Continental Divide

We've had lots of visitors lately - my mother's cousins from the former East Germany on their first trip to the United States for 2 weeks and my 4,000 mile away romantic interest for a week. And for some reason Labor Day brought about several meetings with people I haven't seen in over 15 years - there have been a lot of those this year.

Carter Lake Hike

A flash of lightning dances along the mountain ridge. One one-thousand, Two one-thou-KABOOM! The thunder was so loud that I involuntarily sat down as did the Parental Dog (PDog). The problem was though, that we were at approximately 11,000 feet above sea level (~3,400m) and slightly above treeline - a bad place to be when the lightning is so close which is was. The rule of thumb is that if you can count to 15 after seeing the lightning before you hear the thunder then the lightning is 5 miles away, anything less then that is considered dangerous as lightning not infrequently travels 5 miles between strikes. We started to run, crouched low like crabs against the ground, going from krumholz (the twisted stunted trees at treeline) clump to krumholz clump.

My dad and his dog (PDog)

My father and the PDog were out for an over nighter, I was out for a day hike. We had reached their campsite earlier and had dropped his pack (with his rain jacket) at the site he had selected and then had hiked up beyond the lake to the pass. Hail and rain were coming down hard and the lightning zapped around us the thunder cracking so loudly in the air it was hard not jump. I stopped briefly under a clump of krumholz to dig out a wool shirt and my rain jacket. The PDog stops with me, relieved we are taking shelter, as my father dashes across a boulder field. As soon as I have my jacket on I am urging the PDog across the boulder field as my dad yells "stay low" at us - crabbing as quickly and lowly as possible across wet rock while trying not to do something stupid that might injure me. We quickly descend into the forest where we take refuge under a stand of spruce in a relatively dry space. My father is drenched. We wait no less then 20 minutes before the electric show slows down enough for us to resume hiking. And then we wait one more minute just to be sure. While there we snack, I put my long johns on, my dad puts on my wool hat, we count the distance between each strike and the thunder.

Owl's Clover

Finally we resume hiking and the ground is covered with hail that crunches under our feet. We still move rather fast and we reach the campsite to find everything drenched and my father decides to hike out with me. The final deciding point is that the PDog is absolutely drenched, wetter then I have ever seen her (despite her water-dog roots she does not like to get wet above the ankles) and would have to share a very tight space under a tarp. It turns out to be a very good decision as the roads are all washed out on our way back and there are mudslides turning the river red with silt. I am glad for the immediacy of the storm, it has pushed out of my mind all of the contemplations and worries about the Disreputable Dog's health, my mother's health, and jobs and put me square in the here and now - delighting even in the torrents of water pouring onto the trail, over my boots, and onto the road below.

Hiking & Swimming

Another weekend hike, this time with Life-Time Friend and two of her girlfriends. This time the hike was another short 8miles because I wanted to get back to take my nephew, H, swimming, and because one of the girlfriends was leaving dad at home with the new baby for the first time and didn't want to be gone too long. It was another glorious day and it got warm enough to initiate the first skinny dipping of the season. The first is always the hardest - throwing your warm body into streams or lakes full of fresh snow or ice melt - but once you've done the first one you pretty much have to do it every hike that the weather is nice. In comparison the local municipal pool was a hot tub.

The only bad thing about the hike was that the Disreputable Dog (DDog)was not allowed to go. He has some sort of severe shoulder injury and is on restricted activity and will be seeing a doggy orthopedist next week. It nearly broke my heart (and likely his) to leave him behind. The Parental Dog (PDog) was more then happy to be spoiled for all that she is always nervous hiking about the unseen wildebeests that might be lurking out there and just waiting to pounce on her. The PDog has very poor eyesight and a very active imagination. My favorite story about her is of my dad taking her backpacking for the first time. He was sitting on a log eating his super with her sitting in front of him when an owl hooted off to the front of them. She promptly got up and went and sat behind my father! Brave she is not and as such she is usually glad to have the DDog there to have her back. Although Summit was there (the dog of Life-Long Friend) we were dog poor - I cannot remember the last time I went on an outdoor outing (discounting fieldwork) with other people where the dogs were not at least equal in number to humans if not exceeding them.

On my return H and I had a lovely time at the local pool where he showed me how he knows to blow out the air underwater by saying "artichoke" (which is a rather difficult word for him) and where we generally bounced and splashed around until his teeth were chattering and we had to lay on the hot concrete to warm up - him with his butt in the air. On our way home we stopped to look at his grandfather's current project which is to get the pool to be entirely dependent on solar energy.

Weekend Hike

I worked the US holiday on the 4th of July and the weekend but had Monday and Tuesday off. Luckily, Atmospheric Chemist friend can take any day off he chooses in the summer since he works at a teaching college. He came up from Oil Drilling city with his dog and we had a lovely 8mile- 2,000 foot elevation gain - hike up to a pretty mountain lake. There was still some snow at the last bit but the lake was beautiful and we had it to ourselves.



Atmospheric Chemist friend and I met in Alaska where I was attending grad school and he doing a post-doc. It's one of the serendipitous things in life that finds us in the same state. He's altogether glad to come west to cooler elevations this time of year as I was happy to join him in the desert regions in early spring.

I came home to good news - my mother's latest eye appointment went well and she did not need additional surgery! She has now had 4 surgeries on her right eye and one on her left (and will need additional surgery on the left once the right completely heals). And blessedly she no longer has to lay still with her head at a 75 degree angle below her shoulders! Her vision is recovering, albeit slowly, and the spectre of blindness fades from our thoughts. It turns out that a childhood illness - ricketts - which the doctor did not believe she had (it has been an uncommon thing in North America for some time as it caused by malnutrition) made her more susceptible to retinal detachment. Who knew?

AK to CO Travel Map

Here is a very rough map of my road trip (courtesy of AAA/ CAA). It's the only map I was able to find that included all of the areas I drove through. My approximate route is the thick grey line. Do you guys want more detail? I can provide it but it will have to be a state by state, province by province map. This at least should give you a good idea - just imagine it that I pretty much followed the spine of the rocky mountains all the way down (they go north-south until the Yukon at which point they turn and go east-west).



Photos are up finally! They're posted on the original posts. Let me know what you think.

Day Hikes

'Tis the season to hike. My skis are finally put away. Technically, I could probably continue to find patches to ski but I'm done with the season. My ice skates and sleds, my skijor lines, sleds, and other winter paraphernalia are packed away.

It's hot and I try and keep biking to the cooler hours of the day but as the snow melts out of the high country there is increasingly more and more places to hike. My first day hike of the season was a mild 9.5mile round trip hike before and evening shift at work. It's gorgeous and there is lot of water for happy dogs. My friend is training to hike the JT trail so she carries a 40lb pack mostly filled with spackle containers.

This weekend found me with another friend traipsing through a wildflower strewn meadow and then up the hillside. I don't know the mileage for this one because when the batteries in my camera dies the GPS was sacrificed and we weren't exactly following known routes the entire time. We flushed a sparrow from it's nest and bend down to see four beautiful thumbnail sized, pale blue eggs with brown splotches. we come across a deer skull with blue flowers blooming through the eye socket and we get wet and muddy. We had a lovely picnic lunch along a lakeside where two pooches swim and the Parental Pooch dips her toes (she's supposed to be a water dog but she'll only get in up to her ankles).

From L to R: Parental Dog, Summit, & Disreputable Dog

At some point in the afternoon while we are gaining altitude the Disreputable Dog suddenly keels over in the duff and has a seizure. I catch him before he hits the ground and hold him, leaving the other dogs to my friend. The whole thing lasts about 10 minutes and I am so focused on him that I don't notice the mosquitoes feasting on me. And then he's okay and we are a bit shaken. My friend recently lost a good dog friend and I, while having seen the DDog do this before, still find it jarring and a bit scary. We take this as a sign that we should turn around. We go slowly at first as the DDog is a bit wobbly on his legs but by the end of the hike his tail is in the air again and he is happy.

Deer skull, baby deer tracks, coke kiln, sparrow eggs

We stop, on our way home, at the little cabin owned by the Original Marlboro Man and gather some rhubarb for pies and make sure that the lawn has not dried out entirely. I come home to relieve my dad from caring for my mother and she and the Disreputable Dog sleep side by side the rest of the evening.

Cataract Surgery

My mom had her second (left) eye operated on for her cataracts on Thursday and this time it didn't go so well. By Saturday her vision was going black and when we called the emergency hotline they wanted us down in Oil Drill City immediately. Upon examination it was confirmed that her retina has detached and she immediately needed more surgery. That went fairly well although it's extremely painful and now she must lie on her side with her head at a 75 degree angle for 3 days and it may take as long as 3 month for full recovery. She's in a lot of pain and she's also very nauseous - it makes me wonder how eye sight relates to balance as it almost seems as if she's got motion sickness.

Speaking of balance. I highly recommend the book "Balance: In Search of the Lost Sense" by Scott McCredie. I'm in the middle of reading it (if I had finished it I would know the answer to the eyesight question). Scott was one of the authors we had who came to sign and speak about his book. It's non-fiction and it is really well written not to mention fascinating because balance is really something with so many unknowns still.

Mile 4,113/ Km 6,619 or Journey's End

Well, here I am in Colorado again. While I was gone summer has come and with it the heat. It's not really heat - it just feels like it after being in the cooler north. It seems that almost the entire west has had a long winter and a slow spring. My rear hurts from all that sitting. I'm tired and dusty and both the Disreputable Dog and I have full blown hay fever. We are welcomed mightily by the rest of the pack. The Disreputable Cat comes bolting down the stairs along with the Parental Dog. When I take the dogs out for a walk both of them are wagging the tails fiercely, happy to be together again. My parents, too, are happy to see us.

The next day I open for the bookstore and find my boss already there brewing coffee. It seems, as the day wears on, that there was great deal of uncertainty that I would actually come back. Bets have clearly been made. Perhaps they, and you, knew what has taken me a little bit longer to see clearly - that I will be back in Alaska sooner then later.

PS - Pictures coming soon!!

Mile 3,276/ Km 5,272 (Montana, Idaho, Utah, Colorado)

The last day of travel - I had to hammer it out. By now my rear hurts and I'm just ready to end the trip but somehow the miles I had left were more then I expected so I did about 800 miles in one day - most of the US portion of the trip.

Montana is a memory zone...I drove through the once small town that used to be my refuge a summer when I did field work in the eastern prairie. The camp was small, the person coordinating was temperamental, and the prairie vastness rolled on forever such that I thought sometime my soul would roll out and away and I'd never be able to reign it in again. I could understand how those prairie wives who were stuck in one place and could not travel like their menfolk might lose their minds. I spent the 4th of July in this town, alone. I attended a bluegrass festival in the local park and then camped by the river, lighting a lone sparkler by myself at twilight.

Idaho is a short portion of our drive but we are back - or is it still - in the mountains. I've spent time here too and I watch for the pronghorns and the coyotes.

We hit the heat in Utah - we forgot about heat and it was stifling. The poor Disreputable Dog was panting heavily and the rivers we stopped near for him to swim in were lukewarm and didn't cool him very much. Utah was full of more road construction then the entire rest of the journey - and I had thought it was bad in the north. I almost got lost a few times with the detours. Utah is another memory place, and the heat. I wonder now, how did I ever live in this heat - spending full days out in the sun with no refuge? I watch the prairie dogs on the roadside catching grasshoppers with fondness.

Utah Photos

In Utah bright red poppies burned through the desert gardens. We stopped at a river for a swim and at a nearby gas station I jokingly asked a guy with Washington license plates "Are we there yet?" and he said not yet, took a look at my license plate and asked whether I had ferried down. When I replied no he jabbed his finger at me an exclaimed "You guys are CRAZY". Well, I've heard that before.

Colorado Photos

Just across the Colorado border I see a semi truck rolled over and burned, emergency vehicles surrounding it. Clearly it has burned a huge swath of the median and their is less then a 3rd of the truck left. I hope that the driver is okay. I pass by the red rock country that started in Utah - the country I always yearn for in the spring with it's eons of history running through the stone - and into the grey cliffs which as a kid I used to imagine were precisely what dinosaur skin would have looked like. Of course, now we know that it would have been a lot more colorful as their relationship with birds has become more known but the texture of these cliffs still reminds me of skin. Now I'm in the home stretch and soon I am home, in the cool of the evening, the scent of my parents' garden wafting out at me. We park and end the day and the journey at mile 4,113 / km 6,619.

Anxious Days

An unplanned break from blogging. The anxiety of not knowing where I'm going. Now that the holidays are officially over it lodges somewhere in my breast bone. I try to make a schedule of my days, feeling it somewhat empty, but needing to create some sort of structure nonetheless, needing to make sure I get applications in, and get out and exercise in the sun, and keep my sanity. So my schedule for the moment is this, up in the morning for running, currently mostly an indoor activity, then job applications until hunger for lunch over takes me, lunch and then out with the dogs on a hike or a ski or a snowshoe, out where the sun is. I've been dragging my mom with me often on these trips but also often go alone. Then in the afternoon I want to work on publishing my thesis. I haven't actually done that yet, mostly I do more job searches (I'm not keen on interacting with my erstwhile advisor who is sure to tell me what an idiot I am - and who thinks the work should age! Science is not like cheese or wine, generally it does not age well - and so must take myself firmly in hand and get this done). Then an evening walk with the dogs, I've ceded the morning walks to my father to whom they seem more important although I miss them dearly but it seems we both need our alone-time walks with the dogs as grounding moments in the day and you simply cannot tell one dog that it is going to be left behind while the other one goes out.

I've spent many of my evenings with long ago friends, many of whom I haven't seen in 15-17yrs. It's a bit of a shock but it's also grand fun, catching up with these people who I haven't seen in a decade or two although I have a hard time answering that question of what I'm doing now and where I live.

There are things that are hard for me to adjust to: the excessive use of cars as the two ends of the valley are quite interconnected though it takes an hour of driving to get from one end to the other. I miss my bicycle and find it strange when people are shocked if I take the bus, a system which has greatly improved since I last lived here. One of the things I find the strangest of all is that people here seem unable or unwilling to express a firm opinion on something, as if they are afraid to offend someone. I am not sure if this is usual to the rest of the lower 48, or a peculiarity of this particular region, any more as I have been in Alaska too long. Alaska does have it's unique culture and perhaps it is the lifestyle which allows people to express differing opinions and agree to disagree and then get on with it. Or maybe it's something else entirely.

My niece & nephew were up for the weekend, including Friday, and they absorbed all of the time I and their grandparents had to give while my sister & bother-in-law were off to their own devices, mostly skiing. They are perfect mimics of their parents and every now and then it is as if they are challenging their very spirits. I spend hours dragging them outside whether it is a walk with the dogs (and them being pulled on sled for most of the way) or careening down the driveway, or building snow forts. I simply cannot remain for the better part of a day inside when the sun pours in from the south and they are full of wild energy or when the snow comes down in such thick clumps it obscures our footprints before we return. I don't think they are used to all this outdoor time but I simply get itchy the longer the shadows grow and I am indoors.

Winter Hike

The muffled silence of a snowy winter day, thick flakes, falling like powdered sugar sifted from on high, freshly minted footprints in a magical world of white draped boughs of trees and the joyous bounding of dogs. I'd forgotten the wonders of a pinon-juniper forest, of the sagebrush draped landscape. Of trees with vermilion colored trunks twisted like old swinging ropes with age, the red dirt beneath the snow brilliant in it's contrast. There, too, were the round holes created by the Northern Flicker, a woodpecker, soft tooth scratches of the porcupine along the lower reaches of a tree, and the long claw marks of a black bear marking it's territory. The birds and rodents were absolutely silent, safely asleep in their holes and perches, waiting out the brunt of the storm. As we reached the top of the cliff the clouds began to rise off the valley below, exposing the sinewy wind of the river below and the frosted ranch fields and even the damp asphalt of the highway which from that distance looked like a kind of river itself but the mountains remained shrouded.

* * * *

On a totally different note, many of you will be pleased to hear that I have joined a blog feeder. I am still trying to figure it all out. Why do some blogs have three or four feeds while others only one? Is there one format that is better then the rest (rss versus atom, etc). Please enlighten me if you know.

Rocky Mountain Brilliance

Hoar frost on top of river ice

The other day I was talking to my bother-in-law (no, that's not a typo). I was exclaiming about how bright it is outside. He looked at me as if I was daft. "It's snowing out" he said "and it's cloudy. There's no sun." And he was absolutely correct. When it's overcast and snowing out here it is sooooo much brighter then anything we've seen in a long while in the latitudes north of 60 degrees even when the sun is out in full force. I was forced to wear sunglasses on cloudy days initially because my eyes could not adjust to the beautiful brightness. When people ask me why I'm hear I tell them it's to replenish my Vitamin D and I'm not entirely joking. It's brilliant here when the sun is out and high in the sky reflecting off the powdered sugar light snow. It's such a gift, all this daylight, all this time to get out and play under wide skies when I get bogged down by job applications and need a break.

It's interesting to me, having grown up in this valley, how I seem to have lost it's topography. I once knew it's trails and secrets intimately. If someone suggested a place to hike or ski I could imagine it's slope, the trail head, the creek's that flowed past it, whether the snow stayed late or melted early. Now when people mention these names I can no longer remember how to get there or any of the other details. It saddens me. I have been so many places and explored so many places since I left that those I grew up with are no longer so definitive in my mind and yet the spirit of them remains. So many of the open places have gone, vanished beneath urban sprawl. It seems that every subdivision is named after the species of wildlife it displaced: Elk Run, Coyote Lane, Cougar Hollow, Springing Deer. There are new trails through the pasture lands and the golf courses, rails to trails, new-old places to explore.

Running at Altitude

I went running today the first time since I arrived. I find so difficult to remember that I have been living at sea level for some time now and must give myself time to adjust to the altitude before pulling on my running shoes. I think the fact that my sea shore was surrounded by mountains fooled me into thinking I'm at a higher altitude. But now I'm at least 6,000 feet above sea level and I find that even pulling my niece and nephew up the parental driveway after crazy sled rides left me short of breath (that's my nephew in the picture below).

I am delighted to find myself alone with the animals tonight after days of chaos; lovely chaos but I am fond of my solitude. We've had three birthdays to celebrate in among the holiday celebrations and the house has been full and overflowing with people of all ages and volume. Tonight everyone has plans but me. I went running and am now cuddling with the Disreputable cat to the right of my lap, the Parental cat to left and the Disreputable Dog and Parental Dog at my feet snoring slightly. The Parental Dog is a bit worried that the mainstay of her pack is gone. I am finally in my own space well enough to be ready to visit with other old friends who have flocked to the area to visit family over the holidays. Sadly, I am a bit late for some of them but try as I may I am never ready for these reunions when I first arrive, always needing a few days to acclimatize and adjust to being in this space and making it work for me. Not that I haven't been seeing people every day but they've mostly been due to the planning of others, not the ones I must self initiate. I haven't even pulled on my skis yet since every time I plan to do so I seem to get roped into some other task.

I am finding it somewhat disconcerting how everyone else seems to have plans for what I am going to do next. It usually involves moving closer to them. My sister wants me to be close enough to babysit but not close enough to drop in unexpectedly. Another friend hopes I'll be here until April. My Alaska friends are all convinced I will be back shortly and have even started sending me rental notices for Fairbanks and Anchorage and my lower 48 friends are convinced this means I'm leaving the state while my out of country friends are cajoling me to move near them. Only my out of country friends seem to understand that I could end up ANYWHERE. Really, I could. It was breaking news up and down the extended family telephone wires over the week and I know there will be much gossip about it. I am only glad that they have found something else to discuss other then what they see as my old maid-ism. I am generally the black sheep of the family, the person who lives the exciting life that everyone else enjoys talking about but are secretly relieved they don't live.



I have been spending extended time with my niece and nephew. My niece's fondest desire was to have the Disreputable Cat sit on her lap and she finally got her wish. The cat barely fit but she was game and my niece has never sat stiller for anything in her entire life.