EagleSong February 25, 2012

Doug has friends, peony farmers, who live at Trail Lake, which is at the base of Mt. Susitna. Mt. Susitna is also known as Sleeping Lady. The farm, which is their year-round home is only accessible by float plane in the summer and by ski-plane or a 2 1/2 hour snow machine ride in the winter. The farm is the first checkpoint on the Junior Iditarod. The friends made arrangements for a pilot to fly us to their farm the day the race started. They were a bit worried because the forecast was calling for them to get an additional 21 inches of snow by Sunday.

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It was a gorgeous day for flying and the views were awesome. We saw a lot of moose around the airport and on the way to the farm, as well as lots of snow machine traffic. When we left to fly home, we even saw one of the dog teams on the trail.

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A checker, a vet and the race judge were there to meet the kids and their teams and make sure they had everything that they were supposed to have in their sled and that the dogs were doing okay. We toured the farm as we waited for the first sled dog teams and mushers to arrive at the checkpoint. Other friends of theirs flew out for a cup of coffee or lunch. People here travel by place as easily and frequently as we do in our cars.

Doug watching our pilot fuel the plane

Plane skis

Ready for take-off

Mt. Susitna (Sleeping lady) in the distance
The snowy patch in the trees one of the rivers
The rivers become main highways when the freeze over. But there are always melted places and open water, so you have to be alert when riding a snow machine on the river, even in the winter.

Snow machine tracks

Snow machine tracks on the river

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Eagle Song
The home of EagleSong Family Peony Farm and EagleSong Alaska woodcarvings, an Alaskan wilderness homestead.
Click on this link for more info about Eagle Song:
eaglesongalaska.com
Click on "Tour of EagleSong Farm" for more great pictures. The water right in front of the house is where our plane landed on the snow runway.

Note the 1/2 oval on the left side of the picture. That is the landing strip which Mike has groomed on the frozen lake. He grooms a complete oval so the planes can land, taxi around to the house and them complete the oval to take off again (instead of a long, narrow runway where they would have to go the end and turn around to take off again.) He constantly has to keep the runway groomed so they do not lose their access to the rest of the world. 2 1/2 hours on a snow machine (one-way) is a lot different from a 20 minute plane ride to the outside world.

The large flat places behind and to the side the farmstead are the peony fields.

Our plane taking off to go pick up more people.

Chicken coop

Peony fields

The snow piles would be unbelievably high if he tried to scoop it all off the areas between the buildings after each snow. So
Mike grooms the areas by packing the snow down. It is four feet deep of packed snow. You have to go down about four feet to get into any of the buildings.

If you go to the website, you will see that Mike makes beautiful birch bowls and other wood items. These are pictures of the birch burls which they have harvested. They will be cleaned and shined and Mike will make bowls from most of them. The burls are formed when the birch trees get an infection or imperfection and the tree heals itself by growing over the problem. When they harvest them, they just cut them off the trees. No two are the same shape.

These are a couple of the huge snow machines that they use, along with the sleds they pull. The sleds can be expanded to haul things like lumber or other large loads. Mike had hauled 55 gallon drums of fuel to the farm on the sleds and had more drums to pick up and bring out to the farm. One trip takes most of the day. That is a long day on a snow machine.

Going down into Mike's wood shop

Our pilot was anxious to leave before all of the dog teams had come through the checkpoint on Saturday. When we got in the air, we found out why he was in a hurry. We could that we were flying into snow. He still had to make another trip back to EagleSong to pick up a photographer.

Snow machines below us on the river.

Cabins on the river

Fields near the airport

Apparently we got out just in time. The pilot made it back to Willow with the photographer. But the snow was so heavy that the pilot was unable to continue on to Wasilla to his house where he had a hangar for his airplane. He had to have someone pick him up at the Willow airport and drive him home.
(Remember the story of the old gentleman who was stomped by a moose at the Willow airport and his teeny tiny elderly wife rescued him by beating on the moose with a shovel? We saw him at the Willow airport walking his two dogs. The Willow airport is where the moose attack took place while he was walking his dogs. We did not see his wife with him, so he was on his own this time.)

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Mike was justified in worrying about getting the 21" of snow. But instead of 21", they got 36 inches!!! This pictures he sent us are of the Iditarod folks who got stranded there for a few extra days. They were unable to get out of there until Tuesday or Wednesday. All of the "guests" helped shovel snow. But that's Alaska!
They got another 4 feet last week!!!!!

Chicken Coop - (the same one that is in the pictures above)

X-Country Skiing - February 18, 2012

We went cross country skiing for my birthday last weekend. Our plan was to try some different different trails. As you can see from the pictures, it was a gorgeous day. We drove about an hour and a half toward Talkeetna. We first stopped at Fish Lake. We talked to a lady in the parking lot who had just finished her ski. Fortunately, she was a local and could fill us in on the helpful hints. We pretty much surmised that she was a regular, since she had just finished her ski with a baby on her back. This was a "lazy ski". It was about three miles around, but it was all flat. We were actually skiing on the lake, not on the ground around the lake.

This photo was taken from the parking lot as we approached the lake. The next three photos were taken from beside the snow bank where you can see that the trails drops off toward the lake.

View of lake to the left.

View of center of lake .

View of right side of lake.

The friendly lady in the parking lot told us to ski in a clockwise direction around the lake. She said that it would be a pretty view. Holy cow! She failed to mention that the pretty view was of Mt. McKinley, Mount Hunter and Mt. Foraker. If we had skied in a counter clockwise direction, we most likely never would have noticed this view, as we would have been skiing with the mountains to our backs. By the time we would have gotten to the other side of the lake and faced the mountains, we would have been too close to the trees to get any view of the mountains.


The friendly parking lot lady had also told us that there were some brand new trails just 3 miles up the road toward Talkeetna. So after we finished at Fish Lake we headed to the X-Y trails. These new trails had just been put in last fall. They went around X Lake and Y Lake (but not around Z Lake).
This ski was not difficult, but it did have up and down slopes. We were skiing on trails that are used as hiking trails during the summer, so we were not on the flat lake.

These pictures of Denali (Mt. McKinley), taken from the X-Y trails.

After our ski we stopped at the local grocery store for a birthday dinner of peanut M&M's and Pepsi. Awesome! Actually we did have reservations Saturday evening at a very nice restaurant in Eagle River. But we were having such a great day, we completely forgot about it. We didn't remember until the next evening that we had missed our dinner reservations.

We have had a LOT of snow here this winter.
These pictures are of some of the mailboxes along the roads.

On Sunday we skied another new trail at what is called the Moose Range. We didn't have a map for this one. We skied and skied for more than 45 minutes and never did get turned in the direction of what we thought was heading back to where we parked. The good news is that we could just turn around and follow the trail backwards. We still got our exercise in. The trail was fun, but did not have the spectacular views from our Saturday trails.
Doug was off work on Monday so we skied at Independence Mine at Hatcher Pass. It was challenging because it was overcast and the light was what they call "flat light". There was no definition or shadow in the snow. You could not see the groomed area unless you were standing directly on the trail. The hillside looked like one big glaring white sheet.

One whole hill is the sledding hill and is really packed down from all the sledding. A guy in the parking lot asked us if there was a safe place to take his daughter sledding. We pointed out the sledding hill to him. The reason he was asking for a safe place is because they have avalanches in Hatcher Pass. You would not want to sled down any old hill if you could not tell that the snow was packed.

All in all it was a wonderful weekend!!

Week in Review January 16, 2012

Wildlife in the neighborhood in January

Last Saturday when Doug got out of the bed, he looked out the window (as we always do - looking for wildlife and/or Northern Lights) and spotted moose tracks in the snow in our yard. The tracks were right beside our deck and patio door and led around the side of the house. We went from window to window and finally decided that the moose was no longer in our yard. When Doug went out later to scoop snow. he discovered the tracks led to the corner of the house right outside our laundry room window. The young (judging from the size of the tracks) moose had munched on what was left of our flower barrel in the corner. While the moose was dining in the corner by the house, he apparently got tangled in the extension cords of our outside holiday lights which Doug had placed "out of the way" off the sidewalk by the flower barrel. Doug found quite a tangled mess of cords on the sidewalk and the snow on the sidewalk pretty trampled down. It looked like the moose had quite a time extricating himself from the cords. Sorry - lots of evidence, but no pictures!

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On Sunday when the sun came up we found new visitors to our bird feeders. These are Bohemian Wax Wings. As you can see they are much larger than our regular customers, the red polls, nuthatches and chickadees. Doug saw one that was orange-red from his head to his tail. He did not stick around for a photo- op. We see pictures of them in the Anchorage newspaper every winter, but have never actually had them at our house before this year. A couple of them have been back a few times this week.

You can really see the red breasts and red caps on the red polls.

At first when the red polls were at the feeder, the nut hatches and chickadees flew away. But they are now sharing the feeder more frequently.

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We have had tons of birds, probably because we have had TONS of snow! Doug puts feed out every day. Sometimes we have 30-40 just on the porch feeders. They also feed on the ground under the deck. You can also see the red hanging feeder in these pictures.

Note the snow on the hanging feeder in the left center of this picture. The feeder is down the hill about 20' from the deck.

In this picture, between the porch railings, you can see the squirrel feed shelf on the tree about 40' down the hill. When the squirrel is not there, the birds help themselves to his feed.

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We have had some resident eagles in the tree on a regular basis. The first couple of pictures were taken 2-3 weeks ago. We went through about 3 weeks of gray,
cloudy weather. As you can see by the snow on the house roof, this was taken before our last couple of weeks of snow, snow, snow. But we do count our blessings. We do not have anywhere near the amount of snow that has fallen at Valdez and Cordova.

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These photos were taken on Sunday, January 15, 2012. Doug was outside chipping away at the ice on the driveway when he heard the eagles "talking" to each other. It is kind of a chittering noise. This house is four houses away from ours. You can see that the sun is out and the sky is blue. But it comes at a price. It has been about -15* all week and that trend is to continue this next week. It is VERY beautiful weather (if viewed from the inside). :>) And it is gorgeous outside if you are dressed for it. I have been substituting this past week and since it is not exceeding -20*, the kids still go outside for recess. They all bring their "gear" and out they go. Fortunately (for me), my current position does not require me to go outside with them.

Since the winter solstice (big party time here) on December 21, we have gained back 4-6 minutes of daylight each day. Actual sunrise is currently at 9:55 AM (it starts getting light earlier than that), and sunset is at 4:23 PM - 6 hours and 28 minutes -- not much less than a normal winter day in Nebraska. Of course, we will keep gaining until we are almost at 24 hours of light by June.

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Speaking of "Wild Life"

These photos are of the spot where I slid into the ditch on the way home from school on Friday afternoon. It wasn't really a wild ride. It actually happened in kind of slow motion. Those of you who know me know that I can usually easily drive my way out of something like this. Not this time.

It was snowing like crazy and I met a car in our neighborhood just two blocks from our house who felt that his half of the road was the middle of the road. I moved over to the right, not worrying about going too far, as there was a monster snow berm on the side of the road where the maintainer had made a ridge when he cleared the road. I figured I would crunch in the hard berm and know when I was over far enough. I forgot what I have been telling you - that Alaska snow is light and fluffy. The berm was not hard and crunchy. I got over just far enough that I started to slide down into the ditch, and there was no driving out of it--just sliding down and sideways. I ended up with my front bumper in the snow on the passenger side, tilted so I had to crawl up out of the drivers door, and with my wheels completely packed in snow so that I could not turn them.

Thank goodness for cell phones. I called my Knight in Shining Armor (aka Doug) and told him of my predicament and told him if he wanted to pull me out while it was still light out, he should leave the office immediately. (Note that there was not an option given whether or not he would pull me out, just WHEN he would pull me out).

Doug shoveled on the passenger side and I shoveled on the drivers side. Then I got back in the car, ready to try again. Suddenly Doug knocked on the window and told me to look out the passenger window. There was a young moose munching on the tree in the yard beside us (picture #2, tree at the left side of the photo. You can see how close he was. The two-rail fence would not even have slowed him down if he headed for Doug.

As we were digging, the school bus arrived and dropped off kids. There was a mom waiting to pick up her kids from the bus. As often happens here, she had all the kids get in her car, in case the moose decided to attack. No "don't get in with strangers" in this case. The moose started walking toward the bus and her car. It apparently looked up and saw all the activity and turned around and went the other direction (Whew!) Sorry, no moose pictures here either.

Pictures, finally!!!!

When we got up this morning, Doug did the normal check out the window and not only saw moose tracks, but the actual moose! He was at the house next door. The tracks showed that he had been in our yard right beside our house earlier. I did get a few quick pictures before he disappeared down the hill.