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.
"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.
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