Yellow Iron

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!

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

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

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!