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

Over time, and in the Christmas spirit, we've been posting past Christmas letters. This one is the 2011 letter.

Happy Holidays!

 I’m not a great believer in exclamation points, but this seems like the right occasion.

 We try to write about things that have happened to us each year, and this year it seems the answer is not much. We had the usual good summer fishing, but less company than usual. Dean’s sister Martha broke a string of 30 years of summer trips to Alaska. That’s a non-happening of some magnitude. Half of those years featured sleeping on a futon supported by an air mattress supported by our basement’s concrete floor. So far as we know, though, that’s unrelated to her failure to turn up. She says she sleeps on that futon better than anywhere else. Very cool, supremely quiet, peaceful.  

She did have an adventure last summer that would have discouraged even the strong-hearted, which she is.  She and our nephew were fishing some distance upriver from us well out of  sight but near a group of three men. A brown bear/aka grizzly appeared below them coming upriver. This is worse than it sounds, because the only escape, short of scaling cliffs and bushwhacking through untrammeled wilderness without  a compass or a GPS, was downriver through the bear.

  We’ve been trapped in that situation before, and it doesn’t lead to anything good. One of the times we were caught, we were fishing on the Situk at Yakutat, a village on the Gulf of Alaska that is strictly fly-in and fly-out, and doesn’t – or didn’t then –have much in the way of population or tourists. We were about twelve miles east of town, maybe half a mile above the mouth of the river, and all by ourselves. Our car was parked where the road petered out at the mouth. An hour or so into fishing, a brown bear decided to become friends. He appeared upstream on the opposite side, coming down toward us. We very naturally retreated out of the river on our side. He disappeared. We waited maybe ten minutes, scanning for bear, decided he was long gone, and concluded that Dean could wade out and resume fishing (the deep hole full of salmon was on the bear side) while I stood watch. Dean waded about two-thirds of the way to the other side and cast, looking down his fly rod at his fly as it hit the pool. He also found he was looking along the rod right into the eyes of the grizzly, which had very silently insinuated himself into a deadfall right on the edge of the far bank. Which wasn’t very far. The Situk at that point was maybe thirty feet wide, so Dean was within ten feet of the bear. Bears are fast as lightning and good swimmers, so ten feet away was not a good location. 

We retreated again with some celerity, but the bear held fast. We had a .41 magnum pistol, and we decided to shoot in the air to scare him off. We aimed maybe thirty or forty feet above his head (you could do that on the Situk and not worry where the bullet came down, because you certainly weren’t going to hit any human over there on the bear side). The .41 magnum makes a heck of a crack when fired and is a large caliber, big enough that it lopped the top out of a
sizable spruce on the other bank, but apparently not big enough. Instead of erupting out of the brush and hightailing it, the bear cocked his head with an interested look and sniffed a couple of time as if he rather liked the smell of gunsmoke.  One of us asked the other what we should do next, and we decided the first thing to do was reload that bullet. While we were doing that, the bear got up and purposefully took himself downriver, where he proceeded to cross to our side and start up toward us.

With the bear athwart our only escape route, and possibly feeling revengeful for the bullet, what we  should do next didn’t require debate. We certainly weren’t going to wait for him and serve lunch. We did the prudent thing – we retreated upriver and we kept retreating until we had put a mile or so between us and his last location. Then we huddled about what to do next.  We knew there was a possible escape route upriver – another highway crossed the Situk at what was called Nine-Mile Bridge. But Yakutat is temperate rain forest, totally vegetated with devil’s club and similar evil if beautiful foliage, all growing higher than your head, deer moss hanging down into your face, and bear trails everywhere. We suspected night would come before we could bushwhack all those miles and reach the bridge, so we’d be spending the night in the open and, assuming we reached the bridge, there might not be traffic for days. So, eyes locked on our back trail in case the bear was really interested in us, we decided that we’d halt and hold for a few hours. Which we did. Then we started inching slowly and carefully down river toward our car, gun and bear spray at the ready, flinching at every intersecting bear trail, and jerking at every noise or wind-shivered leaf. Sort of a back-to-back progress as we held off imagined enemies.

 Martha’s experience was similar but wetter. The bear had them blocked and was moving upriver on their side. The factor in their favor is that a grizzly has never been known to attack a group larger than four (they say). So the five of them would still have been okay, if the party of three had not taken it into their head to cross the river to get away from the bear. Pointing out that this was a bad idea did no good. That left Martha and Don by  themselves and well short of the magic won’t-attack number. Their choice then became to stand their ground on a narrow, shaly path between a cliff and the river, or cross. There are places where you can cross the Russian river if you don’t mind wading across hard current that comes well up your thighs. But that was not one of them. I’ve gone out a little too far to fish a few times and been swept away by that force of current. And Martha is short. But she gamely tackled the river. When she got about halfway across, water over her hip waders, holding on to Don for dear life, the men ahead suddenly reversed course and came barreling back toward Martha and Don, shouting, “#%$@&&%#, the bear is crossing!!!!” And so it was. So Martha and Don had to turn and struggle back to the original side in 35 degree water, sloshing and freezing. You’ve heard the expression tight-jawed? That would describe her when she related the incident. If she’d had a gun, I swear she would have shot, not the bear, but the three men.

 I don’t know if this incident had anything to do with her breaking her streak, and she swears it was just coincidence, but it does lead to speculation.

 We are well. We have made several videos this year, including one on making molasses and one on a visit of a college group interested in sustainability during which we made soap, made hominy (both using lye), strung green beans on twine to make shuckey beans, caned a chair seat with hickory bark, shucked, shelled, and ground corn to make cornmeal, and used the corn shucks to make a shuck mattress. We have a couple of parts done of a video on hog killing, with at least one part to go, and are interviewing people for a proposed  video on timber theft. Our other accomplishment this year was a web site on our doings called Cornett
Media, thanks to a lovely tech person called Julia, who set it up for us, and trained us to use it. She did such a good training job that we have since set up two more sites, one for the non-profit we’re allied with, Eco-Outpost, Inc, and one on timber theft. You can find them respectively at http://www.cornettmedia.com, at http://www.ecooutpost.org, and at http://timbertheft.weebly.com. The videos mentioned above are on one or another of those sites, along with many more.

 For those of you who are just learning of them, or haven’t checked them in a while, take a look. And have a very merry Christmas and a great 2012.

 Dean and Nina

Update: Martha didn't make it to Alaska in 2012 either, so our suspicions are growing.