At the end of each year, we usually summarize it for our family and friends. This is it for 2013.

We had a couple of nice things happen to us this year, and a couple of bad ones, but we’ll omit both categories in favor of weather, which loomed large, since we were present in Alaska for two weather records.

This year, we got back to Alaska in March with the intention of renovating our kitchen before fishing started. Said kitchen dates from the seventies and is a teeny bit inconvenient. This is the British understated way of saying the damn thing doesn’t work. If I was breaking eggs into a skillet at the cooktop, I had to walk the length of the long narrow space to toss the eggshell into the trash and to rinse my hands at the sink. (I guess the work-triangle concept had not penetrated Alaska by the seventies.) The oven was not self-cleaning and would not hold a full-size cookie sheet.  I also had cabinets around three corners, which meant majorly - isn’t that a descriptive word? - inaccessible storage at three corners. Plus other less than endearing characteristics.

Anyway, I had talked for years about this kitchen update, but only talk. This was going to be the year. Alas, it wasn’t. I won’t recount the obstacles we met, but they were many and chafing. So we ended our stay in Alaska with the kitchen the winner. Maybe next year.

What getting up there well before the end of March actually did do was remind us of how unreliable an Alaska spring can be. Usually by the end of March, breakup is over, the roads are clear, the snow and ice are mostly gone, and transportation  of the sort enjoyed in the Lower 48 is possible.  This year, breakup started, but underwent a change of mind.

Thanks apparently to the North Pacific Decadal Oscillation’s taking a notion to go into a cold phase, Alaska had a very delayed spring. All told, we had more than a half-dozen March thru May snowfalls, some substantial. Nothing like waking on a late April or May morning to fogging snow. In fact, Anchorage set a record this year for longest snow season. The first snow of this winter of 2012-2013 fell on about 9/27 last fall and the last one at the end of May this spring. When, before that last snow, the meteorologists alerted us that, if the predicted fall exceeded one-eighth inch, we would set a new record, most of us were thinking that if we had to get snow at the end of May, we at least wanted the record, and planned to cheer the snow on. We need not have worried. Parts of town got six inches.

Worse than the snow was the eight inches of packed ice that topped all the parking lots and sidewalks, and all except the main roads. Since we don’t winter in Alaska any more, we don't have studded or even winter tires. Most Alaskans keep theirs on until all the threat is gone (which is usually about 1 May, though not this year) so driving was very dicey for us, especially when the temperature rose into the thirties at midday and the top layer of the ice started melting on the roads. We had to stay off the roads when we could, and creep around very tentatively when we couldn’t. Even when we started off very carefully at traffic lights, the wheels sometimes spun. Then, somewhere in there, we got a streak of four snows in about a week, the first one six inches, and even the main roads were back to bad. It took more than two weeks to get the roads clear again, and another week to get the sidewalks clear. But there was still snow everywhere else, all the yards, roofs, etc

While we were cowering under unending winter, John Back, a Kentucky neighbor, rubbed salt in the wound by calling to tell us Eastern Kentucky was having a great April morel (aka dry-land fish) season. I've hunted morel mushrooms once, and I quickly discovered that there's a knack to it. Dean kind of got the hang of picking them out of the forest-floor debris, but I never developed that sight trick. In several hours of staring, I think I found just one.

After our one expedition, a friend advised us to soak the morels in salt water overnight, and I was glad I did because the next morning there was about a three-inch worm floating in the water. It must have been sheltering in one of the hollow stalks. I fixed the dozen morels three ways, fried like fish with cornmeal and flour, sauteed uncoated in olive oil and garlic, and sauteed plain in butter, and I think I liked the last one best.

Our morel hunt mirrored our one ginseng expedition with another Kentuckian. He would take us within a few feet of a plant and invite us to find it, and I would consistently fail. I’m about as good at finding dry-land fish as at finding ginseng, and wouldn't want to depend on either for a living.

I can’t leave the issue of the no-spring without giving you the Alaska definition of the seasons. According to Alaskans, there are two in Alaska:  winter, and Damn-Late-in-the-Fall. It sure seemed like that. But the weather made up for the infernal spring in June. We had long sunny days all month. In fact, we set another record. We virtually leapt past the old record for number of June days over seventy degrees, and a lot of us were complaining about the heat. For some reason, the seventies in Alaska feel more like eighties or maybe nineties feel in the lower 48 (sun closer? atmosphere thinner because of the ozone hole?) and Alaskans aren’t used to those extremes.

The late spring did do us some favors. We got some wonderful video of a pair of trumpeter swans that also arrived in Alaska too early. They landed on the ice at Eastchester Lagoon near here, and since they didn't have any open water to use for take-off, they had to hang around on the ice waiting for a lead to open and give them a long enough reach of water to flap and paddle their way into the air. That happened after a couple of weeks of cooling their feet on the ice, and they went winging northwest toward their breeding grounds, likely with frostbitten feet. We were hoping they'd establish summer residence there, as some very occasionally do, but no such luck.

Fishing was a mixed bag. The first run of salmon had decent numbers, but the water was a foot higher than normal and the current horrendous. To wade out far enough to get at the fish was taking your life in your hands, especially on a bottom as unstable as the Russian River’s. Dean went into the river four times, and once you’ve done that, you can’t get out on your own. You just can’t get up with that icy current pouring over you and pounding you down. Fortunately, there was always someone around to help. He was not close to drowning any time, but there were several close calls in other cases. In one case, a man’s chest waders filled with water and took him under, and it was a near thing. We’re used to falling in the river, but it’s usually not dangerous, at least to the extent we experienced this year. I had a hard time standing against the current when I was out no further than my calves, so I took the coward’s path and stayed practically on shore. Dean, however, will get out there nearly over his hip boots, with the inevitable result.

The bears made up for mixed fishing. We saw a lot on the river, and captured some very good footage, especially of a huge, blonde-colored brown bear (coastal grizzly) sow with a very tiny brown cub. He had a struggle following her around the river, but he was dauntless and plugged along.

Have a very good 2014.

Dean and Nina

A while back, I started running past Chirstmas letters because they often highlight the sharp differences between life in Alaska and life in Kentucky. The last one featured Kentucky, so this one returns (mostly) to Alaska.

"We were blessed with a lot of wildlife around our house this summer –  parka squirrels, Steller’s jays, ptarmigan, spruce grouse, moose, bears, and no doubt others we can’t remember.  They were a diverse group, but they all had one thing in common – they all resented us.  They come here in early spring, settle in before we arrive, and never adjust to our being here.  The fact that we own the property doesn’t weigh with them in the least.  Any time we leave the house, two Steller’s jays hop along behind us screeching all the way, and a parka squirrel climbs to the top of the carport and curses us until it is exhausted.

The bears and moose are mostly indifferent so long as we stay out of their way.  On 28 May, two baby calves were born in our backyard and we were able to watch them through their first few days as they learned to get up and, eventually, to walk in a straight line.  Once up, they had a particularly difficult time getting back down.  They would lurch around in a circle a couple of times and then, giving up any hope of getting down in an orderly fashion, just collapse, hitting the ground so hard they bounced.  They became agile after a few days and wandered away following their mother, but they visited a couple of times
afterward.

Another moose cow with a single calf came several days after her calf was born and just sort of took up there.  She spent several days alternatively sleeping in the front and back yards.  The two moose mothers had very different personalities.  The younger one with the two calves was very wary when we came out and would either watch us carefully or retreat, but the older one with the single calf didn’t put up with that at all.  If we stuck our head out the door, she’d make a blowing/snorting noise the way a horse sometimes does, and we’d retreat back inside.  One Sunday we were pinned in our house all morning; it was noon before we could venture out to pick up our Sunday paper. In both families, the calves always studied us with great interest and would watch us over their shoulder as they were being led away.

Although we never saw it, we had a big grizzly living in our neighborhood and visiting the houses.  One night, our neighbor Catherine woke to a noise and found it peering in her bedroom window.  The noise was apparently from a garbage raid, because she later discovered the bear had been in her cans.  After it left her place, it went next door to visit Ken and Katie’s garbage, and from there to a third house where it made a similar garbage raid and tore into a greenhouse.  That was apparently the end of its forays for that night, but Paula, two cabins down, found bear prints in her yard one morning, and Mike Gould, a little further down, found his garbage can opened and flattened (or vice-versa).  To me,  the most surprising thing about all this was not that the bear was raiding
garbage – garbage is their favorite – but that so many neighbors had stored their garbage outside.  Alaskans, even those in the big cities, generally know better than to do that.  We keep our garbage in the basement, and try to make the trek to the transfer station before it becomes so smelly it drives us out of the house.  We never put out bird feeders, either, because they are bear magnets.

We drove last week to Girdwood, a town about 60 miles from the cabin and about 40 from Anchorage.  Although it’s very close to Anchorage, Girdwood’s climate is drastically different.  While Anchorage gets maybe 60 inches of snow in a winter, Girdwood gets maybe 600 inches.  As a result of the amount of moisture it gets, it hosts a world-class ski resort.  Even in Alaska, where you can often ski into June, we were too late in the year for skiing (and don’t ski, anyway).  Our purpose in going was to hike the Winner Creek trail, which winds through a lovely rain forest of Sitka spruce, ferns, and Devil’s Club.  Sitka spruce trees grow mostly in the Southeastern Panhandle of Alaska and barely penetrate the Alaska mainland.  We were hiking through the very northernmost edge of their range that day.  Besides the ferns and Devil’s club, there were thousands of wild blueberry bushes, offering a berry picker an orgy of picking once they
ripened.  The trail reminded us of walking in the redwood forests of northern California.  There are no under-story trees, just the ground cover  of ferns, blueberries and Devil’s Club, and these tall straight trunks rising from that low ground cover.  The trunks are branchless for a large part of the tree’s height, giving that cathedral look and deep, sun-speckled shade of  northern California's forests.  The trail leads to the Winner Creek gorge, a spectacular and beautiful narrow gorge with high rock walls that compress Winner Creek down to as narrow as five feet in places as it thunders over the boulders in the gorge.  We stopped at the beginning of the gorge, although some other hikers tried to entice us a mile further by describing a hand tram that you can use to pull yourself across the top of the gorge and back.  As a special inducement, they promised we could stop the hand tram above the middle of the gorge and take pictures of the river way below.  I didn’t tell them what I was thinking, which was “Wild horses couldn’t….”, and “When pigs....”  We just wished them good luck and waved them
on.

We had a really good summer – much cooler than the last 4-5 years and with a lot more rain, which we like a lot.  Lots of times when we came back from fishing, we'd turn the heat on and it would be really cozy and pleasant.  We ran into several people from Kentucky this year, one from Pikeville, one from Lexington, and a couple from Richmond, one of whom grew up in Letcher County on Pert Creek and went to Whitesburg High School.  In every case, they had good fishing and lucked into seeing several animals,  including bears.

With all the animals, we accumulated some good video. Some of it is on this web site, or at the web site  http://www.ecooutpost.org. Any that isn't, we'll be glad to share with anyone  who is interested."

Update:
No neighbors were attacked by bears, nor have we been so lucky as to have  resident moose again, much less calves born in our yard. On the plus side, two years after this letter was written we made friends with our Stellar's jay by  satisfying his insatiable appetite for peanuts, and now he shows up the minute  we open the cabin and stridently demands his peanuts. He eats more than we do,  so we are thinking about filling coolers with peanuts to take up with us. That  way, we'll have a paying crop of peanuts on the way up, and of salmon on the way down, so we won't have to deadhead either way.