A Welcome Home

Anaktuvuk Pass gets its first new house in a decade

by Mike Peters

Anaktuvuk Pass is a pocket of beauty tucked into the Brooks Range: You can only get there by plane, and visitors revel in the peace and majesty of the remote setting.

But living there is another story. Residents endure the coldest winter temperatures in Alaska. The '70s-era wood-frame houses are poorly suited to life where everyone expects to see temperatures that drop to 50 below.

The Nunamiut Inupiat community of 312 has some natural resources – good gravel and soil, and a healthy crop of willow – but building materials for housing have to be flown in by the planeload. That prospect is so expensive that state agencies estimate it would cost $1.5 million to build even a small house in Anaktuvuk Pass, which explains why there has been no home construction there for more than 10 years.

But that's about to change, thanks to a project that began this summer. Designers from the Cold Climate Housing Research Center in Fairbanks have teamed with the village, the Alaska Housing Finance Corp., Ilisagvik College in Barrow and several corporate sponsors to build a prototype house that combines energy-saving features of traditional Native construction with today's technology. The goal: Build 10 houses for the price of one.

"We're not coming out to build sod houses," says CCHRC president Jack Hebert, "But we're taking advantage of what made them work."

That means building a high-tech thermal envelope with MaxGuard walls (think of your truck's bedliner). Add about 7 inches of soy spray-foam insulation, and set the Mound up earth on two or three sides. Finally, cover the roof with sod. It means orienting each house to capture the sun's heat and deflect snow drifts. It means creating "cool rooms" outside the living areas for butchering and drying game and providing natural refrigeration.

Covering part of the house with earth berms reduces the amount of building material that has to be freighted in by air. The MaxGuard with spray-foam insulation will be shipped as liquid in 55-gallon drums, staying liquid until it's reformulated onsite, Hebert says.

Tool-belted students from Ilisagvik joined the CCHRC team this summer to help local residents build a prototype house. They'll help build more next summer. Like the Habitat for Humanity model, the future residents must help with construction.

Aaron Cook, the chief designer of the prototype house for CCHRC, says more than 200 villages need homes. They commonly face overcrowding, lack of building materials and relentless coastal erosion that could force residents to move to new locations. "So lots of villages are watching what we're doing here," he says.

"I met a guy in Anaktuvuk that had six kids in one room with bunk beds stacked to the ceiling," says Ty Keltner, who is filming a documentary of the project for CCHRC.

Hebert was homesteading in the Brooks Range 35 years ago, so he brings a lot of personal experience to the project. "If you can build a sustainable community in Anaktuvuk," he says, "you can build a sustainable community anywhere in the world."

Hebert's team soon will be building similar homes in Point Lay and Nuiquit but with modifications: Instead of the gravel and solid earth at Anaktuvuk, those communities sit on tenuous permafrost. "The trick there will be to build and bond houses onto a double foundation, and evenly distribute the weight over the whole footprint instead of concentrating it on pilings," Hebert says. "Indigenous people built cities on top of reed mats in Mexico so they would 'float,' and we can do something very similar in places like Point Lay."

The U.S. Department of Commerce, the North Slope Borough's Tagiugmiullu Nunamiullu Housing Authority and the Alaska Housing Finance Corp. have funded the homebuilding projects in all three communities.

Meanwhile, the earth is moving in Anaktuvuk Pass.

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