Biohazard and Crime Scene Remediation in Kaktovik, AK

Kaktovik (Inupiaq: Qaaktuġvik) is an incorporated city in North Slope Borough, Alaska, on the north shore of Barter Island on the Beaufort Sea coast.

Kaktovik was incorporated as the City of Kaktovik on March 26, 1971.

The 2020 census counted 283 residents in 88 households in Kaktovik, with a median age of 30.5 years.

Kaktovik lies within the 19.6-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, between the Okpilak River and the Jago River.

Until the late nineteenth century, Barter Island was a major trade center for the Inupiat, especially as a bartering place for Inupiat from Alaska and Inuit from Canada.

Kaktovik was a traditional fishing place whose name refers to seining for whitefish, and it has a large pond of good fresh water on high ground.

The village had no permanent settlers until people from other parts of Barter Island and northern Alaska moved to the area around the construction of a runway and Distant Early Warning Line station in the 1950s.

Subsistence in Kaktovik depends heavily on hunting caribou and whale, and the Inupiat are permitted to kill three bowhead whales per year.

In the early twenty-first century, Kaktovik became a tourist destination for viewing polar bears, drawn in part by whale carcasses left on the beach at the edge of town after flensing.

Barter Island LRRS Airport is located near the city.