Sharatin

For Nora and I the Adjust Your Altitude challenge is complete.  Yesterday we climbed the last peak in the challenge - Sharatin.  We hiked up through the trees from the Small Creek trailhead, climbed up to and over the summit, and then hiked down the Red Cloud trail on the other side.  I'd left a bicycle at the Red Cloud trailhead and biked back to Small Creek to fetch the car and complete the circuit.  Including the bike ride the whole circuit took less than 5 hours.  To be honest I thought it would take a lot longer than that - Nora is a FAST hiker!

Going over the top and making a circuit out of the hike adds a lot of diversity to the experience.  We got to hike up through a mossy green spruce forest and up through an enormous alpine bowl on one side of the mountain.  And then, on the other side descended into a precipitous bowl with huge cliffs and waterfalls and then walked down to the road through wide open fields with a view in all directions.

Sharatin has become incredibly popular as a summer hiking destination.  It used to be that you never met anyone up on the mountain.  While these days it is getting hard to find a parking spot at the trailheads and you generally meet 2 or 3 other groups of hikers on the mountain.  But that's a good thing.  More hikers means more advocacy for trails and green places!
Patrick

August 2019

June 2018

Checking out the B18a Bomber wreckage from WWII

One of the many groups of hikers we saw on the mountain

Barometer

Six down and only one more to go in the Adjust Your Altitude Challenge.  Yesterday Nora and I climbed the mountain on the challenge that had had us the most worried - Barometer.  And it turned out to be not so bad.

According to the Kodiak weather station it hit an all time high for Kodiak of 86 degrees while we were on the mountain.  But the heat was not so bad because there was a breeze pretty much the whole time.  Nora and I had been worried about the trail and exposure on the upper mountain.  I had heard it has gotten super sketchy.  But in reality it was no worse and maybe better than both Pyramid and the North Sister.

And now on to Sharatin for the final leg of the challenge.  Sheratin is both Nora and I's favorite ski mountain.  Patrick

Garlic and Beets

Yesterday I harvested the first of my garlic and they are already huge. Much, Much bigger than my tiny beets.  Generally I harvest all the garlic near the end of August but this year I think I will be harvesting it early - like in the next week.

I pulled a little hard on one of the heads and ripped off the plant portion by accident.  So instead of hanging the head with the others in the shed to dry and cure - I roasted it up with carrots and beats.  One of my favorite dishes!  Since the garlic had not been 'aged' the cloves ended up super buttery.  mmmmmmmmm.  One of my favorite dishes!
Patrick

Lake Gertrude

Lately it has been HOT on Kodiak.  Every day is sunny with no wind and temperatures in the low 70s.  I read in the paper that we are starting to set some serious meteorological records.  I think it has been 3 weeks now without rain.  Good thing is that my lawn is dying - no mowing! But the bad thing is that the heat is enervating and it is hard to sleep at night.  I don't know how people do it in the lower 48 with temps in the 90s and overnight lows in the 70s - I think I'd die!

To beat the heat the last few days we have been swimming in Lake Gertrude at Abercrombie State park.  We take the dogs and all go for a swim.  Mostly we just stay near the 'beach' and splash around.  The dogs follow us out into the lake and do their thing.  Stuey and his friend Elias have water spray fights.  Nora and I mostly just float around and use the life jackets as float seats.

Great way to beat the heat!
Patrick

Woody Island Survey

Way back in July Molly and I surveyed the North side of Woody Island for the landowner Leisnoi Inc (see older posts here, here, here and here for more about the Leisnoi land survey).  For some reason or other, until now, I seemed to have forgotten to post about what we found.  And we certainly found a lot - we found 7 new sites and reported on another 3 already known sites.  That's a lot of new sites for a quick day survey.

The Woody Island landscape reminded me a lot of Long Island, and I realized that it is not because they are both relatively small islands.  Both places have cows that have cleared out the forest understory.  This makes it both easy to hike and easy to find sites.  This time of year archaeological sites are often covered in thick mantles of grass, pushki and salmonberry, and can be quite difficult to see.  Not so on Long and Woody Islands!

The coolest discovery of the survey is what appears to have been an early Russian era brick kiln.  Sometime in the early 19th century they were making bricks on Woody Island.  We already knew about brick kiln sites in Middle Bay and out on Long Island, but never even suspected that there was one on Woody Island.  And in comparison with the 2 already known brick kilns, the one we found seems remarkably intact.  We found the foundations of a number of structures.  Also from what we have learned the Woody Island kiln might well have been the oldest of the three.

I gather making bricks was a pretty labor intensive process.  I laughed when I read that they had to sift the glacial till clay for rocks.  It sounded a lot like screening back dirt - something I am particularly good at!  Patrick

These look like early 20th century potatoes patches

Russian Bricks - Early 19th Century!

Russian Brick Kiln?

John S helped Molly and I with 'travel logistics'

Playing with the camera filters

The last couple of days I have been playing around with my Fujifilm mirrorless camera - getting to know all the menus and what the various buttons and dials do.  And I discovered the 'color' filters.  Basically you program the camera to only see one of the various prime colors (blue, red, yellow, green) and the rest of the image is black and white.  I realize it is a total gimmick but it also creates a striking composition.

In college in photography class we often toned our prints and achieved somewhat similar results.  Our photography teacher always warned us that toning made prints look great but that the basic composition still had to be there - there is no 'dressing up a pig as a ballerina' so to speak.  And I am also sure that I could re create what the camera does with filters in photoshop.  All that said - it was certainly fun to take pictures of various berries and see the results.  Very dramatic.  Patrick

No filter for this one - but with all gray rocks the same effect!