 people gather around to watch,” Sean said. “It inspires other people and engages them in the research.” 

Sean encouraged me to speak with Q-Corp CEO Warren Jones to uncover other information needs. Warren was supposed to fly to Bethel that day, so I had 15 minutes to give my spiel while he drove the van from the dump to the office. I explained what AOOS is and does, and that we wanted to hear more about the community’s observing needs. 

Warren launched into a story about a boat with seven people that was lost in Kuskokwim Bay a few years prior. He leads Quinhagak’s search and rescue team, and said they didn’t find a trace of the boaters, which is something that still haunts the community. He said that better understanding of tides, waves, and currents could have aided the rescuers, and that they needed a low-tech, low-bandwidth way to access the data.

AOOS ultimately funded two of their projects.

In the summer of 2024, Sean and his team completed the first phase of Nalaquq’s salmon monitoring project using drones. In August of that year, I traveled to Quinhagak with other AOOS staff. We discussed the salmon projects and enjoyed some freshly caught sockeye over a campfire on a gravel bar. 

Coincidentally, the whole search and rescue team was training in the “Red Building” where we were staying. We asked Warren if they might want to hear about the Backyard Buoys project, and before long we were talking with the whole group. They pointed out three places in Kuskokwim Bay commonly used by boaters for traveling and harvesting seals, salmon, and halibut.

In June, Nalaquq successfully deployed three yellow buoys the size of a basketball at these locations. All summer, people could check wave conditions from their phones. Warren and Patrick brought the buoys back to shore in September before the weather turned too dangerous for boating, and will redeploy them in the spring. 

After the Typhoon

I landed in Quinhagak around 3 p.m. on October 20, 2025, about a week after Ex-Typhoon Halong had ravaged the region. The town itself was relatively intact compared to communities like Kipnuk and Kwigillingok. The worst flooding occurred near the river, where many people—including Sarah—lost smokehouses and faced other storm damage. Floodwaters reached the inside of a handful of houses, and those residents were concerned about black mold. 

Rick met me at the plane and told me to gear up for the beach. Winter was closing in, with a few snowflakes in the air and a steady wind picking up. He was eager to search for any artifacts washed ashore before the ground froze and made them impossible to recover.

We drove the 4-wheeler to where the road ends at the Bering Sea. The first obvious sign of the storm was the exposed fiber optic cable. We turned to the south and I gasped when I saw the beach. 

I couldn’t believe how different it looked from a year ago—like the ocean had swallowed the land. In places, up to 60 feet were gone. What used to be solid tundra was now sand, torn-up chunks of peat, and ancient gray clay. Even navigating the four-wheeler over broken tundra was tough.

We drove a mile or so, stopping to scan the sand for artifacts—mostly pieces of wood—looking for anything “worked” or carved. In just a couple of hours, we found plenty, including a small wooden doll whose eyes hadn’t seen people in 500 years. Sarah arrived and immediately found a six-fingered hand, maybe from a mask. 

The next day Rick and I were out for seven hours in wind and snow—no one else was crazy enough to be out there. We worked our way to the old dig site, now mostly gone, which was heartbreaking to see. On the way back to town, we had a strong feeling that we needed to stop and look one more time. I looked down, and there in the sand was an incredible carved eye, possibly from a wolf figurine. 

We added these treasures to the hundreds recovered by Quinhagak residents in the days immediately after the storm. All were soaked in fresh water to remove the ocean’s salt, before the usual bath in Polyethylene glycol to keep the ancient wood from drying out and crumbling.

As usual, I was mesmerized by the faces and designs carved centuries ago, and it was confounding that these objects were as intact as they were after being extracted from the earth by the remnants of a typhoon, carried out to sea, and deposited miles away. One mask, perhaps the best in the entire collection, was in perfect condition—and eerily looks like the young Jimmy Jones, who found it at low tide when he was looking for firewood.

So what next? Intense storms like Halong will likely become more frequent, said Rick Thoman, who is a climate expert at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “While every fall will not bring a Halong type storm to Kuskokwim Bay, with continued warming a stormier future is likely.”

As a visitor from Fairbanks, I marvel that wooden artifacts, buried beneath an ancient Yup’ik house burned in an attack around 1650, could lie undisturbed for centuries and then survive a wild ride on stormy seas before washing up miles down the beach. Seeing these messengers from the past, I don’t doubt that the people of Quinhagak can weather whatever comes their way.