A Busy Weekend in Anchorage

The weekend of Sept. 19-21 was busy with a Wisdom Weekend, but this past weekend was filled with lots of activity -- Friday night we had tickets to Radical Reels, Banff Film Festival adventure shorts showing at the University, Saturday was a bike ride and then dinner and the opening night of the symphony with Lance and Mary.  Then Sunday was our usual commitment to hiking, this time out of Eagle River again but exploring the trail to Blacktail Rocks.  We knew that we wouldn't have time to actually climb it, but this was a re-con mission, designed to get us up there to look at it.  Next time.

The guidebook talks about the trail from going over Baldy and continuing on, but we prefer the longer and more gradual route around and up - still plenty of climbing!  We did pass through blueberry-filled meadows that are described in the book -- even now, Sept. 28 - they evidently haven't frozen yet.  We passed some blueberry pickers, and they had the right idea - when you have to stop to catch your breath from the steep climb, whip out a container and say that you want to pick berries!

After about an hour, we were up on top of the ridge, which is pretty wide and runs between Baldy and Blacktail Rocks.  Once again a beautiful day, and views on either side dropping down into valleys.  We had to get back or we might have challenged ourselves to the extra 2 hours of going up and down Blacktail Rocks.

The guidebook says that it's easy walking across the ridge until you're 1/2 mile and 1100 ft. from the top - then it swings pretty much straight up.  It also says the mountain was named for the lichen on its southern cliffs - it's not a pretty mountain, but they say it's an impressive view of "black-and-gray capped cliffs rising from the green valley below" (50 Hikes in Alaska's Chugach Park).

We saw more hikers on our way down and several families picking blueberries, resting a various points along the way. It's great to see so many children hiking with their parents, even 3 and 4 year-olds, trucking right along!  Behind Brian, you could see Denali clearly yesterday, which is about 250 miles away.

And Cook Inlet below, Anchorage not that far away!  Home for a halibut dinner and work on our fireplace - Brian just finished installing a gas fireplace insert for our fireplace.  It was nice to come home to, and I'm looking forward to getting up in the morning with it!

Before pictures here and after pictures next week - we're using it tonight but we'll wait for the show and tell til the last fabricated piece we're waiting for is in place!

South Fork Eagle River Hike up to Rendezvous Ridge

It was another beautiful weekend in Anchorage - at least some of it!  A rainy Saturday at the start, but cleared in afternoon, and we were running around anyway - another house project not quite finished when we moved in - the extra full bath, which needs a bathtub replacement, new flooring, tiling, etc.  Brian to the rescue!  Picked out our bathtub and fixtures, and now all that he had to do is get it ready and put it all together!  Just kidding Brian - lots of work there for him, but he always comes through with such a nice job -- and we've decided to get a gas insert for our old fireplace, so that will come next - or at the same time!  So nice having a husband who's a contractor!

Saturday night was a "house concert" that we always appreciate being invited to at the home of Tom Begich and Sarah Sledge -- always nice to have good music and great company with about 40 other people packed in to hear the people that Tom invites up - usually folk singers, broadly defined, and always impressive and enjoyable!  Then, since we hadn't been outside other than to run errands, we went for a walk downtown and ended at Crush, one of our favorite places, usually for a glass of wine, this time for a wonderful warm apple cake and great coffee!  A beautiful night for a walk.

Sunday morning is almost always a planning time for "Where should we hike today?"

So first I have to share my favorite picture from our hike today!

 After a great omelet, if I do say so myself, with onion, mushroom, celery and swiss chard with feta cheese (I should have taken a picture!), we took off for the South Fork Eagle River trail.  I've always wanted to do the ridge trail from Rendezvous Peak out of the Arctic Valley, and it seemed from the guide book that it was a 10 mile trail necessitating dropping a car off at one location and driving to the end.  We had never gotten quite organized for it, and I was intimidated by wondering if we were in shape for it.  We discovered that you could access the ridge trail from several places, so today, we started from the South Fork Eagle River trail.

Almost 2 miles from the trailhead, a narrow path starts up with signage for the Rendezvous Ridge trail.  It is a gradual climb up that intensifies considerably along the way, initially through some pretty tall grass on both sides.  We know there are berries still out for picking, so Brian stopped and got out his whistle and confirmed the bear spray was "at the ready!"  If I was a bear, I'd hang out here - it's beautiful!

We went from sunny and fairly warm hiking - it was about 59 degrees and very sunny - to extremely windy and cold closer to the top - this was a notch that we came to before having to continue on, where we met a photographer who had been in Brian's class when he took black and white photography a year or so ago.  The hiking got much steeper towards the top, necessitating much stopping and recovering of breath by me!

Once at the top, you can continue along the ridge for several miles!  The reward!  The views are incredible, and we liked doing the hike in this direction.

There were SO many cars in the parking lot, and we saw hardly anyone on the hike.  We met two guys and their dog on the last peak before we started down, and this picture is looking south over the ridge that we had hiked.  There was definitely weather moving in, and we weren't sure if we were going to get rained or snowed upon at the higher elevation before we started down!

The hike down, though highly anticipated, is almost as difficult as the hike up - easier on the heart & lungs, as Brian said, but murder on the thighs and hip flexors from bracing and uneven descent.  We stopped at one point for a rest, as we were pushing across the ridge, unsure of how quickly the grey-black clouds were moving in.  As you're returning, the town of Eagle River is spread out for viewing along the valley - so pretty!

Ah. . . you can see why we love living in Alaska!!

An Anniversary Hike!

It's been a beautiful weekend in Anchorage!  Today was definitely a hiking day, and we went back to Baldy Mountain in Eagle River, where we did a partial hike in late winter/early spring, but no summit.  Today we took the same longer, more gradual route up, with beautiful views of Cook Inlet and Denali way off in the distance!

It was so much nicer hiking up than with spikes in early March and slogging through snowfields.  That was a beautiful sunny day too though, and we've enjoyed this hike.  Today we went all of the way up to the ridge that runs over to Baldy - or you can take a left turn to Blacktail Rocks, which we'll do the next time.

There was a beautiful view looking down through a valley, which exposes another ridge hike that I've wanted to do ever since I moved here - it is 10 miles and a hike for two cars, leaving one at the beginning and one at the end - it may have to wait til next year while we get in better shape again.  This is an "easy" hike in the guidebook, and it seems like enough for an anniversary Sunday!

The high point of Baldy is 3038 feet with an elevation gain of 1300 ft.  Most people go up the face of it and make the loop down with the more gradual descent, but we did it in reverse.  I think in the future we'll do both with the more gradual elevation, as it has better views!  Next time, Blacktail Rocks,, elevation 4446 ft., named after "the dark lichen eking out an existence on the mountain's southern cliffs"  (50 Hikes in Alaska Chugach State Park).  Looking forward to it - maybe next weekend?

Baldy is described in the same guidebook as a "bare, rounded knob" above Eagle River.  It looked like "take your daughter to hike day" today with several little girls climbing with their parents.  We took a short rest stop on top of the "knob" before starting down the steep way - a little muddy and slick and probably won't go that way again.

And honest, I did take a picture of Brian, which apparently didn't turn out, but he had the camera in HIS hand today!  Now for a halibut dinner and a nice glass of wine!  

Halibut Fishing in Ninilchik - The Freezer is Loaded!

Brian has been salmon fishing for silvers since he's been back in Alaska and came home with 4 silvers - and this weekend we went halibut fishing on a charter that I had bought a groupon for last year and we never got to use - they had agreed to hold it over to this year, and we went out on the last weekend for the season.  It was a beautiful day, though, and we couldn't have asked for anything nicer.  All 6 of us out on the charter fished our limit - we could only take 1 over 29 " and one under for a total of 2 fish each.  We came home with 4 total, 27 pounds of filets, nicely stacked in the freezer now - that is a LOT of halibut, which is my very favorite thing to eat!  Ninilchik is about 3 1/2 hours away and just about to Homer.

Don't know if you can see from the picture, but they launch off the beach by having a big tractor push the boat off a trailer.  It's an easy day on a charter in most ways, because they have so much of the work done for you -- we were out for 5 hours in the sun and on the water, though, and just reeling in and jigging the line is work enough for me!  What a gorgeous view though, and fun to come back with so much.

Today, the last day of Labor Day weekend, we restained our deck, took a long bike ride on the Coastal Trail and came back to a halibut dinner - Lance came over and had dinner with us, our former landlord - and our first fire in the fireplace!

Tomorrow it's back to work!

New House Pictures and Colleen & Ivana's Visit in June!

After much work and quick work, we moved in just in time for Colleen's visit - we were only living here for about 2 days before they came and Brian especially did an unbelievable amount of work taking out carpeting, putting in laminate floors, new appliances, tile backsplash, and we both painted.

We've been very happy here (though we haven't been here much), and we had a great visit with Colleen and Ivana.  We did a hike up Rendevous Peak, on a glorious day, did a float trip down the upper Kenai, and spent a night on Prince William Sound in Surprise Cove - also did a little kayaking.

Long Time No Blog!!

It's been a long, dry spell here as we've been traveling to the East Coast to visit -- 3 weeks of visiting, one week of sailing, then 5 days in Toronto at a conference before returning to Anchorage!  I got to see two sisters who I don't see very often, and then I found out that it had been 17 years since all 6 of us as brothers and sisters had been together in the same place at the same time - that was worth going home for, for sure!  I have to come back and post pictures when someone sends me one, as I only had my phone and didn't get any of us together.

One of the things that we like the best is seeing old friends . . . and there are SO MANY people we want to see, we never get to see them all.  We spent a nice moonlit night, though, with John Cappelli and his friend Dawn and Jim Hayes . . . the 3 guys have a lot of history together, and we both enjoy spending time with them when we're "home!"

Boilermaker Sunday was right after we got to Utica, and we got together with Brian's family for a picnic at the Sauquoit Town Park - something of a tradition now!

Sailing was so nice once we got there, as usual, and we had great weather for it.  We sail out of Henderson Harbor now on Lake Ontario on Petrel, a 1978 32' Allied Seawind, originally made in Catskill, NY!  A week on a boat is like being away, away for a month - even with some engine trouble that changed some of our plans!  The boat gets picked up and set in the water in a pretty interesting process.

The next morning we set out to sail in Henderson Bay, intending to return to the dock, but the winds were blowing just right, and we sailed to Cape Vincent, about a 5 hour sail.  We ended up spending more time there than we had intended because of inclement weather and then a little engine trouble when we were ready to leave.   It was all worth it for sailing!