149

 

This was the view from Pyramid last November 26th the first day of the streak

This afternoon I am flying off to the south end of Kodiak for an extended archaeological survey.  For the next couple of weeks I'll be kayaking and hiking in search of archaeological sites to document.  There will be no skiing.  And so my streak of 149 straight days of skiing will come to an end after today's (fingers crossed) ski.

At first I did not really intend to start a streak and ski every single day, but after a week or so of skiing it just sort of got going.  One day after about 12 straight days I was not going to go skiing, but Nora and Stuey encouraged me to go. 'You can't break the streak', they declared.  And so I kept it up until today (or tomorrow if we get stuck in Kodiak due to weather). Rain, shine or wind, I skied every single day.

Ironically I think I could make 200 straight days if I did not have to go on survey.  There is plenty of snow and should be good skiing on Pyramid until late June.  And funnily enough when I last maintained a ski streak in 2018 I also skied 149 days straight.  That year I ended the streak to take the kids to Afognak for Memorial Day weekend (click here for post).  Maybe since Alaska is the 49th state ski streaks are supposed to end at 149 rather than the neater and more concise 150?.

Later today if time allows, and I actually do manage to ski for 149 rather than 148 straight days, I will try and add a photo from today's final ski.

So this year's ski streak November 26th, 2020 to April 23rd, 2021!

Patrick

This is from the 26th - a lot more snow now!

Nora and Stuey last November 21rst the first ski of the season

November 21 - the bushes are all showing!

Eagles

 

Yesterday morning I took these pictures of eagles hanging out at the church - perched on the Russian Orthodox crosses above the onion domes.  Kind of a grey day, but it makes the onion domes look more blue.  The eagles are there on the crosses every morning when I arrive at work, and then every afternoon when I leave work they are gone.  Then come summer all the eagles, for the most part, leave town.

In the afternoon Nora and I went for a ski.  Pyramid has lost a lot of snow which is a little distressing.  But the skiing was good.  Deep corn snow.  Today it is supposed to rain hard so I am glad we went yesterday.

Patrick

Night's without Freeze

 

Spring arrives, it happens every year.  Last night in town we had a low of 44 degrees, and it does not look like it will freeze at night in the foreseeable future.  On Pyramid this is when the snow gets really soft, but usually only for a few days when right at first it does not freeze at night.  After a couple of days the snow settles down and sort of solidifies. On Pyramid we should still have another couple months of spring corn skiing, but we reached our peak snow pack last week.  From now on there will be less and less snow on the mountain.

Yesterday when Nora and I went skiing it suddenly got windy and these very weird clouds blew in.  It was kind of creepy and ominous.  The clouds were like veils and sort of flapping and moving as we watched.  The reminded me of the clouds from that old movie 'Poltergeist' when things hit the fan.  Nora and I were actually a bit worried that maybe they presaged a tornado or something.  But then as quickly as they arrived they went away and it turned into a hot sunny day again.  It was in the low 50's. It's spring.

Patrick

Miscellaneous Pictures

 

Near Island dog walk

Here are some random pictures from the last couple of weeks that never made the blog.  Pictures I deemed worthy of the family photo album!

Patrick

Buskin beach and town

Slush covered spruce trees during a recent ski

I took this picture to show Nora that it was snowing and not raining on the mountain (like it was in town)

Afognak elk

crow in tree just outside work

An Andy Warhol inspired photo of my lunch at work

More Helicopter

Friday afternoon I spent another glorious day 'doing' archaeology in a helicopter. However, unlike the past few helicopter surveys this was not a petroglyph survey.  

On this trip I was returning to places I had already surveyed and showing the landowner the locations of sites on their land.  So instead of a new notebook with blank pages I brought along my old survey notebook from 2009.  The notebook had all the village maps I drew when I first surveyed the area.  Instead of looking for old house pits and then drawing them onto a sketch map in a new notebook - I was matching the housepits with the ones I drew on my 2009 sketch maps.  I was very happy with the accuracy of all my old maps.

I also checked on the condition of the archaeological sites, and found that some of them are eroding severely.  By carefully inspecting my old notes I was able to determine that around 3 to 4 meters of one particular site has fallen into the river since 2009.  On my 2009 map I drew a house depression with a hearth in the middle.  Today only the back edge of the house depression remains.  Wow!

Then on the way home we crossed over a bay I surveyed last year by kayak.  There are some islands out in the middle that were too difficult to reach by kayak with steep sides that would have been impossible to climb.  But I had suspected they may have house depressions on top, and so on Friday I had the helicopter swing by them for a quick aerial view - and they did have house depressions on top! 

Patrick

In 2009 the bank extended a full 3 meters out to the right

Black birch - a pretty substantial tree for a part of the island people often consider 'treeless'

The sea stack on right has an old house depression on top - the inhabitants would have had to use ropes to climb up and down the cliffs

Wet Powder

 

Yesterday it had snowed overnight even in town, and in the afternoon it cleared off.  We got up to the pass just as the sun was starting to break through the clouds.  And we were happy to find almost a foot of new snow on the mountain!

There was even powder snow on the highest slopes. Nora had given up on skiing powder for the year, and she was ecstatic with the new snow.  But the sun is strong these days and it was so warm that down low the powder had turned to soup.  

Hopefully in the next few days we get some more snow!

Patrick

More helicopter archaeology

 

You could see these petroglyphs from the helicopter - look closely in the dead center

On Tuesday I went on another petroglyph documentation survey by helicopter.  On this trip we went to places I already knew quite well.  But we did draw 2 sets of petroglyphs that we had not been formally documented prior to our visit.

Both sets consisted of small holes pecked into the local bedrock.  Sometimes these ones are really hard to judge - especially if they have been weathered and partially eroded away.  Are they pecked or natural?  But sometimes they are really obvious too - and on this trip we got to see some pecked holes and ground slash lines that have barely been weathered and are clearly man made.

The face pictured at the bottom of this post I first saw in 1995 - 26 years ago!  What's cool is that in the intervening 26 years that particular petroglyph has moved up in the intertidal zone.  Ever since the land on south Afognak sank around 5 feet in the Great Alaskan Earthquake of 1964 it has been rebounding back out of the water.  Prior to 1964 the face was barely below the waves at high tide.  When I examined it in 1995 it was covered with blue mussels at the bottom of the low tide zone (we only knew where it was because Don Clark who first found it in 1964 knew exactly where to look and scrape the mussels away).  Today there are far fewer mussels and the face is getting back to where it was prior to the earthquake.

We hope that by carefully documenting them we will start to better understand their meaning and better recognize them too.  Patrick

A porcelain pig eroding out of a nearby late 19th century site - we did not collect it

Molly documenting some pit petroglyphs on an outcrop

Some pit and star petroglyphs that are very clear

More pit petroglyphs in front of a late prehistoric village - Molly was a little skeptical of these ones

Because of the 'barnacle debris' this one is hard to see but there is a face with a chin tattoo in there!

Back to downhill

 

Yesterday it was sunny and NOT at the same time windy and cold.  With the recent cold and wind I've been cross country skiing down in the shelter of the trees, and it felt like forever since we've gone up the mountain.  Nora and I thought about it and figured out that it had been just on a week since we last went downhill skiing.

We ran into uncle Dicky on the mountain, and met up with some other members of the COVID ski club. A year ago we were skiing every day with other members of what we came to call the 'COVID ski club', and it was good to be back in the routine.

And the skiing was perfect - spring corn.  

Patrick