Blue Sky and Bright Snow

 

Tuesday afternoon I took the dogs skiing - no surprise there - but unlike usual I also brought along my telephoto zoom lens.  I was hoping to get some bird pictures.  I did not see a single bird.  I heard an American Pipit and tried to get a picture, but that was it. 

Still the long lens was not a total loss.  Its made for some unusual landscape photos, and brought all the distant mountains up close.  It was a clear and bright day - so clear that I could zoom in on the Alaska Peninsula over 70 miles away and it still looked sharp. To create landscapes I had to stitch together the zoomed in photos to make panoramics. 

The skiing was pretty good too.  Very fast and there was blue skies above.  I was surprised that I was the only one up there. Pretty much the best skiing of the year!

Patrick

A panoramic created from zoomed in stills

Nora Graduated!

 

Yesterday Nora graduated from Kodiak High School - WOW!

As I sat in the audience and watched all the kids get their diplomas I recognized a lot of the faces and names.  I remembered some of them from pre school day care days while others I've watched grow up with Nora. It's hard to believe that they are all moving on to the next phase of their lives.

It was a joy to watch their faces light up when they turned to face the audience after receiving their diplomas. There is so much out there ahead of them.  But I think they also all know that there is also a lot here behind them.

Patrick

... and on the beach

 

The beach in the spring is a good place to be.  In the late summer I rarely go to the beach because of all the dead salmon carcasses.  The dogs end up smelling like a rotten fish. But in the spring the beaches are largely clean.  The birds all wheel about and the dogs race up and down the beach chasing each other.

Patrick

Late May in the Mountains

 

Some pictures from the last few days in the mountains.  The snow is going quickly and even at the pass the grass is starting to get green.  On the drive to the mountain yesterday I even noticed that the cottonwood trees are about to leaf out.  Once the cottonwood trees get their leaves it is but a short while to  'peak green'. 

Nonetheless, there is still a lot of snow high up in the mountains, and it is still worth the climb up with the dogs for the ski down.  Our run back to the car is still almost 1000 vertical feet.

Patrick

My first salmonberry blossom 2024

 

Salmonberry

I saw my first salmonberry blossom last Friday (5/24) but did not get around to taking a picture of one until today.  I also suspect that they have been blooming for a few days before I noticed my first blossom.  I had forgotten to look for blossoms and the one I saw caught me by surprise. Last year I saw my first blossom on May 17th - so we are about a week later than last year. Looking back at 'my first blossom' blog posts (click here for link) I think we typically get our first salmonberry blossom in mid May.  So spring is a little bit later than usual this year - which is a good thing because I have also been late planting my garden.  However, I also saw that in 2016 we had the first blossom in late March and in 2018 it was mid April.  

As regards my garden I planted all my seeds a few days ago and am just now planting my potatoes.  But my garden is already producing nettles and every single one of the garlic cloves I planted last fall has sprouted. This year my garden will be super simple with just lettuce, beets, carrots, kale, garlic, potatoes and radishes. I also planted nasturtiums in some of my planters.  Fingers crossed that everything sprouts!

Patrick

My nettles

Cottonwood tree bud

My garlic is doing GREAT

Final Shuyak Post

This is my final Shuyak Post.  Well until next year anyway - we will finish surveying the rest of the coastline in 2025 (east and south side of the island).  

These are the photos that initially did not make my cut as best photos for the trip, but that grew on me with time.  So here are the random strays. I also made a video of the trip (click here for link to video - https://youtu.be/EF5mf6ylkCk).

Anyway, that is it for archaeological surveys in 2024.  Later in the summer I will be at Karluk Lake again for an excavation.  But for now there is no more planned archaeological fieldwork in the near future.  So it is time to get back to the doggies, skiing, walks, and any garden.  I've actually been doing a lot of work in my garden lately.

Patrick

I saw a lot of children bike helmets on the beaches - it looks like a container of them fell off of a cargo ship

Molly checks a possible house depression with the soil probe - this one is not a house

I found one site by noticing artifacts and fire-cracked rock on the beach

The video below shows some quiet moments while on survey.  I did not put these clips into the longer video linked above.

Life On Survey

 

The Big Bay side of Skiff Passage portage

While on Shuyak Molly and I did a lot of kayaking and hiking. Shuyak Island has a very convoluted coastline and we had to survey all of it.  The hardest part was coming up with a plan where we did as little backtracking as possible.  We had to be efficient to cover all the coastline in the time allotted to us.  

Our basic method was to spend 2 days at each camp or cabin. On the first day at each camp Molly and I would split up and hike the coastline in different directions.  This is the way we surveyed the outer coasts that would have been scary to survey by kayak. And at the end of the day we would meet back in camp.  During the day while separated we would keep in communication by radio, and, if we got too far apart for the radio, by Inreach device. 

Then on the second day we would pack up our gear into the kayaks and leave for another camp.  On that day we would survey from our kayaks.  And, again, we would often separate. For instance, to cover both sides of an inlet or go around either side of an island.  We would also leap frog each other as one person checked a likely spot on foot the other would go ahead and get out at another likely spot.

We also had a number of portages across narrow necks of land.  Most of them were quite short, but at one we hit the portage at low tide and had to deflate the kayaks and make a couple of trips to get all the gear over to the other side. 

Patrick

This is not the actual cabin that we stayed at but another that I visited while surveying. Still they all look basically the same inside