A Visit From Old Friends - Week 1!

Two weeks SOUNDS like a long time when you start, but so many possibilities for a first land trip to Alaska!  After a couple of days to get acclimated, rest up, check out downtown for first Friday and our wonderful Anchorage Museum, Cindy and Peter Molesky, our good and long-time friends from Central New York, had a couple of rainy trips on our boat, Kakwik, out of Whittier on Prince William Sound - one at the dock with too much wind to go out, the second still rainy out to Shotgun Cove to pick up shrimp!  We had a great shrimp "on the grill" dinner out of it, even though the rain didn't show Whittier at its best!

We had SO many hikes picked out to take our friends on, so Sunday we picked the Rabbit Creek Trail into Rabbit Lake - in the rain.  Spitting at least on Sunday and not 100% of the time - a beautiful view at the end of the trail!

The end of the trail - and a tiny bit of blue sky! 

Peter & Judy at Rabbit Lake 

Monday we took off for Seward and a planned full-day kayak trip from Miller's Landing - still in the rain.  We had a great yurt right on the water, beautiful deck and grill - and still rain. It didn't stop us from grilling, playing cards and having a great time - even with the rain LOUDLY drilling the yurt roof all night!  

The next morning it was still raining, but the outfit was pretty clear that we could not wimp out - so 48 degrees and pouring, we were in.  A paddle to Caine's Head, 4 mile hike to the top and abandoned WWII gun placement/bunker, and paddle back - in record time, I've heard, since in the pouring rain, it was not as tempting to keep stopping and looking around!  We did see a whale surface, porpoise, harbor seal and sea otter, but mostly we kept moving to stay warm - or something as close as we could get!

Back at Miller's Landing, it took a while to warm up!  But we agreed you get adventures and stories from trips like this more than the good weather/everything was great trips!

Back Outside after a Writing Workshop and Conference Travel

Memorial Day Weekend- so tempting to just go have fun, but we started the weekend with a workday outside, planting flowers and making a tiny raised bed vegetable garden!  Brian put that together for me, and I planted arugula, spinach, lettuce, basil, and 2 tomato plants.  We aren't here for 4-5 weeks in the summer, but I'd love to have the fresh greens when I am here!

My first time out on Kakwik this year!  Brian has been out several times for shrimp from late April/early May, but we went down to Whittier today, even though it was raining - it rarely rains very hard here.  Lots of shrimp - yay!  A bit on the cool side but always beautiful in its own way.

And a short hike afterwards to Virgin Creek Falls in Girdwood after an excellent late lunch/early dinner at the Silvertip Grill.

There is no shortage of beautiful places here, that is for sure - not as long of a hike as we would have wanted, but a nice place to visit at the end of Timberline Drive in Girdwood.

Mother's Day in Seward

Mother's Day brought together two different silent auction purchases - one for the Alaska Railroad and one for a "Close Encounter with the Puffins" at the Sea Life Center in Seward.  I love riding the train, and we had a great time on this route that divides from the Seward Highway once you are past Portage - so a part of the countryside that you can only access from the train.  Brian took a couple of pictures of this picturesque gorge, but we passed two glaciers, and we could have been taking pictures out the window the entire time.

They have a full dining car, and it is a pleasant way to spend the 4 hour trip each way by having breakfast on the way and dinner on the way home - a surprisingly full menu too!

But the real treat was the puffins - we got a behind the scenes lecture on puffins then were brought in with a feed bucket to feed them individual pieces of herring - and then chopped up hooligan, which we were told was like their dessert!  Each puffin as a name and their own personality, and they told us some of them are really smart and won't eat until the good stuff comes out!

It was really fun.  The puffins were smaller than I expected them to be, and they only just got their spring plumage - in the winter, they are not nearly as colorful!  We found out that they usually mate with the same partner year after year - unless they're unsuccessful, in which case they will often search out a new mate.  They seem to be sad when they don't have a mate and spend a lot of time with the staff.  I recommend it, and the Sea Life Center has other close encounters to offer too!

We had just enough time for a beer and snack at the Seward Brewing Company and to try a "flight" of their beers.  We especially liked the red and the stout.

More Spring Hiking

A funny season in late April/early May - it can still be snowing in the mountains and even down below, but not this year.  Hiking means guessing, "Do I need spikes?"  "How much mud, how much snow?"  Brian's been wanting to hike the Fall Creek Trail along Turnagain Arm, a popular trail, but oddly you don't see many people along the way!  The hiking book says that "like nearly all hikes starting from the Seard Highway, heads uphill without delay."  This is true!  After 1 1/2 miles, you leave the treeline and are out in the open mountains, with gorgeous views!  We ran into snow about 1/2 way up, which made the trip a little slipperier.  The goal was to get to the Falls Creek tarn, and it wasn't obvious where it was.  The elevation gain is 2900 feet and the high point of the trail is 3920 ft.  with a distance of 5 miles.  I sent Lance and Brian up the last bit by themselves, sat on a rock in the sun and meditated in the beauty and stillness.

The next day we did another hike, a little less but still a significant uphill, about 2 hours total, from the top of Basher Road.  What a mud bog!  We had prepared for it though - we were stopping at Carl and Diane's for a glass of wine so we brought clean socks, clean shirts, and we both had pants that had lower leg coverings that zipped off - we were almost fit for company!  I love the hiking that we do this time of year though, messy as it can be.

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!