AK

Everything is bigger than average here...the moose, the mountains, the bears, mosquitoes and even some vegetables.

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Check out the latest from the Anchorage Daily News:

http://www.adn.com/life/story/807240.html

got crabs?

Crab Fest!

some highlights:

-Hobo Jim @ The Rendevous

-King crab legs

-Survival suit race

-riding the "Tornado," an amusement park ride set up on the spit, with Margo in the rain and cold

-Blackened butt wrap

-Kodiak Island Drummers show and workshop

-Balalaika Players @ the Baranov Museum (Russian folk songs)

-Erica's reading of her dirty fishergirl poem "I wanna get you in a bunk" at the Fisherman's Poet gathering

feel the burn

We went on a great hike up Pyramid Mountain yesterday. There was nothing but sunshine and blue skies so we ate lunch at the top (a little over 2,000ft). Shelly spotted some mountain goats along the top ridge and we saw a couple Rock Ptarmigans on our way down. Ryan impressed/entertained us with his sledding attempts-one good way of using plastic bags. Yes! There is still snow, and quite a bit of it on the mountains-people were skiing on Pyramid all day.

The last two nights a few of us have driven to Abercrombie Park to watch the sun go down off Miller Point. It has been setting at about 10:30 and getting later every day! I am loving the long days.

hot butt

Jone hooked us up with some fresh butt- caught this morning! It was delicious. I just put some butter and garlic on a warm skillet and slapped the fish on there and voila!

Hopefully I'll be catching my own fish soon. The Dolly Vardens are here! I put in a picture below of one in spawning colors. The name "Dolly Varden" comes from a character in the Charles Dickens novel, Barnaby Rudge. Dolly V. was a young girl with a rosy complexion and around 1860, a popular fabric with red polka dots was marketed under the name Dolly Varden. It was actually then a young girl who is credited with connecting the name with the fish, and it stuck.

potluck cookout birthday

What a sweet group of people I have met here. Margo & Roger invited us all over for a potluck cookout at their house on Saturday. There were sweet and sour meatballs, salmon dip & crackers, burgers & bratwursts, fruit salad, beer, and of course, butt. To top it off, Margo made two "bombs," a homemade type of ice cream cake, only 10x better than any you've ever had. I put on a poor performance of blowing out candles on one of them and we gobbled it up.

ps. I feel lucky to be here with some really cool, adventurous, and down to earth people.

pps. I'm really just sucking up because they got me some awesome presents, but they're alright I guess.

the tuffs...xtra tuffs that is

You might be wondering where you can get a pair of the sweet boots I'm wearing...

They're called Xtra Tuffs and they are like the Alaskan sneaker. I feel like I fit in much more now that I can wear these around town. They came with the job and are really rather comfortable!

(I was told by the pilot to hold onto the plane until he jumped in and got it turned on)

Flying the Beaver

We went out on a float plane today! We took the Beaver (that's the model of the plane) to Karluk Lake where Fish & Wildlife has a cabin. It took us about ~45mins each way, taking off from Trident Basin, which is on the other side of Near Island from town. I mapped out where we went on the map as best as I could. The black square is Karluk Lake.

I was sitting shotgun for the ride out and was pretty sure I was going to lose my cookies before we touched down in Karluk, but managed to hold on. On the way there, we took the coastal route, saw some whales and a couple Native villages (Port Lions and Larsen Bay) and it was a bit bumpy. I thought it was cool that we could see the mainland too! Going home was smooth sailing, we took the mountainous route over the "spine" of the island and saw some bear tracks in the snow, no bear though.

So, Kevin was our fearless leader- he's a native Alaskan who grew up flying with his dad in Fairbanks, now he flies for Fish&Wildlife. He happened to have open seats and Margo, Chad and I all had the day off, so we got to hitch a ride :)

The sun has been out all weekend with blue skies ta boot! Doesn't happen much around here I'm told, so I've been soaking it up.

fish here, fish there

Mama bought me a fishing license for my bday! I've been learning some lingo, ha...so there are
chinook salmon=you call them kings, they're the big guys
chum=dog
sockeye=reds
coho=silvers
pink=pinks, right? nope, you call them humpies because of this huge hump on their backs


What did the fish say when it hit the wall?

DAM.

butt

I had some Halibut the other night at the Powerhouse, which is right on the channel between Kodiak and Near Island. I was told that some people call it butt- so, now I do. I had some butt and chips for dinner. There was an eagle out on their deck looking in at us all eating.

Did you know that butts here can weigh up to 700 lbs? That's a big butt! The largest ever caught was something like 450, but I have heard that it's the small ones that are the tastiest.

They are the flat fish that hang out on the ocean floor and have both of their eyes on one side. A weird factoid: Shelly told me that they are born with eyes on both sides of their head, but then one migrates around to the other side-freaky!

Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge

The refuge includes 2 million acres of the Kodiak Archipelago.  You can't actually get to it from town unless you're in a plane or boat.

So, I work for US Fish and Wildlife at the Refuge Visitor Center right in the middle of "downtown" next to one of the harbors.  My job includes running an educational program for local kids 1x week, starting a nature club and hiking 1x week with them, and staffing the center when cruise ships (27 scheduled) come to town and giving interpretive talks.  An extra bonus: I have awesome co-workers :)

Road system map

Close up: This is the only extensive road system on Kodiak, about 7,000 people live here.  My house is near the Buskin River, about 5 miles SW of town.  You can see Narrow Cape at the bottom- that's the best spot to see Gray whales.  Each bay has great birding opportunities, lots of water fowl and shorebirds.    

Where in the world...

So, I thought this could be helpful to see where I actually am.  The Island is circled, and the city of Kodiak is where the black dot is- that's me!

The weather is nothing like how brutal the interior can be- people compare it to Seattle.  Average temps in the summer are 50-60.  We're going to have over 18 hours of daylight by June!

tide pooling, whaling & birding

Yesterday 5 of us went out to one of the ends of the road around here to Narrow Cape (took about an hour). We ate lunch on the cliffs and watched the Gray whales go by, on their way north to their arctic summer feeding grounds. My first whale sightings! I saw some flukes and got some through a scope, which was cool. We also took a look down on Fossil Beach for some treasures. I had fun breaking open concretions to see what was inside. On our way back, we had to stop for Bison to cross the road. There is a guy out there that farms with Bison because they stand up to the bears more than cattle do. I also had some Buffalo jerky, not as good as moose but it was alright.

We saw lots of birds- Emperor Geese, Black Brants, some Oystercatchers are fairly normal and easy to see around here, but there are only 15,000 in the world and they have really cool red beaks and circles around their eyes. We stopped many times along the road to check the slopes for mountain goats and bears, and found 3 goats in a ravine and one on top of a ridge. Didn't see any bears, but found bear tracks down a mountain leading to a deer carcass, or I should say where a deer carcass used to be because only fur was left.

I went down to Abercrombie Park to find some tide pools this morning. Lowest tide of the month- we saw some sweet sea stars, sunflower stars, anemones, sea cucumbers, sea urchins and varied shelled critters. It was neat to turn rocks over and see a little community of these guys.

work work work

So, yesterday for work we had a 2 hour boat tour of the water just outside of Kodiak which turned into a 6 hour cruise around Spruce Island and all the way to Whale Pass and Afognak Island.  We didn't see any whales, but lots of sea otters showed up!  They would be on their backs floating along, maybe kicking a bit, being all cute and eating on their bellies and rolling over to wash the crumbs away, then back to eating.  We were also lucky the sun was out AND I didn't puke :)

first week highlights

I got here a week ago Saturday and what a week it has been!  After flying all day, we were approaching Kodiak and things got interesting because the runway starts in water and ends at the bottom of Barometer Mountain- I'm told that often a couple tries are needed to get just the right approach, luckily we landed on the first try.  My boss, Tina, was there to meet me and explained how the airport is more like a bus stop because everyone knows each other.  It seemed like everyone on the plane was a fisherman.  People say that everyone fishes here, whether they are out in a boat or in town, everyone's work is connected to fish- mostly because they are so abundant.

So, on Sunday I met Tina who got me my car (I get my own car AND they pay for gas) and oriented me to the road system.  It's funny that they call it the road system, but I think they do that just to distinguish it from the rest of the island which doesn't have any roads.  On our way into town, I noticed eagles perching in the trees.  I guess Bald Eagles hang out in town until the snow clears- they are everywhere!  All over the harbor on boats, trees, buildings, it's cool to see these guys flying all over town.

It was lonely here the first night and day, but then I got some roommates on Sunday- Chad and James and got to work on Monday and felt more at home.  My coworkers are great and everyone I have met thus far has been super friendly and welcoming :)

this week's adventures:

• Hike along Monashka Bay- saw a river otter, seal, black-tailed deer, sea otters and lots of birds- cormorants, harlequin ducks, pine grosbeak, grebes and a couple from home- mallards and chickadees!  The deer are coming to the beaches (black sand) to eat kelp that has washed ashore because there is still a good amount of snow on the ground.
  
• Moose steak and homefries for dinner!  One of my roommates brought moose from SE Alaska that his boss had killed- it was tasty!  He was working as a dog handler for a big-time musher who has won the Yukon Quest a couple times, which is a race just like the Iditarod.
  
• Went for a walk in one of the harbors downtown to check out the sea lions that hang out there- they were all taking naps, except for one who was stretching his flippers.  I met a retired fisherman who had fished the Bering Sea for 22 years!  
  
• I had a Sarah Pale beer from the local Brewery, ha! and cod & chips at Henry's (a restaurant downtown).
• WWII remnants in Fort Abercrombie State Park and moss like I have never seen on the trees- apparently you can find a layer of ash from the 1912 eruption of Novarupta under the moss.  
• Met Larry Van Daele- a wildlife biologist for the warm and fuzzy critters on Kodiak, he told us about the bears in particular.  When they stand on their back legs, they can put their heads through a basketball hoop and the males can weigh up to 1500lbs.  There is one bear per square mile of the island.  The males are just starting to wake up from hibernation, there was one sighted not far from the bunkhouse near one of the popular salmon runs around here.
• It is Whale Fest here this week, so there are lots of activities centered around whales and celebrating the migration of the Gray Whale past the island.  I went to a talk about how the Native people of the island, the Alutiiqs, used to hunt whales 2,000 years ago.  The hunters were shaman-type members of the village and would dig up bodies of people that used to be important in the village and use the rendered fat from them on their spears...ewww

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