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

Rats in the potato patch

This past August I returned from Karluk Lake to a rat problem. In early August when I left for Karluk Lake my potatoes were doing great, and I had even already harvested a few 'new' potatoes. So when I got back I was looking forward to some more 'new' potato meals. I was devastated to find my potato patch was a warren of rat tunnels, and the few plants I did dig up had no more potatoes under them. Chewed bits of potatoes abounded all around.

Worse yet, there were also rats in the house. I surprised one in the bathroom and it escaped down the hole for the heat pipe. It was time for a rat extermination jihad. I know from past experience that you got to get them all at once. If you set out traps and don't get them all at once you risk educating them about traps. They learn to avoid the traps. So I decided to wait until I got back from my most recent hunting trip, and then go on a full fledged rat extermination jihad. 

So last weekend when I got back from the south end I bought a mess of rat traps and started to dig up the remaining potatoes. By harvesting the potatoes I hoped to eliminate their food supply. Imagine my surprise to find that the rats were largely gone. I only caught 2 HUGE rats (both over a foot long), and there was very little recent evidence of rats in the potato patch.

It got me thinking about Stuey reporting on a 'sick rat' by the potato patch that he saw while mowing the lawn back in August. While harvesting I also noticed that the rats had been chewing the tops of the potatoes not covered by dirt that had turned green. I've known for years that green potatoes are poisonous. Sunlight turns the potatoes green and creates the poison solanine. Once, back in the day, I thought not eating green potatoes was an old wives tale, and I got very sick. I had home fries made from partially green potatoes for breakfast and then went on a hike. I got horribly ill, threw up and felt very weak and disoriented - I had a hard time making it home! Could it be that the 'sick' rat Stuey saw had been eating the green potatoes and was stricken with solanine poisoning?

So I googled 'rats and green potatoes' and found a very interesting article (click here for article). It seems green potatoes really are hell on rats. In particular on pregnant females whose litters fail after a diet of green potatoes. So maybe that's why I did not catch any small rats in my traps. Usually when trapping rats you catch mostly the small inexperienced ones. I only caught two HUGE rats - the ones that are usually the hardest to catch. This indicates to me that there are not very many, if any, small rats around my house.

Anyway, I also discovered that I still had plenty of potatoes and that some of the red potatoes had even produced new potatoes to replace the ones eaten earlier in the summer. I figure the rats got about a third of my potato crop, but hey I'm willing to pay that price if it also partially exterminated them. It's also worth mentioning that I am very much against using rat poison because of the potential for harming dogs and rats dying in the walls. But I don't see how green potatoes could harm my dogs? Maybe next year I'll mound my potatoes as usual (to keep them buried so they don't turn green) but put a few on purpose on the surface to turn green for the rats to find.

Patrick

Potato turning green in the sunlight

some rat chewed potatoes

Hiking for meat

 

This year on the south end we only harvested one small deer. This was a bit of a disappointment. Usually this part of the island is crawling with deer. Just last year we saw herds of 20 or more deer where this year there were none. Partially the weather was to blame for our lack of success. We only had two clear days to hunt where there was no fog. And you can't hunt deer if you can't see them. But even when we did go hunting we saw very few deer - just the occasional doe.

To find deer we ended up hiking entirely out of the river valley we were on and over to another drainage. There we found plenty of deer, but it was a LONG way away. We harvested the one deer and then had to climb 1000 feet and carry it for miles back to camp. That said, it was a glorious hike!

At the end of the trip I was actually a little embarrassed about the lack of deer harvested. But then we talked to a local fishing guide who told us that there had been an extreme localized deer die off last spring. He told us that back in April and May the deer were dying in droves along the banks of the river. He figures that 90% of the local deer died off. He had not been seeing any big bucks either. 

This year I did notice that there is a lot of poisonous water hemlock along the banks of the river. I wonder if the late spring forced them to eat the water hemlock?

In any case, there was an upside to the lack of deer - we got to go on longer hikes. In the past, we never got very far from camp before we harvested a deer and had to go back to camp. This year we go to explore a ridge that extended far from camp. I got to see far more of the landscape than usual (landscape blog post to come).

Patrick