the big land staking adventure

The Alaska Department of Natural Resources (DNR) has been running their remote recreational cabin staking program for the past few years. In a nutshell, each year DNR selects parcels of state-owned land in each region of the state (northern, interior, southcentral, southeast, and southwest) and opens them up to residents via a lottery system.  Winners get to stake parcels of state land for purchase at fair market value.  It's $25 to throw your name in the hat for a particular area (residents only, sorry lower-48ers) and, for the last few years, I've been throwing mine in for various areas. This year, both Jon and I were drawn for the same area!

We were both selected to go out and stake anywhere from 5 to 20 acres apiece in the Ridgeview area, just west of Glenallen. Oh yeah. Imagine the Beverly Hillbillies theme song playing as we loaded up the truck and headed to Glenallen... Just how much stuff can you fit in a Tacoma?  lots. 

Camped in the arctic oven, the greatest wall tent ever!  Much to Jon's irritation, the stove was a bit finicky and wouldn't light (it's a little drip stove, kind of like a portable toyo stove).  But, no worries, we brought our warm bags just in case and once you started cooking the place heated right up.  Luxury!

We spent a day hiking all over the staking area before deciding on our spot.  Everyone who had already been out there had marked up their areas, and it was really neat to see the different areas people chose.  Some were obviously for ease of access: adjacent to a platted but not yet built subdivision, off of an ATV trail, or near a big lake (maybe they have a float plane?). Other lots were obviously for the surroundings - there were some pretty phenomenal views out there! From high points you could see Mount Drum and Sanford, Tazlina Lake, and a good chunk of the Chugach Range!

We went for views.  Ease of access played a minor role, but really, we went for views.  A lot of sweet spots were already taken but we still got a great little spot, no more than 1 1/2 miles from the road, with beautiful views!  

Jon has pics of our views, but they look way better in person.  for now, just imagine snowcovered mountains, giant glacial lakes...  I'll give you directions if you want to see for yourself. 

So once we picked a spot, it was time to get to work.  First order of business: make nameplates for corner posts.  OK, so you could actually pay someone in town to engrave metal plates to put on your corner posts, but we thought that making our own could be way more fun.  Here's the process - drink one PBR.  Cut open can with tin snips. Scratch info in with nail. Repeat. 

Here's what one of our finished corner posts looked like.  You lop a tree off ~4' high, remove all branches, square up the sides, and attach your PBR nameplate. voila.  

Once the corners are set, you need to brush and flag the lines between them.  Thankfully, Jon comes from a long line of chainsaw operators.  It would have been much, much harder to do all of this by hand.   Props to those that do.  

Packing out the chainsaw at the end of the day.

Give us a few years to get a cabin up, then we'll have just the spot for some adventures!

gardening fun

It's been a great year for gardens in southcentral Alaska. Sun, sun, and more sun, with just enough rain to keep things well watered. Just in time, our perennial beds have finally filled in, we started a rooftop vegetable garden, and I inoculated a few birch stumps with oyster mushroom mycelium this spring. Success all around!

Here are a few oyster mushrooms I'll be eating tonight, along with a rice pilaf and pink snapper. I'm stoked this worked! I was growing oyster mushrooms indoors last winter (a kit from fungi perfecti, super easy and mine produced plenty). I read that you could innoculate stumps and logs if you timed it right. We had to cut a few birch trees from our yard, so we waited two weeks (long enough for the tree's antifungal compounds to degrade, but hopefully not so long that another fungus moves in), then scored the stumps with a chainsaw and stuffed the oyster mushroom mycelium/straw mixture in. A few months later and they're starting to produce!

Here's a shot of our rooftop garden. I'm standing near the peak of our roof, looking down on our flat mudroom roof. The mudroom is around 10' by 10', and say 8-10 feet tall. Jon framed the outside of the roof like you would a wall, built 2' wide planter boxes for the sides and a patio for the center. We have a ladder up the back for access, and put in soaker hoses so that watering is as easy as turning on the hose by the driveway. The veggies are a little behind because we got them in the ground so late. By the time we built the boxes/patio and hauled up the soil it was early June, but that's ok. A good trial run for next year, and I think we'll get a few cabbages and zucchini out of it before freezeup. Bonus - no possible way our veggies can be eaten by moose! It's like they have a sixth sense, as soon as your veggies are ready to harvest it's almost guaranteed that a moose will come through and mow them down. No more free ride, moose! A great way to make use of the space, and further reducing the amount of impervious surface on our lot.

While I was up there, I snapped a shot of our backyard/pond/patio. You'll be happy to know the fish are all doing well. Have I mentioned how great it is to have a husband who does landscaping?

The gentians are in full bloom (Gentiana septemfida). They're little, but I love them. Especially how the buds have that spiraled look.

Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve

Believe it or not, I was lucky enough to have a paid work trip to Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve. It's an amazing place, one of the least visited units of our National Park system. The caldera in the center of the monument makes it pretty clear that Aniakchak is in the ring of fire - 6 miles wide and 2,500 feet deep, the caldera is what's left of a stratovolcano that blew its top around 3,000 years ago. Pretty darned impressive. The volcanic history of the area combined with tectonic uplift leaves some pretty neat geology. Depending on what portion of the monument you're in, you could find old glacial till, sedimentary layers, columnar volcanic rock, or vast barren cinder flats.

I'm not sure how well it shows up in the photo, but this is an area where Lindsay Flagstad (AKNHP ecologist and my field partner for the trip) and I saw these neat layers of sedimentary (horizontal layers) and volcanic (vertical columns) rock atop each other.

There were lots of neat volcanic features along the coast, near the mouths of the Aniakchak River and Plenty Bear Creek. Plenty of jutting columns, and even places where the intensive erosive forces along the coast wore away the rock into arches and caves.

There was another less catastrophic eruption in the early 1930s that sent ash and pyroclastic materials (imagine little molten rock blobs flying through the air) as far as 40 miles away. the ashfall buried plant communities, which are gradually on the comeback in portions of the park covered by ash. Check out these big, barren cinder flats, it was like walking on the moon.

Unfortunately, I don't have any great caldera photos. Lindsey and I did get up to the lip of the caldera, but the fog was so thick we couldn't see a thing. In fact, our helicopter landed downslope to take us back to camp and we actually had to play Marco Polo with our pilot to find him.

Here's a shot of a park service cabin Lindsey and I spent a week in. Pretty sweet. This is actually the view from the outhouse. There are lots of big coastal brown bears in this part of the park. One day, while I was in the outhouse, Lindsey came across one near the cabin. She hollered at him and he took off, which was good, but he came straight for the outhouse, which was very bad! It's never a good thing to hear your buddy yelling "hey, hey bear, get away from there!" while you're in a rickety little outhouse without a door, with your pants down. You can imagine the thoughts going through my head - boy will this be a humiliating obituary... so I started banging the heck out of the side of the outhouse with my trusty can of bear spray, which made such a ruckus Lindsey said the bear took off in a hurry. whew.

Can you see all the bear tracks? The beach was a bear superhighway!

and man, were they big!

We even went swimming once, here are my tracks out to the water and back to prove it!

And there were loads of cool plants. Leymis mollis, a beach rye, surrounded the cabin and held these neat beach dunes with little bits of beach pea (Lathyrus maritimus), Senecio pseudoarnica, Honkenya peploides, Mertensia maritima, and Cakile edentula.

and one of my favorites, the monkey flower (Mimulus guttatus)!

Working in the alpine environments was a trip, so many new plants! The first few plots were overwhelming, but once we figured out the difference between the Diapencia and Loiseleuria, we were on a roll... here's Lindsey, hard at work. This is basically what we were doing for our two weeks out.

We even found spotted ladyslipper orchids (Cypripedium guttatum), which aren't common in Alaska!

We did squeeze in a mini-packraft adventure. To cross the Aniakchak we managed to fit two people, two full packs, a shovel, and a shotgun in one Alpacka raft. We ferried across, worked upstream throughout the day, and then floated down to get back to our cabin. Things were going well until a sow and cub forced us to abandon our float, top our boots, and revert to packraft-as-sled mode for a while. Such is life. Definitely take bear spray if you're heading out this way!

We staged in Port Heiden (outside the monument) for a bit, and hiked out to the old village site on a day when it was too windy for the helicopter to fly. check this out - one of the old houses had slat boards plastered with 1929 newspapers. I liked the drawings from the fashion section.

So, yeah. A great trip, beautiful place, fun work, and great people. I can't think of a better way to spend a few weeks of my summer.

Inlet Photos

I did a bit of work in western Cook Inlet this summer. Flying over the inlet is one of my favorite things - all of the neat patterns in the mudflats!

Emperor Geese and Carbon Flux on the Manokinak

I'm back from the Manokinak! I've spent the last 5 days out on the Manokinak River, at a USGS study site researching emperor geese on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. Joel Schmutz (USGS Wildlife Biologist) has been studying emperor geese there since 1993, trying to understand why the population declined in the 1980's and hasn't really recovered.

It's beautiful country out there, the sky goes on forever.

Here's an emperor goose, they're really pretty birds! If you look them up in your bird guide their heads are white, but there's a bunch of iron floc on the sediment surface (naturally occurring in these wet environments), so their heads stain orange from poking around in the sedges to feed.

In a sense, these geese create their own feeding habitat. Take a look below. The really short veg closer to the water is Carex subspathacea, which is a different growth form of the adjacent taller Carex ramenskii. The emperor geese prefer the shorter C. subspath.; it has higher nitrogen concentrations, they don't have to pick through all the dead stuff, etc. The emperor geese maintain this habitat through intensive grazing of C. subspath. "grazing lawns."

I was helping Joel and Karen Beard (prof from Univ. of Utah) to set up a study site looking at the effects of climate change on emperor goose habitat. The idea is that, with warmer temperatures, C. subspath will grow up into the taller C. ramenskii, which is less of an ideal goose forage. To simulate warming, we set up what are basically mini-greenhouses. These were paired with exclosures to study the effect of keeping geese from grazing, and an unmanipulated control. We also did a bit of work measuring CO2 flux from grazed and ungrazed habitats.

After all of that, I got to help with nest surveys! Hatch date was quickly approaching for the baby emperor goslings, and I was able to help with assessing development of the eggs. Basically, this translated to hiking all day with Sasha (certainly a very fun assignment), visiting nest locations. You can assess how near the egg is to hatching by floating it - eggs become more and more buoyant as they near their hatch date. At one of the nests, the little goslings were starting to poke out of their eggs! Sasha helped them along just a smidge to see if she could tag their feet so they could be identified later. It was still too early to tag, so we left them with their mother (the concerned goose visible in the background - don't worry, they were reunited minutes after this photo).

We ended the day by getting caught in the mother of all storms. Dumping rain (and marble-sized hail on some other crews!) with thunder and lightning! What to do in a thunder storm with 3-second count, 2-second count, oh my god 1-second count it's right on top of us lightning when you're the tallest thing for miles? Sasha and I beat feet back to the river, put on our float coats, and hunkered down in a muddy slough for an hour or so, dreaming of dry clothes and hot gooey dinners. mmmmm, burritos... Eventually the storm passed and our prayers were answered, our trip back across the river ended with burritos for dinner and a solstice bonfire!

Crow Pass: The Collective

Some days it's all about the collective... I have a map, you have a compass. Four poles shared amongst three people. Collectively, we've got everything we need. That's how Sunday's trip over Crow Pass went - between Haley, Olga, and myself we had pretty much everything we needed to hike/float our way from Girdwood to Eagle River.

There was a lot of learning involved in my first real packraft daytrip. Fast and light? Well, not yet. But I'm figuring out how to lighten my load and getting faster with every trip.

Due to some last minute trail beta we added snowshoes to the lineup. Surprise, May 31 is officially still winter at Crow Pass. There was plenty of thigh-deep snow and some howling wind, which blew across our paddle handles and made it sound like we were accompanied by our own personal jug band!

Eventually, though, once we came down through the Eagle River side winter gave way to spring, and spring gave way to summer. Glorious summer.

And then finally to Eagle River, where we inflated our packrafts for a float. The water level was a bit low, we hit plenty of gravel and rocks. The upper stretch was quite fun, to be followed by portage after portage around sweepers and strainers. The woody debris seemed endless and we pulled out at Icicle, thinking it would actually be faster to hike. Little did we know, we pulled out right where the good floating began! Glimpses of the river from the trail between Icicle and Echo Bend showed a wood-free mellow float. doh! A lesson learned for the next time...

Thanks to Haley and Olga for a great day out. All four seasons in one day, 24-miles of hiking and floating. OK, mostly hiking. But a good time nonetheless!

Paper Bears

I'm not at all stoked about shooting real bears, but paper bears... well, that's something I can get in to! I've spent the past two days in the National Park Service bear awareness/shotgun certification course. All day today was spent on the shooting range, getting used to 12-gauges, learning how to clean them, and firing off tons of rounds. I actually shot pretty well - nice tight groupings all day long! Many thanks to Scott for his patience and good spirits, this was one of the best gun certification courses I've been through!

Springtime in Alaska

Ahhh... spring.  It's finally here!  Plants in the garden are coming up, time to take the feeders down and just enjoy the birds in the trees.  I'm continuing to develop my novice birder skills, trying to ID by sight/sound the birds I've run into so far.  Here are my favorites from this spring:

• ruby-crowned kinglets (lots!)
• yellow-rumped warblers (one pair many times)
• scaups (greater or lesser, I couldn't tell)
• varied thrush

The weather in southcentral AK has been amazing lately.  The cottonwoods are like perfume right now, intoxicating, and I love it.  They draw you out of doors, convince you to leave your books and computer behind to play in the sunshine with friends.  I wonder how people in continuously nice climates get anything done?

greatest email footer ever

I never have footers on my emails.  You know, those one to two line, favorite quote ever footers.   I tend to get a little annoyed at the one's referencing love, kindness, and puppy dogs (I'm sure you've seen them) but to each his own.  Anyways, this is one of the best I've ever seen, from Professor McCallum at Texas A&M.

1880's: "There's lots of good fish in the sea"   W.S. Gilbert
1990's:  Many fish stocks depleted due to overfishing, habitat loss, and pollution.
2000:  Marine reserves, ecosystem restoration, and pollution reduction MAY help restore populations.
2022: Soylent Green is People

Visiting Cameryn

I'm on my way back home from a quick trip back to western NY to meet my new niece, Cameryn.  She's all of 2 months old now, and weighing in at around 8lbs.  ( i think...)  Anyways, she's super cute and a welcome addition to the family!

This trip could have been called my western NY home improvement tour as me, my brother Mike, and his fiance Sarah spent quite a bit of time getting the baby's room ready and then helping my mom with various electrical/plumbing/painting things.  But we did manage to find time to goof off...  

Griffis Sculpture Park is one of my favorite western NY places to go.  Not only are there tons of great sculptures, but they're touchable, my favorite kind!

willpower, marshmallows, and the rest of my life

So Todd and Libby were going skiing yesterday and I was faced with a dilemma.  Do what I really wanted to do (a day skiing with good friends) or do what I really should do (study for my WFR class).  I ended up studying, which is good for me in the long run but pretty darn difficult right now.   

After finishing up my studies, I downloaded the latest radiolab podcast.  (I *love* radiolab, by the way.)  I listened to "Mischel's Marshmallows," which talked about a Columbia psych prof's experiments with children and willpower.  Basically, giving a kid the choice between one marshmallow now or lots of marshmallows later, then leaving them alone with the one and seeing how long they can hold out.  delayed gratification... some can hold out, some give in right away, most could make it about 7 minutes.  Anyways, he checked back in with a bunch of these kids later in life and found that those who could hold out longer for the marshmallows when they were kids did better later in life (better grades, higher SAT scores, stuff like that).  

No one really knows if this willpower is hardwired, due to parenting/experience, or some combination.  But geez, I don't think I could hold out very long for a marshmallow.  In fact, after listening to this I baked brownies for Jon and couldn't even wait until the flour was added to taste them.  That's way less than seven minutes.  Does this mean I'm screwed?  Maybe passing on skiing balances this out...  wish me luck.

Redoubt finally erupted!

According to today's Anchorage Daily News article, Alaskan volcanos don't have the pretty, fluid lava that Hawaiian volcanos do.  Instead, our volcanos have a more sticky magma that will ooze out a little before hardening.  Pressure keeps building beneath this newly hard surface until *BLAM* the whole top gets blown off! 

Apparently this is called "pyroclastic."  I first heard this word a few years ago when I was out in the Pribilofs.  I was checking out some very cool, very shiny rocks that were scattered across the island.  A geologist on the project told me these were pyroclastic rocks, meaning that when the volcano (the island) had last blown, bits of magma shot through the air hardened to form these rocks. 

We also played in some lava tubes on that trip, I'll have to find a picture to post.  Things like this make me want to be a geologist.  Ok, really right now I want to be a vulcanologist.

Here are some pics from the Alaska Volcano Observatory (photo credits: Cyrus Read, AVO/USGS).  Check out their site for more pics and status updates:  http://www.avo.alaska.edu/activity/Redoubt.php

Summit crater showing rapidly melting glacier and enlarged "ice piston" feature.

Flood waters generated in the summit crater of Redoubt descending down through an ice gorge on Drift Glacier.