Ned Rozell

ON AUGUST 7, 2008, a 717-acre island in the central Aleutians erupted for the first time in recorded history, surprising experts and spitting a cloud of ash high into the atmosphere, and delaying a few dozen commercial flights into Alaska. In one day, Kasatochi Island changed from a pungent, green refuge for hundreds of thousands of seabirds into a broken, gray mountain, a place with its geologic and biological clocks reset.

As word of the eruption made the news in a summer of two other giant eruptions in the Aleutians, another story surfaced. Two biologists living in a small cabin on the island had evacuated Kasatochi less than an hour before the eruption. A fishing boat captain from Adak, 80 miles away, picked up the two men, Ray Buchheit of Montana and Chris Ford of Southeast Alaska.

After the rescue, both biologists stayed on Adak for several weeks, declining interview requests from journalists, including writers from Alaska newspapers, Readers Digest and me. I thought those guys had experienced the best story that occurred in Alaska that year. I’d heard of scientists having close calls on volcanoes, but nothing like this.

A year later, I visited Kasatochi with Scientists who are tracking what happens when an island is reborn as a pile of ash. Post-eruption Kasatochi is muddy, misty and smells bitter, and you can walk an hour before you see a sprig of vegetation. Of the landscapes that reside in my memory, it most resembles the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, where the ground still hasn’t recovered from the 1912 eruption that was the largest of the 20th century.

After my visit to the island, Chris Ford was more willing to speak with me. I interviewed him one afternoon by phone at his home in Kupreanof, a small settlement just across the Wrangell Narrows from Petersburg.

Ford, 35 at the time of the eruption, is a field biologist who landed a seasonal job with the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, the Homer-based caretakers of the Aleutians. He is single, adventurous and enjoys getting paid to observe creatures in wild, raw places.

Kasatochi was a wonderful assignment for someone like Ford. Before 2008, the island was a green mountaintop with a large, water-filled crater, the rim of which poked 1,000 feet into the moist air above the Bering Sea. The circular island with steep cliffs was about one-and-a-half miles in diameter. During a long summer day, Ford could explore everything from its rocky slopes that created nest crevices for 200,000 auklets, to its aquamarine caldera,Where gulls still nested on its near-vertical walls even though their old predators— blue foxes—were long gone. After a walking tour of the island, he could unroll his sleeping bag in a rustic, 10- by 12-foot cabin that refuge workers had restored several times. Fur farmers constructed it on one of the few semi-level spots on the island in 1929.

Ford and Buchheit didn’t know each other before they met in Adak just before boarding the refuge ship Tiglax on their way to Kasatochi. They were a good match, Ford said, getting along while they shared the tiny cabin and even smaller bird-observation blinds on the island. They had read books on the Aleutians and had braced themselves for the famous storms that occur where the Bering Sea meets the North Pacific. That set them up for Kasatochi’s first surprise.

“It was just pleasant, day after day,” Ford said. “It was one of these summers up there that was amazing.”

The biologists’ seabird studies required hikes all over the island, through knee-deep rye grass on steep slopes. The hiking was hard on their knees, but they adjusted in time. At the end of their day’s labor, they savored their small cabin and its warm, dry bunks. They chatted about how lucky they were to be two of the most out-there people in Alaska, reveling in their cratered island home that looked like the set of a monster movie.

“You walk up to the rim of this thing, and two more feet and you’re falling in,” Ford said of the caldera. “We kidded around a lot about it erupting.”

They also realized how isolated they were; about 80 miles from the few hundred people who live in the former Navy town of Adak, they rarely saw ships or planes.

On the second day of August 2008, something was different about the island. They started feeling mild earthquakes every five minutes or so. Earthquakes are common in the Aleutians—which sit above the boundary where the Pacific Plate rumbles beneath the North American Plate—and Buchheit, the radio operator, mentioned the larger ones on their 9 p.m. check-ins. Often, Lisa Spitler, who worked at the refuge headquarters in Adak and had spent a few summers on Kasatochi, would check the Alaska Earthquake Information Center Web site and report the results over the radio.

The shaking continued but Spitler told the biologists she wasn’t seeing all of the earthquakes on the Internet. The biologists were probably feeling the ground motion from molten rock moving within a restless volcano, which scientists call “volcanic tremor.”

On Aug. 6, rather then venturing out on fieldwork, Ford stayed in the cabin to catch up on his computer data entry. The cabin shook almost every minute of the day. Buchheit made his rounds on the island, reaching the far side and returning by walking the rim of the crater.

“When Ray came back, he said, ‘Man you’ve got to see inside the caldera—avalanches are just constantly pouring inside this thing.’”

Ford ran out and climbed the hill to the edge of the crater. He could see rockslides falling into the maw, and brown clouds within the water, which he later deduced was sulfur dioxide emitted during an early stage of eruption.

“We’re sitting there looking at each other like, ‘Wow, this is crazy.’ It hadn’t really hit into our brains that this volcano was erupting. Maybe your mind just won’t go there or something.”

— Chris Ford

The biologists radioed their observations to Spitler, who conferred with Alaska Volcano Observatory scientists in Anchorage.

Weighing the evidence, refuge staffers made the call to evacuate Buchheit and Ford as soon as possible. The Tiglax was too far west to reach Kasatochi any time soon, and the Coast Guard rescue helicopter on Adak wasn’t flying—it needed a part that wouldn’t arrive for days.

Spitler contacted local fishermen while Buchheit and Ford pondered their options. On the rocky beach below the cabin, they had an inflatable skiff with a 15-horsepower engine. On a map they found a protected bay off Great Sitkin Island, 20 miles away across open ocean. Neither man liked the idea of shoving off into the Bering Sea, but they packed a dry bag with bottles of drinking water, a GPS unit, beef jerky and a satellite phone. If necessary, they would grab that bag, jump in the skiff and motor toward an island they could not see.

Just then, Jeff Williams, a refuge biologist with 20 years of experience in the Aleutians and the man who had paired Buchheit and Ford, called them on the radio. He gave them the latitude and longitude coordinates to Yoke Bay on Great Sitkin Island.

“Jeff has this persona that’s very scientific, very a-b-c,” Ford said. “When he gets on the radio this time, you can hear it in his voice—he’s totally distraught, doesn’t know what to say, there’s long pauses.

“He said ‘I don’t want to alarm you guys, but if you need to leave, this is where you should go,’” Ford said. “It was the same conversation me and Ray had five minutes before.”

The shaking was nearly constant, but Ford and Buchheit were going nowhere because night had fallen and it was too dark to move. Buchheit and Ford lay in their bunks, listening to their VHF radio in case they might hear a fisherman they could hail. And they felt their island groan.

“We were just laying there counting the seismic movements,” Ford said. “There’s these little explosions, muffled booms, and then there’d be this massive vibration that would just rattle the cabin.”

Cans of food walked across shelves, some hitting the floor.

“We’re sitting there looking at each other like, ‘Wow, this is crazy,’” Ford said. “It hadn’t really hit into our brains that this volcano was erupting. Maybe your mind just won’t go there or something.”

Both men drifted off into fitful sleep, and Ford remembers waking at daylight the next morning.

“I wake up to massive vibration, just the whole cabin going back and forth,” he said. “Stuff being pitched on the floor. I was like ‘Wow, it’s eight in the morning and I guess we’re still here.’”

Ford got up to make coffee and Buchheit got on the radio to Adak. Spitler told them she had contacted a local fisherman, Al Giddings, who agreed to run his 32-foot bowpicker, the Homeward Bound, to Kasatochi.

Less than an hour after receiving the news of a possible rescue, the men felt the island shake for 10 minutes straight, and a strong sulfur smell penetrated the cabin.

They looked at each other, knowing it was time to move. They each grabbed some gear and staggered down the long, crooked path that led to a small cliff where they would descend to the rock beach where there skiff was anchored offshore.

When they got to the ledge above the skiff, they looked back at the rocky slope where the auklets lived.

“We stopped and looked up at (the talus pile)—the whole face of it was completely caved in,” Ford said. “It had collapsed on itself. This was an area where we spent our whole summer, and it’s just turned upside down, and it’s still turning upside down, with rocks falling in on themselves. We were just kind of amazed.”

Suddenly, their VHF radio crackled to life. It was Giddings, on the Homeward Bound.

“We’re about 45 minutes out,” he said.

“It was just a complete relief to think that here’s the boat that’s going to come and get you,” Ford said.

Through the mist, the fishing boat appeared. Giddings radioed the men and told them to launch their skiff and meet him at his deck. Throwing in one bag apiece, Buchheit and Ford jumped in their inflatable, fired up the motor and took one last look at the cabin that had been their home for the summer.

Giddings and his deckhand, Eric Mochuziki, threw them a rope, pulled them on deck, winched aboard their skiff, and turned back for Adak.

Their bellies not accustomed to the swells of the sea, the biologists stayed on the deck in the open air for a while, until they reached the calmer waters between other islands. They then went inside the cabin of the Homeward Bound.

Soon after, a gray film rained over the boat, coating the windows.

“It was the ash from the volcano when it had blown up,” Ford said. “That’s all we experienced from the volcano exploding— this light little ash on the windshield.”

The eruption was as thorough as they come, with molten rock rising to the surface and exploding when it reached the water of the caldera, its vent blasting ash, steam and rock as high as 45,000 feet. Tens of thousands of organisms died in minutes, and rich kelp beds surrounding the island disappeared. The cabin was either vaporized or buried. There is no sign of it in the stark gray hills today.

Ford knows Kasatochi will be with him for the rest of his days. It’s obvious in how the word “volcano” is hardwired to make him think of the island, and in how he feels he can now relate to a combat veteran who has survived a close call. He still doesn’t quite know what to make of the experience, and of his story, which he can truly share with just one other person on this ever-changing planet.

“It’s sort of weird,” he said. “That volcano blew up and it wasn’t ready to take us with it. That’s the gist of it.”

Ned Rozell is author of Alaska Tracks: Footprints in the Big Country from Attu to Ambler. Read his blog at alaskatracks.com