The Mainland

As mentioned in a previous post, we spent the last two weeks of July on the Mainland. I'll just say here, bluntly, that we tried to pack too many things into one short trip--including family time, shopping, fishing, cultural experiences, and camping.

And now I'm going to try to pack too many things into one blog post.

First of all, the ferry ride: We had the good fortune to ride on the Kennicott, the larger of the two ferries that stop in Kodiak, and I have to say that, while the trip was not without queasiness, it was smoother and more enjoyable than I expected. 

Guess who loves riding on the ferry?

No ferry ride is complete without whale sightings.

One highlight of the trip for Rainbow and for and me was watching T and his dad go dip net fishing for sockeye salmon. Rural Alaska residents, a category that includes us, can apply for a subsistence fishing license that allows them to catch significantly more fish via dipnetting than people with "regular" fishing licenses. 

When the sockeye are coming in, hundreds of people drive their vehicles on the beach near the mouth of the Kenai River. Whole families come. They set up lawn chairs and grills. It's not rowdy, it's not a party scene, but there is a feeling of celebration. These people are catching food for their families. The fishermen and fisherwomen carry their ridiculously large nets into the water, where they stand and wait. The fish literally swim straight into the nets on their way to the river. On good days, a dozen fish can be caught quickly and easily.

T's dad in his fancy dry suit

T and his dad waiting for the fish to swim by

T and his dad didn't end up going on good days, but they did catch enough to get some salmon in our freezer. I'm thankful to them and to the fish.

Rainbow sharing a snack with her grandpa while he takes a break from fishing

Girl needed a day of rest after her big dip net fishing outing.

Most of the time when T and his dad were fishing, Rainbow and I hung out with T's mom. We also spent some time in Homer, Alaska, a beautiful, artsy town at the end of Alaska's well-traveled Sterling Highway. T's parents live near Homer. 

Rainbow got lots of snuggle time with her grandma.

View from the playground at Karen Hornaday Park playground in Homer

This seagull relentlessly shadowed this sea otter, hoping to get some nibbles of the crab the otter was eating.

We borrowed his parents' truck and camper for a five-day camping trip with stops in Anchorage, near Whittier, in Hope, and at Skilak Lake. 

Shuyak Island

Kodiak Island, on which the town of Kodiak is located, is only one of many islands in the Kodiak Archipelago. This large collection of islands is about as big as Connecticut. In addition to Kodiak city, the archipelago has six villages. All but one are located on Kodiak island, and all six are off the road system. 

Most of the archipelago is uninhabited by humans and untouched by marks of civilization such as roads, electricity, and cell phone reception. This includes Shuyak Island, located at the northern end of the Kodiak Archipelago. Most of the island's wilderness is part of Shuyak Island State Park, which T, Rainbow, my parents, and I visited this week. 

So how did we get to such a place? Well, we chartered a six-seater float plane to take us there. Both on the way out to Shuyak Island and on the way back, we flew low enough over the land and ocean that I could see individual seagulls flying over the water. 

It's a strange feeling watching an airplane fly away after dropping you off on a remote island. 

We stayed in Deer Haven, a rustic State Park cabin located about 100 feet from a calm rocky beach on Carry Inlet. We were the first guests of the season and had to do a bit of housekeeping to get the dusty cabin inhabitable for our three-night stay. 

Amenities on the premises included an outhouse (with a door that had rotted off its hinges); an outbuilding equipped with a hanging bucket that could, at least in theory, be filled with hot water for a shower; a stocked wood shed; a metal sink connected to a bucket outside the cabin that could be filled with water; a wood burning stove; and two sets of bunk beds consisting of thin, dusty foam pads glued to wooden boards. The cabin's fresh water supply had been mostly cut off by the local beavers, so we were glad T had thought to bring 10 gallons of drinking water with us.

I suppose we would have been surprised if we HADN'T seen deer from our cabin, given its name.

This picture doesn't do justice to the golden evening light. 

Somehow, miraculously, we had four warm, spectacularly sunny days and spent most of our time on the beach near our cabin. We gathered sand dollars and looked for crabs and jelly fish in the clear water of the inlet. We made a fire on the beach each evening. We cooked our suppers on the open fire and roasted marshmallows while we watched fish jump and listened to Canada geese, oyster catchers, and loons call to each other. 

Marshmallows!

We went for walks in the woods and saw lots of signs of bears but, luckily, never came across one. It wasn't quite the right season for fishing in that area, but my dad still gave it a try for the first time in his life. 

All in all, the trip was everything a vacation should be. T and I were delighted to get to see the more "wild" side of Kodiak and to share that with someone else. 

On the beach with all of our wilderness gear, waiting for the plane to pick us up

Finally, a sunny day

It's been a while since I've written a post, and that is due mainly to three factors:

1. A ridiculous series of illness in members of my family beginning in November
2. Gloomy, cold, rainy weather 
3. Full-time work

That is not to say that we haven't been enjoying ourselves up here on Alaska's Emerald Isle. It's just that we haven't been doing much that is "blog worthy." 

Today we went on our first real outing in months, to nearby Anton Larsen Bay. There was no wind, the sky was a glorious cloudless blue, and we were quite comfortably warm in our winter layers. 

It almost made me like February.

Almost.

Female common merganser

View of the quiet and calm bay

Picnic in the car before our hike

Frosty rose hip

Walking along the trail--the plastic grates help keep it accessible for off-road vehicles even when muddy.

Heitman Lake

Realizing we were stuck in a bit of a hiking rut, we decided to head somewhere new--Heitman Lake. The trail is a 10 or 15 minute drive out of town and heads partway up Heitman Mountain to Heitman Lake. (You can hike all the way to the top of the mountain if you don't need to get back home for your toddler's nap time.) 

The trail felt pretty steep to our out-of-shape bodies (and especially to T, who was carrying Rainbow in a backpack carrier), and our feet were soon covered in mud. It was also rather overgrown with various plants including salmonberry bushes and cow parsnip, a.k.a. pushki. I live in deathly fear of one of us touching pushki, as it contains chemicals which interact with sunlight to cause itchy, painful burns and blisters on the skin. I walked ahead of T shouting "pushki!" ever time I saw one of these plants, which are often big enough that they tower over my head, along the trail.

Luckily, we avoided the pushki and enjoyed the salmonberries. The weather was warm enough that Rainbow got to spend some time splashing around naked in the lake, and we had a picnic at the top of a ridge from which we had a lovely view of the lake on one side and the ocean on the other. 

Rainbow didn't eat much lunch but chowed down on unripe crowberries (a.k.a. mossberries). Not particularly tasty when ripe, they are pretty terrible unripe, in my opinion, but she insisted that she liked them.

 Now that we have flipped the page on the calendar to August, we are keenly aware of the approach of fall, and it was nice to have what felt like a real summer day.

Kodiak Camping

The approaching end of summer (yes, it's coming) and a lot of gloomy weather prompted us, when we saw the sun peeking out of the clouds, to go camping one night each weekend these past two weeks. Both times, we chose Fort Abercrombie State Park because of the relatively low risk of bear encounters (more on that below) and because of its proximity to home, in case things went awry (it's on the edge of town and less than a 10 minute drive from our house).

I have been there so many times that I sometimes forget that the place is spectacularly beautiful. The State Park is quite tiny but still boasts great diversity: tall seaside cliffs from which whales and puffins can be seen (although, sadly, not by me); beaches with tidepools filled with crabs, starfish, anemones, and urchins;  wildflower fields; mossy spruce forests; springs and a lovely calm lake and military bunkers so old and overgrown that they have become part of the landscape.

We went to the beach at low tide, allowing us to walk far out into a rocky area that is usually underwater and encounter these rocky "steps."

This is where we walked--a little tricky with a squirmy toddler on your back.

The only downfall of our trip was sharing a two-person tent with a toddler who hasn't (successfully) shared a bed with us in nearly a year. She loved being in the tent and fell asleep in it by herself quite nicely, but things went south once we crawled in there with her. It didn't help me to get sleep the second time we camped when a park ranger visited our campsite to warn us there was a young bear prowling around the area. We never saw or heard any sign of him, although since then I've seen multiple pictures of the bear on Facebook. 

Despite the lack of sleep, all three of us felt rejuvenated by our

quick 24-hour forays into the "wilderness." My child stuffed herself with salmonberries, we roasted marshmallows and cooked fish in a fire and made pancakes with a camping stove and sat lazily on the beach and rarely looked at our clocks. It was life as it should be.

And now, without further adieu, a ridiculous number of photos of my child:

If your kid sits in a puddle, just take off her pants. Who cares? You're camping! Oh, and she's pointing to a tuft of grass saying, "That's a sea anemone."

She kept asking, "Where's the other one glove?"

Taking the ferry (take 2)

About three weeks ago, we tried to combine business and pleasure by taking a trip to the mainland to take Rainbow to an allergy specialist in Anchorage and to visit T's parents in Anchor Point. This meant taking the ferry again, something I was not looking forward to. My already fairly strong sense of foreboding increased when, the day before we were scheduled to leave, I was struck by an illness so awful that I thought I must have The Flu. (I didn't. At times I thought I had something worse.)

However, thanks to frequent and generous doses of acetaminophen, calm seas, and a selfless husband (he shared a tiny bunk with Rainbow who was so excited to be sleeping "next to Dada! Next to Dada!" that it took over two hours of squirming, talking, and singing before she fell asleep), this ferry trip was much, much better than the last. Once she was asleep, Rainbow slept fairly well on the nighttime ferry to Homer, and she was in good spirits during the day time ferry on the way back to Kodiak at the end of our trip. We even saw a few sea otters and several humpback whales.

While I spent the first half of our vacation sick in bed, T and Rainbow got to spend some quality time with Grandma and "Paka." T went halibut fishing with his dad twice and, as a result, filled our freezer with fish.

Rainbow and Farley were fascinated by each other.

 Once I was better, we did a little exploring of the beach at Anchor Point and some of the sights in nearby Homer.

Beach view in Anchor Point

Rainbow posing with a life-sized sea lion statue at the Alaska Islands and Ocean Visitor Center in Homer

Walking through the Beluga Wetlands on the edge of Homer

Sandhill crane--a bird that links my home state, Nebraska, to my new state. We also saw several moose and a porcupine on the mainland--animals that we don't have in Kodiak.

While in Anchorage, we did two very important things--got some specialty medical services that we can't get in Kodiak (maybe that deserves its own blog post) and went shopping. We hate shopping, but the absence of sales tax combined with a large number of big stores (Super Wal-Mart! Target! And Cabela's! Oh, my!) compelled us to spend a chunk of our vacation pushing carts down aisles.

Sunset in Anchor Point

I love Kodiak and still think it's one of the the most beautiful places in the world, but it was nice to have a change of scenery for a while.  We're already discussing our next "escape." But every means of it--boat, kayak, ferry, plane, four-wheeler, etc.--costs money, something that has been in somewhat short supply for us these last few years (yes, because of choices we have made).   

T and I still don't know how we will handle the challenge of island life long term. A lot of people--even those who have money to get off-island regularly--can't handle it. But we remain determined to enjoy life in Alaska as fully as we can and hopeful that we can keep calling it home for quite a while.