Mobile, Mississippi, and New Orleans

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!

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!

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

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!