hot tub with a view

Our friend is house and dog sitting this weekend - at a house on the water with a hot tub.  Because the house owners are nice, welcoming people, they are ok with our friend having guests over, so we headed over for a visit (watched a movie) and a long soak at sunset.  You can't see it from either of these pictures, but you can actually see Mendenhall glacier from the deck (it's just to the right of the frame, across all the water, in these two pictures)

The homeowners have a cat too - and according to the house-sitter, she's pretty skittish around new people...Except for Steve the cat whisperer, apparently.  As we were watching the movie, the cat came out of hiding, crawled up on Steve's lap, and sat there purring for half the movie.  She avoided the rest of us.  Steve professes to hate cats, but it's soooooo not true. 

Gold Rush Days

A timed event - whomever gets through the log fastest wins - winner was about 33 seconds!

There's an annual outdoor celebration of Juneau's historic traditions - logging and mining - called Gold Rush Days.  It's held at a park on Douglas Island, and there's logging and mining contests to watch and of course food stalls and fun bouncy houses for the kids.  It's free, so we went on late Sunday morning to watch the logging activities (apparently mining was Saturday).

There were pole climbing events, chainsawing, hand sawing, and vertical chopping (with an axe)...all timed events.  

 

 

The winner took only 16 seconds!

Fastest time up wins - winner was ~30 seconds.  He practically ran up it!  Note - no safety line.

There's a lot less logging happening in SE Alaska these days, but it's traditionally been a big industry up here.  This t-shirt made me laugh:

Earlier in the day, we took Seca out to Auke Recreation Area for a walk.  There was a really low tide this morning, so we poked around in the tide pools a bit, and Seca found a nice, stinky and cushy spot for a rest...in the wet kelp!

There must be a salmon fishing opener today because there's dozens of small gillnet boats heading out of the harbor this morning.  We watched a steady stream pass by for at least 25 minutes. 

Steve, relaxing.

 At really low tides you can see rings of color from the different vegetation that's exposed.  The orange stuff is kelp, I don't know what the inner light green ring is - some sort of algae maybe?

Beach birthday party

The birthday boy

Yesterday it was our friend Bryce's birthday.  There was a small party at his sister's place, which is located on the water at Indian Cove.  It's a beautiful spot, and they have a fire pit down at the water.  It was a low key night, watching the harbor porpoise and salmon splashing around in the cove.  I know I say it a lot, but it's so beautiful here. 

 

Earlier in the evening there were a bunch of thunderstorms that passed through the area, which is very, very rare for Juneau.  Sometimes they'll go years between thunderstorms, though there was one last September, just after we got here.  But, the clouds made for a gorgeous sunset when the sun finally dropped below the cloud horizon and was still above the land horizon.  This is a first for me - a rainbow at 10 pm!

Too hot! But we hiked anyways...

 

This weekend it was sunny and, *gasp*, hot!  Ugh, too hot, if you ask me.  I think it only hit about 80 in the sun (and 70s in the shade) but it felt like an inferno.  We hiked the Perseverance Trail, same one we did last fall.  Obviously there's a lot more snow on the mountains this time of year, which means the creeks and waterfalls were all gushing.  I put on a ton of sunscreen, unlike most of the rest of the city.  Apparently, all the stores are out of aloe after this weekend!

There's a black bear with two cubs that's been seen a lot in the area, but we didn't see them, or any mountain goats either.  We did hear what sounded like a porcupine crashing through the underbrush though.  Despite not seeing any wild animals, there were so many flowers in bloom!  Beautiful!

 We saw these green plants in Wyoming too...I don't know the name, but I think they're pretty.

 

This is the end of the trail.  It used to continue a bit farther (though not much, I imagine) but a landslide from the hill on the left dropped boulders in the creek bed and altered the flow.  Now the boardwalk is submerged, even in fall when flow is much lower. 

land of the midnight sun

I took this picture at 10:05 pm...Without a flash and without a long exposure or tripod.  I just can't get used to it being light so much of the time.  Seca loves it though!  She'll sit outside as long as we let her.  Also, notice in the photo our new, improved front porch.  It's kind of messy out front because we were taking out the carpet and carpet padding and doing some re-arranging.  I've got some pots of lettuce and herbs plants now too.  They're growing incredibly fast with all this sun - about a 1/2 inch a day for the lettuce!

Sunset making the clouds light up...at 10 pm.

Don't fall in

Examining our survival suits, in preparation for a drill.  Have to get it on in 60 seconds or less!

Weds and Thursday I had to go to the safety class in preparation for that research cruise I'll be doing in August.  It was a good class - I learned a lot.  I think some of us in the class had a few 'scared straight' moments after we had to watch several videos of actual helicopter rescues, ships and boats sinking (one went down in only 40 seconds!), and listen to real 'mayday' calls.  It was sobering.  You don't mess around up here, the water is cold, help is often a long ways away, and weather can go from nice to awful in minutes.  I think the hardest was listening to the mayday calls, right before we had to practice our own.  The sheer panic in the voices on the real calls was chilling.  All of the callers we listened to were rescued though.

Day one of the class was all classroom time - lecture, video, practicing mayday calls, going through emergency scenarios and talking out what we'd do.  Day two was fun - we got hands on practice with lighting flares, shooting flare guns, putting out fires, then the best part, working out scenarios in teams on a boat tied up at the dock - like a fire (without a real fire) that then escalated into an abandon ship drill.  We all had roles, had to grab specific equipment, put on our survival suits, then eventually jump into the water.  Once in the water we got to practice maneuvering ourselves (surprisingly hard to do), flipping a life raft, climbing in, and making human rafts and chains in the water (so you stick together and are more visible).  Because none of the water stuff was in a real situation with wind and waves, it was fun, and the suits keep you warm and floating high in the water.  But all that rolling around and maneuvering in stiff suits in the water (and out of the water) is exhausting!

I'll try to post more pictures from the in-the-water training, when I get copies from the guy taking them!

Sunny sunny Sunday

Eagle beach, Chilkat mountains in distance

Wow, hello June!  I can't believe how time is flying by.  We're 12 days away from the longest day of the year (June 21).  Last night we went over to a friend's house and ended up staying until midnight.  When we walked outside to the car it was shocking to see that it was still twilight out...not bright enough to drive without headlights, but you could have easily gone for a night hike without a flashlight.  Official sunset is 10 pm and sunrise is 3:55 am.  This is so crazy.  I figure we're getting about 2 or 2.5 hours of actual darkness each night.  It's a really good thing we have blackout curtains in the Irv. 

In August I'm going on a leg of the sablefish longline survey.  We leave from Cordova, AK (on the coast, near the center of the map above) and will sample stations between Cordova and Kodiak.  I'm really, really excited to go, and this week I am taking the Vessel Safety/Cold Water Survival course in preparation.  We will be on a 150 foot commercial fishing vessel that has been chartered for the whole summer for the survey. 

We went for a nice motorcycle ride to the end of the road today.  Geez, it's so beautiful here when it's sunny.

Eagle beach.

 

Eagle beach state park.