New Shrimp, April in Prince William Sound, & . . . More Hiking!

There is always this question about whether we'll have "enough" shrimp to make it through the winter - they are SO good, you don't want to run out.  And then all of a sudden it's April, and there is more shrimp coming in the door!  What a good problem to have!  Brian snapped a few pictures of one of the first trips out with Carl Roberts on the boat we share, Kakwik.

What a day!  What a place!  Now I really mind that I was working!
On beautiful days like this on the weekend, I really want to be up in the mountains!

This last one, we hiked the Falls Creek Trail along Turnagain Arm on Saturday, a fairly steep hike right from the start and consistent snow on the ground about halfway up.  The Falls Creek Trail meets up with the Rabbit Creek Trail on the other side of the ridge and is another approach to South Suicide Peak, which we haven't done yet.  Lance went with us on this hike, and we now can't find the pictures on the computer that Brian thought he downloaded - too bad, they were good ones!  You're very quickly above treeline and looking down over Cook Inlet and Turnagain Arm, and we saw sheep up on the sunny cliffs.  In the other direction, you're headed into a deep valley with beautiful mountain views, and South Suicide Peak really stands out.

On Sunday, we climbed from the top of Basher Road - from a high point, you immediately go down, evidently so that you can climb back up again and then have an agonizing climb again at the very end!  (Bad design!) This climb is not as out in the open, and you're not above treeline for about the first hour - at least at the rate that I climb!  And, two hours is about what we had, so by the time we popped out, we didn't have the time to go further along the ridge and up to "The Dome" as it is called or onto another peak.  And it was a mud bog!!  Much laundry when we got home.  Although these pictures don't do it justice, once you're on top, you can see out over the inlet and also off to Denali in the distance - plus you're looking at the backside of Wolverine and a series of peaks on the other side. I wonder what we'll do NEXT weekend?!

More Hiking & A Little Remodeling for the Inside Days

One of our favorite hikes now, all times of year, is Baldy Mt. out of Eagle River - it's one of those funny ones classified as an "easy hike" by Alaska standards, but still is a pretty stiff climb - the only "easy" part is that it's relatively short - about 2 hours up and down, depending on how much time you spend walking along the ridge once you're up there!  The ridge continues over to Blacktail Rocks, which I've been wanting to go up, but we've not so far allowed enough time, and that is a more intense push up to the top.

Brian is standing on top of Baldy here, but the view along the ridge is beautiful, and it was too sunny to take a picture in the REALLY gorgeous direction of the valley!  From here, one can drop down over the edge and take a quicker but steeper return to the road, but we prefer the longer route down with a better view - and a ton of blueberries we discovered last fall - waiting for next summer for those!

Brian finished up a project he's been working on for the entrance to our kitchen, which was a hallway, across from a large pantry, which seemed like a good place for a shelf and more storage of some sort.  He'd put up a rough placeholder in the past year, and we've been trying it out to see how we best used it.  The finished product is beautiful, made of oak, with a dark wood decorative inlay.  There are baskets for storage, a place for phone plug-ins, and a shelf for his computer and business "stuff" which now doesn't have to be stored on the dining room table!

And then more hiking on an early April weekend, and I can't even remember where it was!

Spring Break: A Couple of Days in Fairbanks then LA

We spent a few days in Fairbanks mid-March, over spring break - we wanted to go and see the International Ice Sculpture competitions again that we saw a few years ago, search for some snow to ski on, and I was leading an Introduction to the Landmark Forum there.  It was COLD all of a sudden for the days we were there!  We skied (classical) two days, really bundled up, below zero both days, but at least sunny - and late enough in the winter that you could actually begin to feel the sun!

Viewing the ice sculptures turned out to be a shorter trip (at night) than we had anticipated, because it was just so darned cold!  Probably 15-20 degrees below zero, we made a quick trip around, another quick trip round to the "single block" carvings, which seemed to be more outstanding this year than the larger, multiple blocks!  I couldn't bear to take my mittens off and could hardly stand still for a picture, and Brian managed one!

The morning that we left Fairbanks it was 29 degrees below zero!  Not only are we not used to it being that cold, especially THIS winter, it hadn't been even nearly that cold to prepare us!  Coming back to the airport in Anchorage, I never left the airport, and after a quick breakfast, I went on to Los Angeles to a weekend course and a couple of days with Jessica.  It was a short trip, but I managed to see my sister, Christine, also while I was there at a lovely little inn for lunch up in a canyon that I now can't remember the name of! And, of course, it's always beautiful to visit Santa Monica, the beach, the palm trees and Venice Beach, a long walk down the beach and a quick Uber trip back!

And then - back to Anchorage and back to work!