The first thing to know about Barrow, Alaska, is the airport is named for a plane crash. In 1935, American humorist Will Rogers and aviator Wiley Post’s plane nosed into a river outside town. Both men died. Flying is still the only way into Barrow. Rogers might’ve found that funny.
This story originally appeared in Volume 10 of Road & Track.
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I land at Wiley Post–Will Rogers Memorial Airport to find my phone bricked. Zero bars. COVID protocols have halted the hotel shuttle. Dismayed, I stuff one pair of insulated gloves into another, zip my down jacket up to my throat, and set out to hail a ride.
Outside, late-model pickups idle, unattended. A Honda CR-V sits 50 yards upwind, “Polar Cab” on its doors. I gasp against the cold and scuttle over. That’s where I meet Sidthisak Kaybounthome, Arctic outpost pizza-delivery guy.
“Kyle? I was looking for you!” he says. “Call me Sid. Easier for you to pronounce.”
He grins. Finding Sid feels like a small miracle in a miraculous town. Utqiagvik is the city’s Indigenous—and, since 2016, official—name, but everyone I meet still calls it Barrow. One of the most remote settlements on earth, it sits 3000 miles north of Los Angeles, closer to Tokyo than to Washington, D.C.
There are mind-boggling hurdles to deliver- ing pizza here. Temperatures hover at 15 below in January. Ice glosses every surface—roads, stop signs, power lines—like some celestial modeler went ape with the flocking. There are no paved roads, only rutted gravel packed on permafrost. The sun doesn’t rise above the horizon for two months straight.
Then there’s the polar bears. “Sometimes I might have to drive around them,” Sid says, straight-faced.
We stop at the takeout-only East Coast Pizzeria, pack several pies into warming bags, then set out into the Arctic chill. Our first stop is a make-shift box of a building with portholes for windows, painted white with sleet.
“You have to watch for the dogs, too. They’re worse than the bears,” Sid remarks. Dogs? “Yes. If I don’t call ahead, sometimes they forget to bring in the dogs. They attack you.”
Sid trudges up in a thick down jacket, snow pants, and boots, but no gloves. He waits 60 excruciating seconds before the door cracks open just wide enough to receive a pizza box.
Along with pizzas, Sid shuttles travelers and hauls groceries. Each trip costs $6. More than a dozen drivers serve as the city’s lifeblood—during winter, simply getting your car warmed up can be far costlier (and colder) than paying for delivery.
Robert Terzioski of A&D Automotive says every vehicle in Barrow needs robust winterization: two block heaters, a new battery every year. An A&D tech demonstrates how they braze power-steering fittings to prevent ruptures in the subzero cold. Ignition keys are prized here; push-button starters have proved frail in the chill.
Garage labor runs about $160 an hour in town, and there’s a mighty backlog. A&D appears to have about 100 cars lined up, the queue growing daily. Sid’s friend, a fellow driver, waited three months for a shop to take his car.
So people stay holed up inside and let the delivery drivers do the driving. Rather than compete, Sid and his colleagues form a network, organized over short-wave radios that squawk like a chorus of jungle birds. A mixture of Thai and Lao streams forth in flurry with a few English idioms sprinkled in: “Polar Cab 7456,” then a string of Thai, followed by a round of laughter. A crisp “10-4” or “Roger that,” and Sid’s off to the next delivery. There’s no dispatcher—that duty falls to whoever isn’t delivering a pizza or a person at the moment. Sid allows that there isn’t much logic to it; you simply fall into a rhythm with a dozen other drivers or you can’t hack it. It feels like jazz.
Sid never slows down that night, but I take a breather to meet Suphamat Yeesaeng, known as “Bunn,” owner of East Coast Pizzeria. (There’s a second pizza joint in this town of just over 4000 people, proof that capitalism comes with its own antifreeze.)
Bunn immigrated to the U.S. from Thailand, set up a business importing specialty foods from Southeast Asia, then owned a salon in Anchorage. COVID shut it down, so a friend helped her find work in Barrow. When East Coast’s owner, the enigmatic Mario Reyes, died of COVID complications last October, Bunn took over the pizzeria.
I ask what she’s learned about Barrow after living half a year here under hard times. “People are grateful for everything here. They understand if you don’t have all the ingredients because all the produce has to be flown in. Or if the pizza isn’t hot. They’re just thankful to have the food,” she says.
“Also, never shut your car off, even if you’re filling up gas,” she says with a laugh. “You see cars idling everywhere, all day. Never shut them off.”
The next sunless morning, I sit in the lobby at the Top of the World Hotel, waiting for Sid to take me to the airport. A cast of local characters steps in, stomps their boots, and sparks up conversations. One exuberant young man, chest heaving with effort, explains that they endlessly beat back the snow from stop signs, by hand, daily. Sisyphus groans at the thought. The young guy disappears into the chill, smiling. Back to work.
A woman walks in, a lovely tan parka draped on her shoulders. She points out the wolf and wolverine furs lining its hood and explains the coat’s embroidery, an interlaced pattern that identifies and celebrates her family’s Indigenous heritage. Her mother sewed it by hand.
Every person I meet has some triumph to share, a fragment about this place that makes them smile. The town breeds its own insects to process organic waste; the tap water is some of the finest in the United States; there’s a resident writer who survived the Holocaust and thrives here in the cold. A thousand more.
This trip was hatched as a chuckle: Even in one of the darkest, most inhospitable places on earth, people deliver pizzas. We’ll send Kinard up north to shiver his stones off. But I came away with a story of human resilience in a place where opportunity draws some and heritage proudly roots others. Every minute in Barrow shattered some notion I had about the Arctic and the people who live there. Mostly, I’ve learned that what it takes to survive a night in Barrow is kindness, not hardness. A few warm pizzas don’t hurt either.
