M609-
Never worked up there myself... but had friends who did, in Kodiak and Sitka. The distances are epic. I have a letter from a friend of mine (back when people wrote letters) detailing a case in the W. Aleutians. They'd take one crew out of Kodiak and fly the aircraft to Cold Bay or Dutch Harbor (370 and 520 nm respectively), land and refuel, and precisely as you say, a C-130 would drop a second crew to go prosecute the case and the Herc would proceed ahead to search and drop rafts and other such business until the helicopter arrived.
During certain seasons there would be detachments out in the Aleutians to keep the response times down to only a few hours. I seem to remember he did a couple detachments in Shemya, which isn't in Russia, but you can almost see it from there.
There are pretty continually a couple cutters in the Bering or the Gulf of Alaska and they take a severe beating.