Warm and Colorful

 

It's been a warm Fall. Last week we had a very light frost, but that's been about it as far as cold goes. Mostly it has been in the 50's. This is warmer than it was all spring until June. And yet everything has still died and turned red, brown and yellow. The Fall colors actually seem a bit better than usual.

Yesterday I planted 71 bulbs of garlic and covered them with leaves and grass clippings. I stopped harvesting my potatoes because the rats are no longer eating them, and I noticed that they are still producing. I figure I will get the rest of the potatoes after the first true 'hard frost'.

Patrick

Snuffling for blueberries

They love to snuffle for blueberries

Fall Color

 

I took the dogs up to our favorite pond and noticed that the fall colors have really popped. It certainly is no longer green. 

We started up the trail in the sunshine, and then a squall rolled in over the pass. It started to rain really hard and I took shelter under a spruce tree. Then just as quickly it ended and the sun came out again. There was even a rainbow (see 5th picture). The rain and foreboding clouds somehow made the red leaves seem a little brighter. Like they had been washed clean by the rain.

My camera has a fixed 43 mm lens. So when I wanted a less focused view I took a few pictures and stitched them together into a panoramic. I think I tend to like the more focused view better, but some of the panoramic photos work too.

Patrick

The Refugium Landscape

 

This is my final trip to the Refugium post, and it focuses on the landscape. As I said in the first post about the trip, Kodiak's Refugium is characterized by weathered and rounded mountains and vast muskegs that were once lake bottoms. In some protected places there are black birch trees but there are no other tall trees.  It is a quite distinctive and a very different landscape than seen anywhere else in the archipelago.

One of the highlights of the trip was an eight mile ridge top hike. We climbed up one ridge and then followed it all the way around a long valley. The walk back to camp was on a parallel ridge to the one we went in on.  It was a gigantic loop, and one of the best ridgewalks I've ever done on the archipelago. All of the alpine scenics pictured here are from that hike.

Patrick

Riding the river

 

My favorite time on my recent trip to the Refugium was time on the river. I loved paddling my raft down the river. There is the paddling aspect - it's fun to hone your paddling technique to take the corners smoothly. And then there is the floating lounge chair aspect - nothing quite like sitting back on a floating chair through some drop-dead spectacular scenery.

Three of our days on the trip were devoted almost entirely to riding the river. We'd float down the river and set up camp at the end of the day. One day we almost decided to paddle in the rain. We figured it would give us an extra day hunting. But I am glad we did not decide to paddle in the rain because it would have been a wasted 'float' day. 

Patrick