Blodgett Lake

Today was a good day for a 14mile round trip hike with two friends up to Blodgett Lake. On our way we passed several other lakes some of which, like the unnamed one pictured, reminded me of Newfoundland. It was a pretty steep return and as a result my knees ache.

Everything that Rain Promises

I must admit the last month or so has been full of some not so happy surprises. I complained once to a friend that I wanted a "boring life" for once - the kind of boring where you just don't have anything to say to people about what is going on in your life because everything is the same and everything is good. My friend said he couldn't imagine me living a boring life and that since I seem to be one of those people who things always happen to, I would probably get tired of it quite soon. However, since I have been through many life phases where it seems like every time the telephone rings there's more bad news I am adept at taking the little things in life and appreciating them for all they are worth. So here are some of the things I am enjoying this summer despite it's challenges (just in case you thought I was getting whiny):

Lyle & Mormon Lakes - a hike taken in the rain with both my sister & Life Long Friend

- being back in Colorado means the opportunity to go hiking and reconnect regularly with old friends & my sister
- being able to spend time with my sister all alone for the first time since she had kids (since 2002 in fact)
- getting to spend more then holiday time with my niece & nephew...which includes lots of wandering in the woods with baskets in search of anything edible or otherwise collectible.
- getting re-acquainted with old friends
- super sweet blogger friends who not only keep stopping by to visit but also give me generous awards even though I have clearly been absentee this summer (they will be passed on soon!!)

the first mushroom harvest of the season, from top left: a fabulous bright pink fungus growing on a wild gooseberry (not edible), golden chantrelles & coral fungus, mysterious white fungus (who is leading me to make all sorts of acquaintances) & more chantrelles, puffballs & boletes (otherwise known as leccinium)

- taking my niece, nephew, sister, and friends mushrooming in Colorado! How exciting is it to find orange chantrelles when the most common ones in Alaska are dark purple (commonly known as pig's ears)
- getting to eat fresh picked mushrooms
- fresh fruit! oh peaches! Oh apricots! oh plums! (I survived the lack of fruit in Alaska due to TreeThings, bless their hearts, who brought fresh fruits by the crate load up from California just for us fruit deprived Alaskans. There was also the abundance of wild berries which helped immensely but nothing beats buying fresh fruit from the orchard roadside stand.)
- getting to make hard cider (yes, that's with alcohol) & wine with said fruit with my dad
- lovely fresh garden produce .... homemade pizza (mine) with only the crust made of ingredients not grown or harvested by ourselves
- nightly entertainment by the Disreputable Cat who makes sure that everyone has their dose of cheer even if it means she has to swat them on the nose (most often this has to be applied to the Parental Dog who takes things quite seriously)
- having the Disreputable Dog at work as an official bookstore greeter

Here are the Parental & Disreputable Dogs being cute together.

*Note: the name of this post was liberated from the name David Arora's mushroom book Everything that Rain Promises and more... which is a good book for the beginner mushroomer and highly entertaining to boot

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?

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.

Of Doings

Grumph....working on uploading pictures of the trip but between being on the wrong computer and internet connection issues it feels slow in coming. Maybe I will try again tomorrow.

Went for a hike today, pre-work, around 9 and a half miles with the Disreputable & Parental Dogs and a friend from Peach Country. It was a glorious day and the first real hike of the season. Luckily the hike we chose was snow free - there is a lot of snow still in the high country and post holing is the name of the game if you go too high up in elevation. As that snow melts, rushing off the mountain sides in rivulets which lead to swollen streams which cascade into swollen rivers, the flood threat grows. Daily I watch as the local rivers rise and listen the the grinding of the rocks under the water which are being moved by the force of all that water. It's perverse, but I find much pleasure in it's raw power even when it threatens to take out a chunk of roadway or a local bridge.

The Disreputable Cat met her first grass snake. It surprised her so much that she leapt in a quick arc over the head of the Parental Dog and out of her harness in one fell swoop. I grabbed her as she bolted for goodness knows what. As soon as the surprise wore off she was ready for another look but I like grass snakes so I deposited her inside and let the snake make its get away and live to eat more bugs that destroy garden crops. After such excitement Missus Cat needed a rest and slept the rest of the day away. Meanwhile the Disreputable Dog finally got those staples out of his face and although the vet keeps telling him he should turn his scar into a bear story he insists on sticking to facts.

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.

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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.

The Bear Went Over the Moutain

I was singing this song on my hike the other evening when lo and behold I ran into a black bear going over the mountain. It's a bit of an odd coincidence. Now, technically, I was singing this song for the benefit of this bear and it's brethren, the better not to sneak up on them, but still. I was singing this particular song not because it's a good song or because I had an enthusiastic child along but because I was tired of my own prattle of out-loud thoughts and because the repetitive songs learned in childhood are a good way to keep up the noise level and keep thinking because I don't have to work at remembering the lyrics. (Yellow Owl's Clover [Orthocarpus luteus] pictured to the lower right)

So why was this bear going over the mountain? As far as I can tell s/he climbed the mountain because the view made it a perfect place for a latrine. Clearly it had been in use as such for some years as the piles of aged to new feces would attest. And once s/he was there, why not go down the other side? After all, there is a good salmon stream down there and some yummy watermelon & salmonberries along the way. Of course, maybe s/he was going to the other side but the exertion of mountain climbing prompted other bodily functions, we'll never know for sure.

Midnight sun hiking

Something I love about midnight summer sun? The fact that you can spend the whole morning of a weekend day being lazy (taking time with your coffee, your breakfast, and a lazy walk with the dog) and getting things that just cannot be put off any longer (laundry, filing, vaccuming, etc) and still get off for a hike at 3 in the afternoon without even pausing to think about daylight. If you'd gone in the morning you would have brought lunch, now it's going to be dinner. And 17 miles later you show up at your doorstep right around bed time. Love it.

Pushki (Heracleum maximum)

It was a gloriously sunny day the Sunday before last. It actually felt like summer. I and DOG went hiking as per our usual weekend ritual. The trail wound through deep, lush vegetation that was over my head (from all that rain we get). Normally I do not worry overly much about this vegetation and just plow through. It’s been so long since we had a sunny day though that I forgot all about pushki (also known as cow parsnip or Indian celery). It was such a warm day (okay, I know 70F/ 21C does not count as hot for most of you but I live in a coastal northern environment and it has been around 40F/ 5C much of the summer) so when DOG and I reached the lake and he went for a swim I decided to join him. It was my first dip of the year and I enjoyed the sensation of the cold sucking my breath away as the glacial fed water hit my body. After a picnic lunch we hiked back, me talking my thoughts out loud to warn any bears meandering nearby that we were deep in the brush.

That evening when I was doing dishes I realized the back of my hand hurt. On closer inspection I realized that rather larger brown blisters had developed all the way across the back of my hand. They looked like an infected burn. I racked my brain to think of when I might have burned them – I would have remembered if I had spilled something hot on them wouldn’t I? Ah, yes, then I remembered the pushki. The juices of this lovely plant contain a phototoxin, which with the interaction of sunlight, can create a chemical burn on the skin. Of course! And I had been brandishing through them all day, likely breaking more then a few leaves and letting the juices flow on a bright sunny day. The other disconcerting thing about pushki is that the burn can take about 4 hours to show up so you don’t realize your mistake right away.

As the blisters were infected I popped them with a sterile needle and then used a cotton swab to press out the infected liquid and mop it up. Then I put a pad of second skin across all of the burnt areas and wrapped it with tape. I got all kinds of questions all week about what kind of a fight I got into. Now it has healed enough to take the wrappings off but it is still an angry scarry red which looks rather like something large sunk it's teeth into my hand. I'm not sure how I only burned that portion of my hand and not more. I wonder if my swim in the lake may have helped as you can escape reaction if you can wash pushki off your skin before exposing yourself to sunlight. Thankfully DOG escaped it all together, an acquaintance's dog got in the stuff the same weekend and is intense pain, suffering full body burns.