06/24/2026
Day 1 on the Job site:
It was a long trip here but were on site at 9:00pm last night and we are working now. We traveled to Ketchikan with 4 tubs of food; went shopping and bought 6 more tubs/coolers of food. Unlike past missions, this time we had some time up front to get our shopping in and sample some of the local cuisine. Then we boarded a ferry with 10 tubs of food and all the luggage for a 3-hour ride to Prince of Wales Island.
The teens hit the ground running today. Tashia, Will and Gage started in the kitchen at 6:30am. The rest of the group arrived for breakfast at 7:30am and enjoyed bacon, eggs, hashbrowns and toast. The day started with a group stacking firewood at one house, splitting wood at another, helping a fellow bleed his brakes, and getting started on the house project. Broke for a great lunch Tashia had laid out, finished the day with all crews on the house, framing mostly. Some teens used some tools that they had never used before, apparently we are the youngest work crew to have visited. Tashia and Naomi fixed us great spaghetti and salad dinner with cherry cobbler for dessert. They will take some time to clean up before meeting back up for devotions and daily stories at 8:30pm. Full day. We’ll do it again tomorrow.
BTW, the water system is a rainwater catchment system. So it all comes off the roof. Therefore all drinking water is run through a Berkey Water Filter; very slow.
Following story by Gage:
Hello World outside of Alaska! I’m going to tell you about the first days of our Mission trip and What I was doing and thinking. We arrived at the Site Monday the 22nd after a ferry from Ketchikan to Naukati bay. When we got here it was about 8:30 and we hopped out of the van and stretched our legs and went to check out our living quarters. Me, Jack, Will, Josiah, and Daniel all share a cabin and there were enough beds for all except one, so we held a vote of who got the couch and so I volunteered because I assumed they’d be thankful, but turns out a whole bunch of tired teens and one grumpy adult aren’t very appreciative of ones self-sacrifice. So, I begrudgingly tossed my bag and suitcase on my minty green cushion and after I sat down, I realized I unintentionally made the best choice because this couch was HEAVENLY. The rest all had hard beds and one of me didn’t even notice it was an air mattress and apparently no other room’s outlets worked except mine.
So, after full night’s rest I got up bright and early to help with breakfast with Tashia and Will and I’ll tell you what, Gas stoves are effective! So effective in fact it burned our bacon in like 2 minutes. So shortly after the other teens woke up and we all ate our hashbrowns toast eggs and only one charred bacon I was sent off to split some yellow cedar and hemlock with Josiah Maddison and Naomi which afterwards we taught Maddison how to split wood with a maul which she picked up pretty fast and was Quite a fast learner and we deemed her a “true Idahoan”. And after we got done with all that wood, we ate lunch and once I thought I was free from swinging axes I was adopted by Sharis and Ana to split MORE WOOD. So, once we split and stacked some spruce we headed towards the actual job Site and once I thought I was finally going to do some carpentry sure enough Gary asked me, “Are you feeling creative?” and so here I am telling my story of our first day of work which even though it was mostly lumber It was fun and were all getting along!
Thanks for reading my mundane story and sorry it wasn’t very eventful things are going pretty smoothly so I don’t have much to write about the only thing I learned for sure is that spruce Sucks to split!
