Sue Ives

Morocco, part deux

2010-12-04T08:36:00.000-08:00

Sun, surf, and sand… what else could you want? Climbing, of course! Tafroute was about 5hrs from Taghazoute, and we’d heard that it was full of “tasty boulders” – who could resist? We stocked up the safari van for an adventure and were off!

It was a neat drive out through the anti-Atlas, we passed kasbahs, fortress towns, and desert oases. The anti-Atlas were also full of Argan trees that were, in turn, often full of goats. Goats in trees!! Jon and Resh were particularly excited about this. They're still waiting to see a goat on a cow...

Tafroute is a great town, I can easily say one of my favorites of all the places we went. Friendly people, clean streets...

and a really cute souk where they even sell crashpads!

ok, a foam mattress, but once you cut it in half...

We also made it out to the painted rocks, where a Belgian artist painted lots of boulders all sorts of colors in the 1980s. It’s kind of a trip to drive out along a desert trail and suddenly come up on giant blue and pink rocks scattered in the sand.

So if you're looking for an out of the way bouldering get away, Tafroute is the place!

Morocco Surfing!

2010-12-02T19:30:00.000-08:00

After Paris, a little surf safari was in order!

Jon and I rolled into Taghazout, Morocco, in early November to meet up with our friends Rick, Tanya, and Suresh. It was a blast – generally two surf sessions a day, with beach merriment between and after.

There were great beginner spots for me and T, with plenty of bigger sets for Rick and Jon. Even Suresh got in on the action! I graduated from the whitewater, learned how to turn (well, most of the time...), and caught an awesome long right on an outside set. Jon’s biggest challenge continues to be even sunscreen application...

Plenty of sun, surf, food, and memorable Moroccan massages with friends... all in all a great time!

vive la Paris!

2010-11-04T15:11:00.000-07:00

Jon and I are on our way to Morocco to meet up with our friends, Rick, Tanya, and Suresh, to do a little surfing and hanging out. We had a layover in Paris on the way and figured, well, why not stretch that out into a few days and check the city out?

We made the most of our two full days in Paris! The food has been amazing. Croissants, bread, and coffee everywhere you turn! Here's our standard breakfast - fresh squeezed orange juice, cafe au lait, bread, croissant, and a different jam every time.

We did the classics on our first day: the Louvre, Arc de Triumphe, and up the Eiffel Tower. It was great! The Louvre is incredible. No matter your taste in art, they have it. We did a cruise through most of the sections, and made a point to see the three most popular pieces, the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, and Winged Victory. A few of my favorites were a really neat ancient egyption sarcophagus cover (the surface is flat and polished, with an incut figure):

and aphrodite:

I'm generally way more into sculpture and other tactile sorts of art, but, for sheer scale, the "grand tableau" (aka BIG paintings) were a trip. Seriously, these things were huge. Jon and I were talking about where the heck you could ever put something like this. Our question was answered on day two when we went to Versailles - a palace.

After the Louvre, we walked over to the Arc de Triumphe at the start of Champs de Elysees. One of the largest triumphal arches in the world, Napoleon had it built to commemorate his battles and it's also now the home of Frances Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. I don't have any super-great Arc pictures (they're all cut off either at the top or bottom), but wikipedia does: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_de_Triomphe

We took the stairs to the top to check out the view. Notably, the horror of Paris traffic in the "star," where twelve streets dump into a circle with no discernible traffic laws.

and who could spend a day in Paris without a trip up the Eiffel tower? A perfect way to end the day!

Today, day two in Paris, we took the train out to Versailles, which was amazing! It was a trip to spend the day wandering around where Marie Antoinette, Lois XVI, and Napoleon hung out. Gardens that went on forever, trimmed into geometric patterns with fountains and statues.

The biggest surprise for me in touring the Grand Palace and the Trianon were the colors - the palace was filled with bright fabrics! Here's the Queen's bedroom, with the little door to the king's room Marie Antoinette used to escape rioting mobs during the French Revolution.

And, in the Grand Trianon, cheetah print carpet with bright pink furniture! These folks had style!

Yellow Iron

2010-09-26T23:56:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty sure everyone has a secret (or not so secret) desire to operate heavy equipment. Me included. So I was pretty excited when Jon and I headed to Chickaloon this past weekend to prep our cabin site, excavator in tow!

We've got a little lot, ~1/4 acre, and plan to put up a cabin within the next year or two. So this weekend's task was to clear off our building site and driveway. Man, equipment makes moving dirt so easy! Jon did most (ok, all) of the clearing / leveling / general dirt moving, but I got to dig a big hole!

Hooray for excavators! We've got a building site!

Powerline Pass!

2010-09-12T20:09:00.000-07:00

Last time I was in town, Libby and I talked Jon and Todd into going with us on a favorite near-town bike ride: Powerline Pass to Indian! Here are a few pics from Libby. Not a sunny day, but a great time nonetheless!

The view from the pass...

snack time!

smiles before starting the steep bit...

Jon is headed to Indian - turnagain arm pit barbecue, here he comes!

Mandalay National Wildlife Refuge

2010-09-06T13:35:00.000-07:00

My friend Allison and I had a great opportunity in Louisiana - to ride along with the Refuge Manager of Mandalay National Wildlife Refuge as he went about a few errands he had to run. It's an amazing little refuge, right in Houma, Louisiana with more birds, alligators, and plants than you can see in a day! Plus we had the chance to see it with someone who could answer all of our questions about the plants, birds, and ecology of the area (and we had lots of them).

The ride involved an airboat, and I wasn't sure at first what to think, but now... I'm sold! I love airboats! Not the greatest for seeing wildlife (it's really hard to sneak up on anything), but a great way to get around and see some country that you couldn't see on foot. Even though the water's pretty shallow in most places, the bottom is mostly unconsolidated organics and your hat would be floating if you tried to take a walk.

Coastal Louisiana has three types of marshes: freshwater, brackish, and salt water. This was a freshwater marsh, I'd love to go see the others someday.

We headed through saw grass, marsh mallows, sedges, and scirpus. Beneath wax myrtles, tupelos, and cypress trees, and over water celery, lilies, and lotus. The lilies and lotus were amazing. We passed through two lakes that were each nearly 3/4 full of American lotus, and they were in bloom! One thing you can't get from the picture is the smell... as soon as the boat came close, the air was thick with the sweet smell of lotus blossoms! They're big blooms (~6" across), each with lots of acorn-sized edible seeds (imagine a sunflower with really really big seeds).

Other lakes and ponds were full of yellow lilies. I don't have a great picture of them in bloom, but trust me, they were pretty! They're also great for wildlife habitat, since they have big, edible tubers. So I love the lilies and lotus because they're pretty, they smell great, and they're great wildlife habitat. But also, they help keep out invasive aquatic plants. Giant salvinia and water hyacinth are two invasives moving into a lot of freshwater marshes. These thick stands of lotus and lilies act like barriers, blocking them out.

Scirpus californicus with...

dragonflies

and least bitterns! can you see him? There was a pair, only about 10 feet away!

The least bitterns were a highlight, but we saw tons of other birds, too. Great blue herons, little blue herons, green herons, snowy egrets, common moore hens, purple galinules, and anhingas.

Coastal Louisiana is truly a beautiful place.

Mobile, Mississippi, and New Orleans

2010-06-01T22:38:00.000-07:00

I'm just back from a 2 1/2 week trip down to the gulf. This was the first time I'd been to the southeastern U.S., and it's beautiful! Downtown Mobile is filled with these big, antebellum buildings that have gourgeous wrought iron balconies. Lots of parks, tree-lined streets, and super-neat architecture, definitely worth checking out!

Coastal Mississippi is beautiful. (and hopefully, with all that's going on, it stays that way.) White sand beaches that seem to go on forever. I used to know a woman from Louisiana, she and her fiance had just bought a coastal lot in Mississippi. Now I understand why she was so excited about it! Here's a pic of Dave, we were checking out some brown pelicans on a barrier island out in the gulf.

Dave flew out before I did, and so we checked out New Orleans the night before his flight. Bourbon Street is completely over the top!

I took a few hours the next day to check out the french quarter - great food, beautiful buildings!

Definitely need to get back and see more of the city, and eat more beignets!

House Remodel!

2010-04-25T11:50:00.000-07:00

I've been hard at work on my thesis this spring (my defense is in 3 days, yay!), which doesn't really make for an exciting blog post. So, on the bright side, Jon has been working on the house the past month, and I can show you that!

Last spring, we made it to the top of AHFC's energy rebate program. A guy came out and did an energy efficiency rating of our house and put together a list of things we could do to improve our rating. We'll get reimbursed for a portion of it! pretty great program. All the big stuff for us - insulation (apparently they only believed in vapor barriers in the 1950s? it's like our house was wrapped in tin foil, and that's it), windows, doors, all of that. So, last fall, we stripped off the asphalt shingles and put foam insulation on the outside of our little 2x4 framed house. We stuck with the "under construction" look until this past month, when Jon got to work on windows, doors, and siding. Seriously, you won't even recognize the place, it's looking pretty great. A combination of metal (same stuff as our roof, but blue) and cedar shakes. the best part? it smells like cedar when you go outside.

so here are a few pics of the evolution of our house. Our first summer, when we pulled out all of the grass on the south side, and put in raised perennial beds.

Then the pond on the north side.

It's really worth the effort to just throw up a gallon and see how a color looks before starting in on the whole house, and dark trim can't really "tone down" lemon yellow.

48 hours and a few trips to home depot later...

and now...

Robin helped with the new big window. It was flattering that Jon thought I could help him carry and install it, but really...

warm, snuggly polar bears!

2010-02-19T20:39:00.000-08:00

I've been lucky enough to have the opportunity to head out on a few polar bear den surveys this winter. That's right, polar bear den surveys! Super-exciting. Just imagine how excited I'll be when a survey I'm on actually locates a den!

It's pretty neat technology, you're basically using a very fancy infrared camera to look for heat signatures in snow drifts that indicate a bear. I picture them all warm and snuggly, a white hot dot in the middle of a dark gray drift. So far I haven't seen any dens. No sign of bears at all, actually. Bummer for me, but good for the bears and anyone who would possibly have to re-consider their plans due to a bear den.

OK, so no bears, but what have I seen? tons! Check this IR photo out - so you know how snowmachine tracks setup after a day or so and make a nice, hard trail? Well, as I understand it, the heat from all the little snow bits mashing against each other when you drive over them generates heat from friction. This heat is enough to transform the snowpack, they all bond, and voila, nice hard trail. The infrared camera used for this type of survey is sensitive enough to pick up this heat. Here's a pic of snow that's been pushed around by a dozer making an airstrip out on the sea ice.

Just about everything is fun to look at through in infrared camera. Here's our tucker operator. Zip up your coat!

the big land staking adventure

2009-11-30T21:36:00.000-08:00

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

2009-08-24T19:35:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-15T09:56:00.003-07:00

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

2009-08-15T09:47:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-23T21:48:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-01T12:15:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-20T23:09:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-16T10:11:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-16T09:53:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-11T15:06:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-29T11:17:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-03-25T18:14:00.000-07:00

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.

Sue and Jon do science

2009-03-24T19:44:00.000-07:00

I've been collecting CO2 flux measurements at my thesis site each month throughout the winter. Since this is Jon's off-season for landscaping, he offered to take a break from his hectic climbing/skiing/netflix-watching schedule to be my winter assistant. Little did he know, once all of the brain-taxing study design is done and the field techniques are dialed, good science is synonymous with repetitive motion. Like in climbing, efficiency and good systems are key. I knew he'd be a natural...

So yesterday we drove out to the Kenai to see what was going on in the world of soil respiration. Believe it or not, there's still some going on! We have tubing running from the tip of this probe to an instrument that measures CO2. We can plunk this in each plot (the same places I've been measuring since May '08) and measure the CO2 at the bottom of the snow pack. Then we measure the CO2 at the top of the snow pack, how thick the snow is, and the snowpack density.

If you assume that the CO2 diffuses equally through the snowpack, you can calculate the rate of CO2 flux (umol CO2 m-2 s-1) coming from soil bacterial respiration. Neat, eh? There's no photosynthesis going on this time of year, so no plants are taking up CO2 but soil microbes are still giving off CO2. It's important to understand winter CO2 flux to really understand what's going on - some areas may be strong CO2 sinks in the summer, but lose so much over the winter that they're a CO2 source over the course of the year.

Thanks to Jon for all the field help... you measured the heck outta that flux.

Mexico Family Vacation

2009-03-18T09:35:00.000-07:00

Just back from a quick little family vacation in Mexico! Judy, Jon's mom, thought it would be nice if we all met up someplace warm this spring, and man was she right! We met up with Jon's parents (Judy and Pete) and his brother Nick in Zihuatanejo for a week (thank you AK Air mileage program for the tickets).

To sum up the trip: sunshine, ceviche, cerveza, surfing, and a cuban cigar...

procrastination and paleoclimate

2009-02-28T09:31:00.000-08:00

It's lightly snowing, a flock of redpolls are at the feeder, my amaryllis bloomed, and I'm procrastinating. Jon headed to Valdez for the weekend, to be followed up by Chickaloon adventures early next week. I couldn't go because I have way too much work to do, but somehow I find the time to sit around for two hours this morning drinking coffee and listening to NPR. I'll regret this later...

I may have work this summer helping FWS with a dendrochronology project (that's the fancy word for a tree-ring study). So I was thinking about this when NPR played a piece on California's current drought, which got me thinking about past North American climates (paleoclimates).

We have instrumental records for about the last 100 years, but people can use all sorts of data to piece together what even earlier climates were like. Tree rings are one of those things - rings are thinner during a drought, as the tree just doesn't have enough water to grow very much. In the eastern U.S., researchers have used baldcypress trees to reconstruct the climate going back to 1185. wow! one of the two the biggest droughts in this 800 year period was around 1587, when the Roanoke colonists disappeared.

Bristlecone pines in the Methuselah grove look even further back. One tree was nearly 5,000 years old when cut down in 1964! (how bad must that logger feel, taking out the world's oldest tree?) Records from these trees and other techniques show that western North America has had some pretty wicked droughts. Seriously bad, put the dustbowl and Roanoke colony droughts to shame bad. This study looked back nearly 8,000 years and found 8 multi-decadal droughts, the most recent were in 924 and 1299 AD.

There a neat paper I read for a course last year that talks about drought records and cultural responses (deMenocal 2001 Cultural Responses to Climate Change During the Late Holocene Science Magazine vol 292 www.sciencemag.org). Basically positing climate - these long term droughts - was a major factor in the disappearance of some historical cultures. For example, he points out that the 1299 "mega-drought" coincided with abandonment of Anasazi settlements.

Definitely makes me think about water resources in the west. Paleoclimate work shows that these large, long-term droughts do occur in North America,so we can reasonably expect one to occur again (though who knows when - in 10 years, 100 years, 1000 years...?). How would we, as a nation, have to adapt? It sure wouldn't be pretty...

NOAA has a really nice site talking about drought and paleoclimate (Drought - A Paleo Perspective). I definitely recommend poking around there, they do a great job of explaining things for the average joe.

OK, now back to work...

volcanoes schmalcanoes!

2009-02-25T09:21:00.000-08:00

For those of you who caught Obama's address to the nation last night and Gov. Bobby Jindal's rebuttal, did you catch this bit by Jindal?

While some of the projects in the [stimulus] bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes ... $140 million for something called 'volcano monitoring.' Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, DC.

It's like you could see him through the radio, making those little quotation marks with his fingers. This is from the governor of LA, a state that suffered horribly from a natural disaster in the recent past.

Volcano monitoring saves lives. We here in Anchorage are hearing near daily updates on Redoubt through the Alaska Volcano Observatory. Yes, most of Alaska's volcanoes are in the Aleutians, but it's still very important to understand what's happening there. You see, the AVO estimates ~30,000 people per day are in aircraft downwind from Aleutian volcanoes, and if a plane flies through an ash cloud its engines can fail. That happened in 1989 - a 747 flying through Redoubt's ash cloud experienced engine failure, dropping over 3,000 meters before the crew could get the engines started again. That's falling 1.8 miles through the sky - yikes!

Our nation also has military installations throughout the world. In the early 1990s, Pinatubo (in the Phillipines) blew. The USGS worked with Phillipinne volcanologists to monitor Pinatubo, and evacuations began before the eruption that are believed to have saved thousands of lives, including 18,000 US military personnel.

Here's a link to a volcanology grad student's response. She's pretty heated up, but I though it was a good response.

Or you can check out this popular mechanics article about Redoubt and airplanes.

Anyways, point is that volcano monitoring (like hurricane monitoring!) is money well spent and Bobby Jindal should do his homework before addressing the nation.

Hat for Cameryn

2009-02-21T11:50:00.000-08:00

I've just finished a hat for my new niece, Cameryn. I really have no idea how big a baby's head is - at first this seemed absurdly small, now that it's done I wonder if it's really too big? Anyways, i really like the yarn (a bamboo/silk by Vickie Howell) and the color.

Happy Birthday Ansel Adams!

2009-02-20T20:28:00.000-08:00

Happy birthday to a man who inspired conservation in the American west.

"In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration."

- Ansel Adams, 1902-1984

bali - uluwatu temple

2009-02-10T14:28:00.001-08:00

Uluwatu is a town on Bali with nice surf (though a bit too hard for me!) and a beautiful temple. I don't know how old it is, but these trees sure look like they've seen alot!

There were impressive sculptures throughout the temple, from detail work on the tops of buildings and along fences to these figures at an entrance.

I thought this was pretty neat. The things hanging inside the small building here are kind of like chimes. People used to bang them to signal goings-on at the temple.

and who doesn't love baby monkeys? There were monkeys everywhere! You're required to take off all jewelry, sunglasses, etc before going into the temple. At first we thought it was to show respect or a religious requirement, but now I'm sure it's so that you don't end up with a monkey on your head stealing your stuff! Even with the no jewelry rule, while we were there we saw monkeys steal a pretty ribbon from a little girl's dress and make off with several camera cases. You can buy little bags of banana pieces to feed the monkeys, and one guy had a monkey looking like he was willing to trade a stolen camera case for some bananas. they're smart. really, really smart. and fast.

Every night at 6, there's a Kecak dance at the Uluwatu temple. It's super cool - basically tells part of the Ramayana, where Rama's wife Sita is kidnaped and the monkey king Hanuman helps get her back. Instead of musical instruments, there a chorus of ~70 (?) men chanting and singing.

The performance ends with Hanuman captured by the bad guys after setting Sita free. The bad guys tie him up and intend to set him on fire, but at the last second Hanuman breaks free and starts kicking the fire everywhere! go Hanuman go!!

indonesia surf holiday

2009-02-10T14:06:00.000-08:00

after all of the leeches and whatnot in Borneo, I met up with Jon in

Bali for a little r&r at Padang Padang Surf Camp in Bali! It was great - beautiful rooms (love walking in to flowers on the bed), great food, and super fun and patient instructors! here are a few pics of the camp. This is the view from our veranda (we had the sweet second story room).

lots of open air spots to hang out. nice way to enjoy the breeze and avoid that brutal equatorial sun.

i don't have any actual surf pics, which may be for the best since I'm pretty beginner-ish and it isn't always pretty. Jon picked it up pretty quickly and was riding bigger waves and having a blast by the time I got there. He and Rick had been living it up for the previous week; they say they were surfing, but I suspect bintang and massages took up most of their time!

here are a few shots of Padang Padang beach on a quiet night. it's within walking distace of the camp and has a neat stairwell etched out of the rock leading down to the beach.

Kinabalu Plants

2009-01-31T02:24:00.000-08:00

Mount Kinabalu goes through 5 different vegetation zones, one of which is intermixed mossy forest with ultramafic soils. Ultramafic soils are high in metals that are toxic to most plants, so unique plants grow in these soils - like pitcher plants!

This is a Rajah's pitcher plant. They're the biggest species of pitcher plant, and they're beautiful! Rajah's pitcher plants are endangered and are found only on Mount Kinabalu. This one is ~10 inches long. Pitcher plants are carnivorous, mainly digesting insects that fall in the "pitcher," but they're not picky and can even digest frogs and mice. The large pitchers like this are quite old, possibly ~80 years.

We also saw lots of orchids (there are over 800 types on Kinabalu). Many of them are epiphytes, meaning that they're not rooted in the ground but instead grow in moss along branches or trunks of trees, or in the crook where a limb meets the trunk. I must have walked past hundreds of plants that weren't in bloom before they were pointed out to me. A lot of them are surprisingly small! I don't remember what this one was called but I liked the pic...

Mount Kinabalu

2009-01-31T01:56:00.001-08:00

So I'm a bit behind on the posting, but we just got back from Kinabalu. It was great! It's the fourth highest peak in SE Asia, and you don't need anything more than some determination to get to the top of Low's Peak (the main one). There's tons of granite there, so if you'd like something more challenging I don't thing think that would be a problem.

Mt Kinabalu hosts an impressive botanical display, there are between 5,000 and 6,000 species on the mountain! There are over 800 orchid species, over 600 fern species, and is famous for its pitcher plants.

Our first day we hiked up to a rest house at around 3,200 meters. The trail was super, about 8km long and through tons of interesting stuff. Here are a few pics from along the way. Once you got out of the montane forest, there was some really neat vegetation. The bright green trees are podocarps (southern hemisphere conifers).

They're pretty neat, they have that stunted, almost bonsai look.

A little further along and you get into the mossy forest, where trees have thick moss layers and lots of vines.

After about 6hrs of hiking, birdwatching, snacking, and general enjoyment, Kim and I reached the rest house at ~3,200m.

And there was a nice view of where we were headed the next day! ok, so I can't actually find the pic of Kinabalu, but here are a few adjacent peaks.

The next day, we left pretty early to see sunrise from the top of Kinabalu. It was great - lots of granite slab to walk up and a super-good time. There were a ton of people... but I'm not sure there's any way to avoid that? You're only allowed to head up w. guides, and you can only summit pretty early in the morning (you have to pass a checkpoint by 4:30am). We got there early enough to shiver for an hour or so and watch stars before the sun came up. I got to see the southern cross! Here's a shot of some of us at the top: Kim, Ed, myself, Stephanie, Nathan, and Peggy in the front.

A neat place, Kinabalu was recently designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. If you get the chance to go, I definitely recommend it!

tree climbing and bird watching

2009-01-20T21:30:00.000-08:00

We have to do a project for the tropical ecology field course I'm taking. I've always wanted to learn about birds but have never really motivated to do it, so I though I could use this opportunity to work on my birding skills. Brian is really pretty good with birds and was game to work on this with me, so I even have a tutor!

We've been birdwatching from different locations in primary and secondary forests and will see if there's a difference in the number or type of species in these two habitats. A great way to bird around here at the Danum Valley Field Center is to use observation platforms to get up above the canopy. It's amazingly hard to see things from the ground here...

Here's a look at a platform in primary forest. This one is about 30m up, and you climb ladders attached to the tree to get to it.

The view once you're up is amazing. Yesterday, we were up to the top by 6am to catch the sunrise. I think if you were good at identifying birds by call, this would be a fantastic time to be up in the platform. There's little overlap between AK and Borneo, so Brian didn't know many of the calls, and I was way out of my league trying to id by sound.

The next platform we hit was in secondary forest. Climbing was a trip! There was the same system of ladders attached to the tree, but the tree has grown so much the rungs are pretty useless in most places! Roman fixed some ropes for us in case we slipped, so it's a-ok to give it a go. Here's a look, I'm standing on the rungs of the ladder cage:

and here's Brian working his way up

We didn't see many birds, which was a bit surprising as this was a nice riparian corridor in primary forest. Maybe we just hit a bad day? Anyways, we did see a really cool snail and this lizard. he's an agamid, they're the big diurnal lizard group in old world tropics.

So now on to the next tree... Roman, our professor, rigged this big Koompassia excelsa for us. These are the beautiful tall Dipterocarp trees with very smooth, almost white bark and no lower limbs. The smooth bark and no lower limbs help keep them from getting covered in vines. They're a climax species here, and pretty typical for southeast Asian rainforests.

Once Roman had the ropes up, Brian and I could jug our way up to see birds. Pretty sweet. Here's a view up the ropes to the canopy. We saw some black-headed bulbuls, a black eagle, a serpent eagle, some sort of spidercatcher, a lot of little brown birds, and... an asian fairy bluebird! (here's a link w. a pic, but it doesn't do justice)

Here's Brian. He had the shady side of the tree, but that's ok by me as it meant battling some brush with possible snakes/bees/nasties... fortunately there were only a few ants.

and here's me on the sunny side of the tree. It's finally not raining!

Carbon Offsets and Canopy Walk

2009-01-16T04:50:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we went to see the FACE project, Forestry Offsetting CO2 Emissions. It's a collaborative project between Sabah, Malaysia and European nations that aims to restore logged rainforest. The restored forests will sequester CO2, storing it in the woody tissue, and will not be logged for 99 years. After 99 years, selective logging will be allowed if reduced impact logging techniques are used.

The nursery for the FACE project can house 1 million seedlings. The rangers working with the project are quite impressive, being able to differentiate many different species of seedlings by leaves/vegetation only!

Later that day, we went for a canopy walk! There's a pretty ritzy eco-tourism lodge near the field station (we're at the Danum Valley Conservation Area Field Station), I think it's called the Borneo Rainforest Lodge? Anyways, pretty fancy, it's about US$350/night and has outdoor bathtubs so you can take a bubble bath and listen to the gibbons. Needless to say we were only visiting to go on their canopy walkway. No rickety ladders on this one, sweet solid steps to the platform and nice suspension spans!

As fancy as the ritzy lodge is, they have 3-horned rhinoceros beetles just like our hostel at the field center! OK, the beetles at the field center were bigger... they're pretty neat, can you believe these things can actually fly? I heard if you put two together, they'll wrestle each other...

Oh, and here's my new favorite food. Rambutans are the greatest!

Ginabatong Caves

2009-01-16T04:04:00.000-08:00

Catching up... a few days ago we went to the Ginabatong Caves in Sabah, Malaysia. Black-nest and white-nest swiftlets roost here, and the nests are collected for use in bird's nest soup. This is big business for Malaysia, bringing in an estimated 3 million Malaysian ringits per year. There is also a substantial cultural significance - historically, trading nests with the Chinese confered high status on Malays.

The nests are so valuable that workers stay in/near the caves year round. there were nicer bunkhouses outside the cave, but this one really impressed me.

The productivity within the cave was amazing! I've never seen (nor imagined!) so many cockroaches, centipedes, millipedes, or bats in one place! All of the little orange things here are cockroaches.

I don't have any good bird or bat pics, the lighting was pretty bad (surprise, surprise) and my little point and shoot couldn't quite make it happen. But here's an agamid we found hanging around outside the cave.

gibbons

2009-01-14T05:45:00.000-08:00

If you don't know what a gibbon sounds like, listen to this.

We've heard bornean gibbons every morning for the past week, around 6:30 in the morning. This morning, we actually saw one! they're quite shy, and we were lucky to get the show we did. I don't have any photos, I was much too busy enjoying the view. It was raining all day, and she was hunkered down in a tree near the veranda of the building we're staying in. After 15 minutes or so, she started moving through the canopy, in full view!

back on those internet tubes...

2009-01-14T05:02:00.000-08:00

we were supposed to have internet in Danum, but alas, lightning struck and took it all out. But it's back!! Travel has been good, though it's quite rainy here. There have been more leeches and biting things than you can count, not much of a tan, but still having a blast.

Here are a few pics of the past week.

Stephanie and Nathan checking out birds near the Sepilok B&B

The trees here are amazing... there are so many species they're discussed as families, perhaps as a genus, but rarely as a species. For non-scientific types, that's like discussing people by their last name only, because there are so many you can't possibly know all of their first names. Here's a beautiful tree of the Dipterocarp family. This is the dominant tree family in southeast Asian rainforests. They grow up above the top of the canopy and have this beautiful, almost cauliflower-like form.

the Segama River, near the Danum Valley Conservation Center

so it turns out that Roman is a master lizard catcher, this one is an agamid.

Borneo!

2009-01-07T04:24:00.000-08:00

Well, after numerous hours in the airport, I'm finally in Borneo! woohoo! I'm having a few difficulties getting photos posted, but no worries, it'll be worth the effort.

We went to an orangutan rehabilitation center today and got to see orangutans, macaques, and tons of really neat tropical birds. Not to mention the trees here are amazing!

and other happenings in 2008

2009-01-02T18:33:00.000-08:00

school has been keeping me pretty busy... my thesis project has been pretty neat, I've learned TONS!!! and have had the chance to work with some pretty smart, and pretty great, people.

Here are a few pics of where I spent most of my summer. I'm heading out tomorrow to get in another round of CO2 flux measurements. It's supposed to be cold (well, well below zero) but that should be ok, not more than a few hours worth of work.

low winter sun!!

Heath and I were flux measuring fools. He's back in South Dakota now, finishing up his B.S.

and here's a pic of Paddy, looking all studious. He's a post-doc who has been pretty instrumental in turning this from an idea into a killer project.

there was also a bit of fishing in '08.

Jon caught a nice halibut

and Thomas' fish was almost as big as he was!

all in all, a pretty good year.

southeast ak

2009-01-02T17:36:00.000-08:00

I went to Prince of Wales Island this summer for a work trip - southeast AK is beautiful! Even when it's raining...

Here's Bobby, John, and I nearly missing our flight because we misunderstood the Ketchikan ferry schedule. That bridge to nowhere was suddenly sounding like a very good idea.

Fortunately, we were most of the flight and our plane waited. I got to ride in a float plane for the first time ever!

The remaining old growth forests on Prince of Wales were pretty amazing. I wish I had photos to do it justice, but these will have to do...

a very good place to start

2009-01-02T17:30:00.000-08:00

The luddite in me can hold out only so long - I'm really going to give it a shot with the blog! I'm taking off on a trip soon and this seemed like a nice way to get out a few photos and in general keep everyone up to date. So hassle me when i'm a slacker about updating, and, yeah, here's to hoping I don't inadvertently delete all my pics!