Army National Guard 1st Lt. Mike Jones, a physicians assistant, examines one of his new teammates on the Alaska National Guard's 103rd Civil Support Team during a training exercise in Valdez in March. U.S. Army photo by Master Sgt. Bob Haskell

VALDEZ, Alaska - After 12 years of trying, 1st Lt. Mike Jones has finally made the big move to Alaska. He is, furthermore, downright delighted about his move from the relative warmth of South Carolina to the vast state that is still locked in winter.

"The lure is Alaska. It's still the great outdoors," said Jones on a brutally cold March Wednesday beside Prince William Sound about why he has tried for so long to get to where he can savor the great American adventure.

"There's the hunting, the fishing and the flying. I'm a pilot, so I want to do some bush flying," said Jones, who is the National Guard's alter ego to Joel Fleischman, the young doctor on the television series "Northern Exposure," who did not exactly embrace his new Alaskan home.

Jones, 32, is also a medical man, a physicians assistant. He was working in South Carolina, when the National Guard gave him his chance to go north. He underwent an extreme climatic adjustment to join the Alaska National Guard's 103rd Civil Support Team in time to take part in Northern Edge 2003 during the second week of March.

Northern Edge is the state's premier joint training exercise which this year included about 1,600 members of all of the military services and focused on homeland security.

It was a balmy 70 degrees in South Carolina on March 4, when Jones flew off to his new home in Anchorage, where the 22-member civil support team is based at Fort Richardson.

It was well below zero, because of an icy gale and gusts of 40 to 50 knots, nine days later here where the team that is trained to respond to emergencies involving biological, chemical or radiological weapons of mass destruction began taking part in the exercise.

The team commanded by Air Guard Maj. Brett Meyer took on two training missions on March 12.

Three of the members, wearing bulky protective suits and air tanks, examined and retrieved a brief case believed to contain a dangerous> biological device after police officers discovered it in the hold of the Bartlett, one of the Alaska Marine Highway's large ferries, at the Valdez terminal.

Three more members later went aboard to secure a can of spray that was discharging its contents inside a men's room. Other members of the team then checked the residue from the two devices to determine if the contents would harm other police officers and emergency people called to the scene.

Jones's job in the terminal building was to monitor the blood pressure and other vital signs of the six men who did their jobs in the suits that made them look like they were walking on the moon and that made them sound like Darth Vadar.

It was a good day to be inside. The majestic Chugach mountains that surround the compact city at the southern end of the Alaska Pipeline were wrapped in winter white, and snow was billowing from every peak. Jones saw and felt for himself why the place is called "Little Switzerland."

And he knew that the circuitous route he had followed to Alaska had been worth the effort.

"The Navy wouldn't send me," said the Georgia-born Jones, who served for six years as a medical corpsman in San Diego, Calif. "Then I asked the Army if they would send me up here, but they wouldn't give me a guarantee.

So, I got here by joining the Guard." That also took some doing.

First, he joined the Georgia Army Guard. Then he was selected for the Army's physicians assistant program and trained for two years at Fort Sam Houston and Fort Hood, both in Texas.

That led to his job as the physicians assistant with the South Carolina Guard's newly formed 43rd Civil Support Team based at Fort Jackson. He got his break two years later, Jones explained, when the physicians assistant left the Alaska team and he got the job.

It is not uncommon for veteran members of the Guard's first two groups of civil support teams to join new teams in order to be promoted and to share their experience.

"That happens quite a lot in the lower 48 states," he said. "It's a lot better to have some experienced people on a new team than it is for all 22 people to start from scratch."

The Alaska team is considered a plum assignment because, it's in Alaska and because the team is so highly regarded. The 103rd passed its fifth Army evaluation with flying colors in Anchorage in February 2002 and was certified by the Office of the Secretary of Defense the following month.

"It was a go, no-go grading system," said Army Guard Lt. Col. Bradley Jorgensen, the team's first commander, "and they received go's in all tasks and subtasks, which equated to a total of 530 tasks."

Jones knew that was quite an accomplishment and he was happy to learn he could be the team's physicians assistant for the next three years. But he had never seen Alaska even though he'd spent a dozen years trying to get there. So, he visited the state for a week last January.

"I had to check it out before I made the big move," said Jones, who quickly fell in love with the place. "It's all that they said it is and more."