Cots of view is a town of small gravel roads, a few bigger paved roads, but lots of little

small gravel paths.

With low buildings, many of them simple, sided buildings with steel roofs in different

colors.

So it's a colorful little outcrop in this corner of the western Arctic.

There's one grocery store, which is really the only store of any size here.

It's just so hard to transport stuff here.

Oil comes in for the entire year on two barges over the course of the summer.

There's no other way to get oil here because in the winter, the sound is unnavigable.

It's covered with ice.

Cots of view sits on the edge of northwestern Alaska.

It overlooks the Cots of view sound, which is part of the Chukchi Sea, which is part of

the Arctic Ocean.

Between land and sea, there's a wall, barely more than a decade old, to protect the town

from increasingly threatening waters.

I arrived for a reporting trip the summer, when residents drive up and down the town's

handful of streets, enjoying the midnight sun.

On a hilltop overlooking Cots of view, I sat with Bobby Schaefer.

Well, yeah, sickle means ice, and then you got sickle that, which means new ice, and

also there's fresh ice, and they call that sickle that.

There's a lot of different terms for different conditions of the ice.

He's an inupiat elder, and tracks the condition of the sea ice, both as a hunter, and as part

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