End of May

 

It's nearing the end of May.  Last week I finally got the garden completely planted - I did the beach peat and potatoes on Friday just before the rain.  Stuey has already mowed the lawn.  The rhubarb is fully grown.  The cottonwoods are almost leafed out.  It is the last week of school for the kids.  And the skiing is still very good.  In a week or so the summer explosion is about to take place.  It will not be until Fall when things finally slow down again.  I'll look back and try and figure out where I was on various projects before summer put everything on hold.  

Yesterday Nora and I went skiing and encountered a practically tame fox.  Nora was wondering if it would attack us, and got apprehensive when I got down to fox level to take his/her picture.  I think he/she just wanted something to eat.

Patrick

Beach greens!  The beach is providing!

New Car

 

If you look carefully you can see the new car at the end of the road by Stuey's right elbow

Well we did it!  We got a new car - a Jeep.  The road to the pass finally all but killed the old Pathfinder.  All winter long the car had lacked shocks, the heater no longer worked and all the electronics were failing.  The final blow was when the brake lights stopped working - YIKES!

So it was definitely time for a new car.  And time for a new car that could handle the rough road to the pass.  In the past all my cars after just a few years have needed 'new U joints' with every oil change.  I needed a car that could handle potholes.  

After a little research the choices basically came down to a truck or a Jeep.  I drove a truck for a quarter century and am not going back! 20 years ago I would have purchased an SUV.  Back then they made SUVs on a truck chassis and they were built for rough roads.  But they became popular in suburbia for taking kids to soccer games and are all now built on a car chassis - simply over sized cars.  My pathfinder was one of the last ones built on a truck chassis and look how it fared! And all things considered it actually did pretty well.

Anyway, I decided not to mess around and got a Jeep.  And it is a monster with HUGE tires - it most definitely is 'not me'.  I know this because when I wave at people I know from the car they never seem to see me.  People assume that since I'm driving a Jeep I'm probably a male in my 20's - most likely in the Coast Guard.  But other Jeep owners do see me!  I did not realize before I purchased the car that there is a 'Jeep wave'.  Whenever I pass another Jeep they wave at us and we wave back.  I kinda like it, and I have the feeling that if we got into trouble on the road - stuck in the snow or a flat tire - that other Jeep owners would go out of their way to help us.

The kids love the new car and Nora has been using it to learn how to drive.  It's amazing to drive a car where everything works!  And have a heater and good windshield defroster - WOW!  My old car had to be scraped on the inside and then manually wiped with a cloth - and none of the windows worked either.  Not so with this new bad boy - we got us a car that can handle the road to the pass!

Patrick

We did NOT drive to here but walked.  My Jeep will not be used off road!

Is this how a bug sees?

 

I have continued to play with the color select filters on my camera, and am struck how it focuses my attention on the colored areas.  It got me thinking, 'is this how insects see the world?'  I have not researched this at all, but I am pretty sure that flowers come in bright colors to attract pollinators. And that particular colored flowers attract particular pollinators.  Some insects go for blue, others for yellow or red etc.

It got me wondering if maybe it would be an advantage for an insect to see only the particular colors of the flowers he/she sought?  Ie for a blue flower pollinator to see only blue? Wouldn't this screen out all the confusion and make it easier for the organism to focus on just what is to their advantage?  This is exactly how my use of the color filters allows me to draw attention to particular elements of a photograph.  

Anyway, it is food for thought and, now having written this post, I'll google it and see if I am an idiot, or if I have learned something scientists have already known for ages.

I wonder how one could set up a science experiment to test this idea?

Patrick

I found that my camera will die double exposures - not sure if this is really useful

Purple orchis

A hike along the shore of Viekoda Bay

 

I hike and surveyed from where I am standing to past the point of land on the far shore in the distance - over 7 miles total

On Monday I got to go on another work-related Helicopter ride.  This time to Viekoda Bay.  The museum did an archaeological survey of the south shore of the bay for the landowner - the USFWS.  But, rather than hike or kayak the whole thing, we experimented surveying by helicopter and did the survey in one, rather than multiple days.  I got dropped off at the head of the bay and hiked the shoreline making my way west.  Meanwhile Molly and Alex stayed with the helicopter and surveyed the other direction starting at the outer bay.  At the end of the day we met in the middle.

The survey method worked pretty well and together we found 5 new sites and documented the condition of another 5 already-known sites.  We covered somewhere around 18 miles of coastline.  That's a pretty good stretch of coastline for one day, but not a whole lot of sites. However, I don't think we missed any sites either.  There are just not all that many sites in the bay and certainly not the big villages I found a couple of weeks ago in Kiliuda Bay.

In Kiliuda Bay pretty much every suitable place for an archaeological site had an archaeological site.  In Viekoda Bay I found a number of places that just seemed perfect, but yet - No site.  I think Viekoda Bay just lacks the biological resources so plentiful in Kiliuda Bay.  Also I think there is a cold west wind that blows up the bay in winter.  It's just a bay where I don't think people spent a lot of time.  And this is true even today - people do go there but it sees no where near the traffic of neighboring bays.

Anyway,  I thoroughly enjoyed myself walking alone along the shoreline in the sunshine.  I listened to the nesting fox sparrows singing their songs and looked at all the pretty blooming flowers.  It was a gorgeous day for a hike.

Patrick

shooting stars - I also saw blooming Lupine

The head of the bay is a big mud flat at low tide

It's still winter on high!

crows harassing a bald eagle

An Arctic tern - he/she just flew like 10,000 miles to spend the summer in Alaska

the first forget me nots of the year

This is where we met at the middle - I was documenting a new site when they found me

Last Year's Excavation

 

Last summer's backfilled excavation

A week ago today I got to fly down to the outlet of Karluk Lake in a helicopter to help the landowner plan some trail improvements, and to check on where we will be excavating a site next August.  We also got to examine the backfilled Qasgiq depression that we excavated last summer (click here for post).  It was a very windy day, but clear and beautiful.

At the end of last summer's excavation we tried to backfill the structure so it would look the same as before we started to dig.  We carefully landscaped and re sodded the whole thing, and left just the hearth and center portion of the main room floor exposed in the middle. It looked pretty good.  Some bears had tossed a few sods here and there, but the everything was starting to grow back, and it really did look pretty much exactly like it did when I first found and mapped it back in 2011 (click here).

I think my favorite part of the trip was looking out the window.  Checking out places I explored on other trips.  The cliffs where I hunted goats with Ray and Jonathon (click here), the mountains I climbed when I first arrived in Alaska in the summer of 1985, and, of course the Karluk River which I have floated and surveyed a number of times.

Patrick

All the scrofulous looking grassy area is old house depressions - this is one of the largest archaeological sites on the island

It looks pretty much like it did before we excavated it

Leaving town - see the shadow of the helicopter?

Termination Point

A beaver dam burst up stream and covered an archaeological site in flood transported gravel - a new type of site damage for me!

Lower Karluk River - In the distance are the hills I climbed my first summer in Alaska way back in 1985

The flank of Mount Leanne - I hunted goats above those cliffs a couple of years ago

Recent Dog Walks

 

Here are some pictures from dogs walks in the past week or so.  

When I got back from my survey in Kiliuda Bay Nora and I discovered that they had opened the gate on the road to the top of Pillar Mountain.  It is gated off all winter and I kind of like this because the road is fun to ski on etc with less traffic.  But it is also nice to be totally lazy and drive to the top.  Now Nora, the dogs and I have a new place to hike!

Of course our favorite spot remains Buskin Beach - especially at low tide.  Yesterday Nora and I noticed that the dogs seem more inclined to swim after sticks in the river than they did a month or so ago.  Has the water warmed up?  I also noticed that someone had set a net off shore to catch salmon.  So the salmon must be here.

It really is summer when the salmon start to go up the rivers.

Patrick

The wind mills on top of Pillar Mountain

Female Red Crossbill

A no horizon kind of day at Buskin Beach