Buskin Beach

 

The last few days have been sunny and crisp.  On Sunday Nora and I took the dogs to Buskin Beach. We are lucky to have such a convenient beach for dog walks.  And it was low tide so we got the whole beach.  

For a while there in the late Summer and early Fall we had to stop taking the dogs to the beach because of all the dead salmon.  The spawned out salmon float out the river and end up all over the beach - and Bode and Brewster like to eat and roll in them.  No matter how mad you get they can't resist.  YUCK!  But the dead salmon have all disappeared and all the yucky things they could find to roll in frozen solid.

Patrick

Pillar Mountain

 

Every winter right about now the City closes the road up Pillar Mountain.  I actually really appreciate that they do this because I like to ski on the road and it is better not all tracked up by cars.  But it is also fun to be totally lazy and drive up to the top in your car.  When the road is open the kids and I like to drive to the top for dog walks.  

So this past weekend when Nora and I saw that the road was still open we drove to the top.  It was super windy and very cold.  The windmills were churning away and making their squeaking noises.

Patrick

Fall in the rearview mirror

 

This morning it is 14 degrees outside - so Fall is most definitely over.  It's now winter.  Here are some pictures that 'got away' and never got posted 'in season'.  Stuey's final cross country running race of the year - wow the golf course looks GREEN! Driving lessons with Nora in the Nisson. Our favorite place to drive is the road down to Buskin Beach.  This year the snow was early and we were skiing in October - so lots and lots of snow pictures.  And, of course hikes!

And now on to winter!

Patrick

New Snow

 

Wednesday, the day after the final archaeological survey of the year, it snowed in town.  And it has continued to snow off and on for the last several days.  We have not gotten all that much new snow but it is cold and most definitely WINTER! 

All the snow on the trees is very Christmas like and it isn't even Thanksgiving.  It's beautiful.  And at night the all the snow on the ground keeps it bright outside.  So much brighter and less dreary with snow on the ground.

Of course I have been skiing every day.  We still do not have a very good base on high so I have been cross country skiing at the golf course.  I added up all the days I have been skiing in the last year and realized that today will be the 200th day of skiing in the last 365 days.  That's pretty good.  it's not often you can say you skied 200 days in a year!

Now fingers crossed that the snow sticks around all winter.

Patrick

My red alder close up

cottonwoods at the golf course

Nora in Abercrombie

Remote Beaches

 

One of the perks of my job is that I frequently get to visit remote beaches.  I do a lot of surveys where I look for archaeological sites on the landscape, and, since the Alutiiq people have always lived on the coast and make their living from the sea, this means I survey a lot of coastline.  And this means I get to visit some pretty remote beaches.

This Tuesday I visited Sitkinak Island for a helicopter survey.  Some of the beaches we visited are so exposed that it is difficult to land a boat or floatplane on them.  They are extremely difficult places to reach.  For this reason they also have some of the best beach combing - everything cool has not been picked up already.  

You know it is a remote beach when you find glass balls, and on this last survey I found two and my co worker one. Glass balls are what fishermen used to use to keep the tops of their fishing nets on the surface.  But they stopped using them about 50 years ago, and they are getting pretty hard to find.

These days fishermen use plastic floats, and it is sad to see how so much of the marine debris is plastic fishing gear.  Unless this stuff is cleaned up all this plastic is going to stay in the environment forever.  In contrast, glass balls are not only cool to find, but they recycle into sand when broken.  Maybe fishermen should consider going back to glass balls?

Patrick

Molly with a plastic and glass float

Modern plastic net floats surrounded this glass ball

Keller with a whale skull

Final Survey of 2021 - just beat the snow!

 

A severely eroding site - the erosion has truncated old house depression (note hearth to right of Molly)

On Tuesday Molly and I took a helicopter to Sitkinak Island for the museum's final survey work of the season.  And then yesterday it snowed.  We just barely beat winter!

We returned to Sitkinak because at the end of our survey in May a bad storm rolled in and cut short our work.  We had planned on a final day of surveying in the helicopter and it never happened - until Tuesday.

So Molly and I returned to Sitkinak and helicoptered around the island checking on the places Chase and I  did not get to back in May (click here for June post on Archaeology).  I was relieved that we did not find a whole lot of new sites - just one or two depending on how you define a 'site'.  One of the sites is the military transport plane that crashed into a mountain in the 1950s (photo below).  But it seems that Chase and I did not miss any big sites on our foot survey.  

On Tuesday Molly and I basically sketch mapped a few of the sites we did not get to in May, and checked on some of the areas that I felt had needed more work (including some remote coves).  It was beautiful down there and a gorgeous day for a survey.  But COLD.  It was quite a dramatic change from what it had been like out there back in May.

Flying around in a helicopter on a stormy winter day also brought home to me just how quickly the sites on Sitkinak are falling into the sea.  We saw severe, on-going coastal erosion everywhere we went.  And you could see the waves crashing onto the shoreline.  The archaeological sites on Sitkinak Island and the south end of the Kodiak Archipelago in general are falling into the sea.  The coastal erosion down there is far more severe than it is anywhere else on the archipelago.

Patrick

Look closely and you can see the remains of a C-47 (DC3) plane crash on the mountainside

Crew photo

Split cobble scraper found in a blowout

A 20th century gold mining operation

Severe coastal erosion