More Alpine hunting trip

 

Some final pictures of the recent alpine goat and deer hunt with Jonathan and Ray.  Our base camp was on a lake just below the alpine and every day we had a 20 minute hike to get up to the true alpine.  But we liked having our 'low' camp low.  For one thing, down low there was a lot of excellent firewood for the wood stove.  And for another, on the last day when it was blowing 50 mph we were really happy not to be up on some exposed ridge.  We'd probably still be waiting for pick up!

One thing to ponder is that this may well be the first time in over 10,000 years that there is no snow on the mountain where we were hunting.  I've never known it to not have snow and wandering around on the mountain you could see all the white and yellow granite that was just getting exposed to sunlight for the first time in ages.  Granite that gets exposed year after year turns grey and black as the lichen grows on it.  In areas where the snow had melted off for the first time ever the rocks down below looked yellow.

Patrick

If we brought meat back to camp we allowed each of us to have a beer - I think it will be a new tradition

This is the serious high alpine - the peak in the distance is 3600 feet high

Some Dig Discoveries

 

Ground lance tip from a sea mammal hunting spear

Here are some photos of the things we found on the Chiniak dig.  Everything is hunting or fishing related.  We did not find any 'household' type artifacts (except maybe the amber bead).  It looks like a place where Alutiiq people went to fish and hunt sea mammals.  The site is where they went to shore and processed the catch.  Once processed they probably took the meat to a nearby village.  

Patrick

Porpoise bones and sea urchin shell bits

Porpoise or sea mammal dart

Fish hook barb

A cod 'otolith' or 'ear' 'stone'

An amber bead

Goat and deer

 

Sunday while on a deer and goat hunt Jonathon, Ray and I survived a tent in a storm and then managed to fly back to Kodiak at the tail end of the same storm.  It was a doozy of a storm and while we were asleep the wind almost dropped the tent on top of us.  But we re set the guys and rocked the pegs down.  After that the tent was stable enough that we could light the wood stove.  With a wood stove going anything is bearable!  We stayed warm and dried out while listening to the rain seethe on the tent fabric.

Then all day yesterday we cut up and packaged the fruits of our hunt - 2 deer and a goat.  We did well to harvest what we did because our hunt was only 4 days long and the weather was bad for most of it. We arrived and set up our base camp in the rain, and we took it all down in the rain when we left. We really only had 2 half days of clear weather with no fog.  But we certainly made good use of the weather windows.

On the first day we climbed up into the high alpine and saw a couple goats just before the fog settled in.  We had to find the goats in the fog and managed to harvest one of them.  Then we gathered dried wood for our tiny stove and camped by an alpine lake - all crammed into a tiny teepee.   In the morning, in thick fog we climbed back down the mountain to our main camp.  After we go back it started to rain again.

On the third day it cleared up in the afternoon and we climbed up into the alpine and harvested 2 deer.  When the sun came out the fall colors were spectacular.  Mostly yellow willow and red alpine birch.  And white and grey barren granite cliffs everywhere on the horizon.

Quite the adventure and now we have meat in the freezer for winter!

Patrick

Our home away from home - this was the 'spike camp' teepee we carried up into goat country

Our spike camp teepee is MUCH smaller than the one we had set up at base camp

And very very cozy with all three of us inside and a blazing wood stove

Hiking back to camp at sunset Saturday with loaded packs - it certainly did not seem like a storm was imminent

Summer Digs

 

group dig photo

I see I never published a number of my archaeology posts from this last summer.  It certainly was a busy season.  I was a part of 2 excavations both on the road system.  One was in June out at the head of Women's Bay while the other was out Chiniak way in July.  I did do a couple of posts about the digs (click here and here for posts) but I barely wrote anything about the Chiniak dig and have more to add on the Women's Bay excavation.  So the next few posts will be devoted to archaeology.  This one will focus on what we found out at Chiniak.

The Chiniak dig was an impromptu excavation.  Road construction crews uncovered archaeological deposits and we were called in to learn what we could before it was destroyed by road construction.  A great opportunity to learn something!  The site had 2 components - a late prehistoric (circa 500 year old) hunting and fishing 'processing' camp, and a far older (maybe 4500 BP?) 'special purpose' site.  We found very little at the latter and we are wondering if perhaps they were processing plants or quarrying sods for a nearby village.  It certainly was fun to dig in bright 'High Vis' clothing!

The deposits were deeply buried under sand blown up from the beach.  Digging down we'd find deep layers of practically pure sand interspersed with thin layers of rotted organics that created a dark soil.  We realized that the dark layers represented periods of time when the sand stopped blowing and vegetation grew on top of the site.  People seemed to have occupied the site near the end of the stable periods.

Right now the locality is stable with a thick mantle of vegetation and no blowing sand.  But we realized that prior to the 1964 earthquake there was a big sandy beach in front of the locality.  In 1964 the land sank and the beach eroded away - no more sand.  It looks like this has happened on a regular basis through time.  Every 500 years or so there is an earthquake, the coastline erodes, and for maybe for a 100 years no blowing sand and there is sod development.  Then with uplift the beach gets re created and more blowing sand.  

Pretty cool story - more on the artifacts and fauna in post to come. 

Patrick

Smoke processing pit associated with the late prehistoric component at the site

Molly on the notes!

Molly drawing a profile - the sites were deeply buried in blown sand

I camped out there during the first week of the dig

Final group picture after backfilling on last day - Molly, Libby, Danielle, me and Alex

Picking Berries with Nora

 

Yesterday Nora and I climbed into the alpine to pick berries.  We climbed up a mountain where we thought nobody else would go to pick berries and promptly ran into another group carrying berry buckets and on the same mission - competition!  But there is a lot of space on a mountain and they went to one bowl while we went to another.  

Our goal was to pick lingonberries and initially we found a few berries, and then we looked and looked and no more lingonberries.  I literally scoured the whole bowl and wasted about 1 1/2 hours looking for the bright red berries and nothing.  We had actually given up and were picking blueberries when Nora called from a high ridge, 'I found some!'  We picked those and then on the way back we found the mother load - about 50 feet from the trail and very close to where we had started out.  

In about 15 minutes I picked 2 quarts of the bright red lingonberries - we ended up with more lingonberries than blueberries.  This despite spending far more time picking blueberries.  

Now to make some lingonberry jam. Patrick

Kids and School

 

The kids have been at school now for almost 2 weeks and the photos at the bottom of this post are from their first day of school.  Nora is now a freshman in High School and takes the bus to and from school everyday.  And she often takes 5 dollars to school with her to buy lunch.  She reports that lunch is Subway sandwiches.  She enjoys school but only tells me snippets about what she does.  I overheard her telling Stuey how she has to have her temperature taken on arrival at the school.  Also she plays pencil and paper games like hangman with another former St Mary's student during her free time.  All is well with Nora.

Stuey is in a pod with 3 other boys from St Mary's.  Their teacher is a former Kodiak High School teacher.  Back in the day I can remember giving a PowerPoint presentation on Alutiiq Prehistory to her class.  She is famous for keeping the boys in order.  A week or so ago when I was working out at Chiniak the backhoe operator fondly remembered her class.  Every day Stuey has it easy because the pod takes place in the downstairs apartment next door, and during their recess breaks, when I'm working at home, I can hear them running around outside.  

So odd that think that just a year ago both Nora and Stuey were safely ensconced at St Mary's.  This year there is a totally different routine!  Patrick