Kashevaroff Mountain

Long before we were a sailing family, Alisa and I were a young couple in love with adventuring in Alaska.

The opportunity to introduce Eric and Elias to the delights of outdoor living in the Great Land was one of the big bright sides of our return to Alaska.

Earlier this winter, the boys and I headed up Kashevaroff Mountain, one of the most accessible peaks in Kodiak. Our goal was to spend the night in a snow cave. Elias was particularly endearing in his desire for Eric to accompany us in spite of my concern over his younger brother's ability to do the trip.

Digging the snow cave.

Eric did great. There turned out not to be enough snow to dig a cave so we had to retreat back to the truck by headlamp.

Last weekend, with spring well advanced, we returned to try our luck at sleeping under nylon.

Spring in Alaska. The brown season.

Alfresco. Al dente.

Tent floors are for people who don't care about weight.

Still snowy if you go high enough.

The difference in ability between the two boys is something to navigate. Eric is doing great, and can clearly get up the mountain and spend the night, no problem. Elias, though, is ready for longer trips.

Harvest Time

All summer long Elias was reflecting on the orgy of potatoes that would await us on our return to Kodiak, his first attempts at growing his own doubtless (doubtless!) on their way to wild success. In spite of the fact that no one was at home to tend the garden.

Great thing about kids. The harvest was many orders of magnitude below the bounty of imagination, but Elias and Eric were overjoyed with what they got - one good meal's worth.

Luckily, it has been a completely bumper year for blueberries.

We pick and we pick, and still there are more.

And the silver salmon - Oncorhynchus kisutch. Their bounty has been all we could want, and we have  44 of the beasts safely in freezer and jars to see us through the dark months.

Carrie, Alisa's indefatigable partner in gillnetting, after another big day.

Any Alaskan resident is allowed to gillnet salmon for their personal use off the Buskin River, which is between downtown Kodiak and the airport.

So what did I do with the boys on the first weekend in a while that we didn't go gillnetting, since we finally had enough fish? Somehow I found myself talked into going to the Buskin River itself, to pursue that ridiculous enterprise of trying to catch a silver out of the river on hook and line.

We struck out. Gillnetting is so much more fun. But we did see another local who was out harvesting.

And, finally! We have our first deer in the freezer. And I got to reprise my favorite butchering photo.

This wild food is such a part of our identity as Alaskans. Why the heck else are we living here? Alisa and I ask each other time and again as we head out on some gathering mission or another. It all adds up to real work, these various efforts. But we're happy with the consolations of hard work, concrete rewards, and the promise of a long slow winter to come.

This Alaskan Life

Well, I really will get to a recap of the science side of our summer soon. We are living in very interesting times, in both the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea, those twin stars that dominate the firmament of Alaskan fisheries.

But we continue this miraculous run of good weather that has made late August and early September so outstanding on the Gulf of Alaska coast. We continue to apply ourselves to using that good weather to our harvesting advantage. And our efforts are beginning to bear fruit.

Yesterday I shot a small buck just before sunrise, way up on that mountain that is so consistently productive for deer hunting. (You know, that one.) Good news is that I can still pack a deer out a mile and down 2,000 feet to the road all by myself, as long as it is a small one.

I was home by 13:30, and by 15:00 had rebuilt my energy levels to the point where I was biking out to that spot where the blueberries are so thick this year. (You know the spot.)

After I'd just started picking I got a call from Alisa. And let's stop to consider how the world changes. When we lived in Alaska 11 years ago, berry picking and getting a phone call were mutually exclusive activities.

Alisa was out gillnetting silvers with family friends. And they had 16 of those big beautiful beasts and were heading back to the harbor.

So berry picking was put on hold to assist with fish cleaning. And we're going back again today. (The fish are in - don't tell anyone!)

Family friend Noah, Eric, and Elias on Undercover.

Carrie and Alisa at the fish cleaning station. For years a popular bumpersticker in Alaska has been the one proclaiming "Alaska girls kick ass."

Home Port

The map of what we did. Numbers indicate the number of seine sets made in each bay.

Under sail at the entrance to Kaguyak Bay.

Galactic at anchor in Rodman's Reach, with the wonderfully hospitable Lazy Bay cannery in the background.

The ship's people on the plane in Akhiok. Next stop, Kodiak, their grandmother, and a new school year.
God, how I love raising Alaskan kids.

Fox Bay

Bluff Point

The Rose 

Reefed down and sailing fast. Oh yes, and my 50th birthday.

Port Wrangell at the end of a windy windy day

Port Wrangell

High energy beach

The 40-knot blow

Picking berries, Kujulik Bay

The fruit of the land

Salty

More berry picking. Agripina Bay.

Butchering Dungeness

We got home a week ago.

Inevitably, we immediately got caught up in the swirl of town life. It's peak harvesting season here in the Gulf of Alaska. Berries need to be picked, fish caught, deer stalked. And if there's any time left before the rains return, house and boat could both use maintenance. Oh yes, and there's third and seventh grade to attend to, and the demands of careers that seem to forever need one thing or another from us.

This is a rich life, and one chapter always seems to be stepping on the toes of the one that came before. So no recap of the summer work just now. I'll get to that *soon*, along with some more about the actual biology we were doing. For now I'll just say that fitting two months of boat life into a town year seems to be a hell of a lot more work than full time boat living was, but we're all four of us ever so glad we did it.

Deer hunting up high. Elias wasn't so impressed by the number of does and fawns we saw (15) vs. the numbers of bucks (1).

Sand Point

Sand Point

We are about to leave the town of Sand Point, that historical cod port in the Shumagin Islands. One more new bay for us to sample on the Alaska Peninsula, and then we will start retracing our track back to Kodiak.

We love Sand Point! What a friendly place, what a fantastic location, what a great harbor. The salmon season was a big disappointment here, but the salmon berries have been out of this world, and the boys have done their best to make a dent in them.

 

We've been in the Shumagins for a week now, sampling three bays and taking advantage of the internet to submit both a National Science Foundation proposal and a journal paper. Oh, and hiding out from some generally ick weather. We are loathe to even mention the idea of poor weather, lest someone think we are complaining. But, when the fishermen start bringing up the bad weather in conversation, as they have, I suppose it's ok to note that it has generally been...atrocious.

But, we've been getting the work done. And now, the wind is in the west, and it's time for us to make tracks.

The team, set to beach seine Sand Point

Cannery and slough

Chasing the salmon berries

Here and below - the taste of summer

National Public Radio reports...

...that I am wiry and have a thick beard.

Seriously, though, it's gratifying to see interest in our work.

The reporter tells me the story will likely air on NPR this weekend.

That's Alisa in the photo with me.

The Cod Are In

Age-0 Pacific cod

My first thought: we should notify the Kodiak Daily Mirror.

Alisa and Elias and I were out at our study site out at Long Island, five miles from Kodiak City, just yesterday.

It was our shakedown trip for our summer sampling, our chance to get the mothership away from the dock and to put all of our new sampling gear through its paces.

We did a test set with the beach seine...and came up with hundreds of juvenile cod, just settled out from the ichthyoplankton.

Alisa, measuring fish on the beach

It felt like life, it felt like renewal, it felt like summer. It even felt like a breath of hope for this fishing town that has been a little short of good news lately.

And now that the cod are in, we're greenlighted to launch on our summer work.

Beach seine and barky

Not incidentally, we all loved being afloat again. The boys were touchingly happy to be sleeping in their bunks.

And I re-discovered that while the true peace of god begins at a thousand miles from sea, a truly good night's sleep begins on your own little ship in a snug anchorage.

Snow Cave #1

Winter ecstasy

This week is spring break for Kodiak schools.

Waaaay back in the 20th Century, spring break trips to the mountains were a big part of my time as a student at the University of Alaska.

This year, Elias and I revived that tradition of spring break trips to the mountains and made our long-planned foray to Cope Mountain to spend the night in a snow cave.

In Kodiak, the way to find winter is to walk uphill. We made it up to about 500 m to get to decent winter-ish conditions. Still, the ceiling of the cave started to turn to slush while we were cooking, and the water that I left in our cook pot didn't freeze overnight. Those are two signs of warmth that I never experienced in all my snowcaving in the Alaska Range.

It was great to be reminded of all the old things - the smell of sunscreen on your face while covering ground in a snowy landscape, and the way that light scintillates off the crystals of ice kicked up by your skis. The sound of each sushing slide of a ski forward, step after step, against the profound quiet of the hills.

It was a great trip for finding out that Elias is able to carry a very light pack in the hills (basically just his sleeping bag and spare clothes), and I am still able to carry a light-ish pack (basically, everything else). My knees still feel it, a few days after the trip was over, but for me backpacking in the mountains of Alaska is exquisitely worth it.

Elias was giddy throughout our night in the cave, and the long process of melting snow and drying out our gear with hot water bottles. (I'm occasionally astonished to see people attempting to cook outdoors while winter camping. In Alaska at least, winter camping means cooking inside your shelter, be it snow cave or tent.) And Elias was, well, pretty tough. Few complaints, and he saw the joy of the thing quite easily.

He was particularly enamored of the realization that his mom has never slept in a snow cave, and that he now has one up on her in terms of camping experiences.

Here and below: the view outside the cave.

In the morning, Elias tried to collapse the cave. But it was plenty strong to hold his weight.

I found 7000 Chilean pesos in my parka pocket - about $11.50 US.

Winter Calm

Last week we finally got out on the water to start our pilot study of juvenile Pacific cod winter ecology.

It was a little nerve-racking to use someone else's boat (the University's skiff). We're pretty used to knowing the gear we rely on.

But everything went just fine. We had a cracker day, as you can see.

And as for that part that I have now spoken to more reporters about the project than we've actually seen cod? Well, that speaks to how important the cod collapse is to Kodiak, and also the nature of a pilot study.

Among other things, we're figuring out winter habitat associations for juvenile Pacific cod, about which very little is known. So we go out, and try different things (Friday is our next day out), and over time new knowledge will be created.

It's not always that calm...