Yellowstone! (A bit late...)

I'm such a procrastinator sometimes. We went to Yellowstone National Park back in JUNE, and I'm just getting around to posting pictures now in August (though I'll back date it so it shows up in the right month). We met some family out there for a fun week of camping and exploring...and it was a great trip!  Yellowstone is such an incredible place - just so much natural oddity and wildlife in one place.

Steve and I arrived two days before the rest of the camping party, so we were able to set up camp and did an evening drive too.  This is the Midway Basin area at sunset:

And we also stopped to see the Old Faithful Lodge at night, along with sitting through an Old Faithful eruption.

Once Mark and Susan and the girls joined us, we hit a good rhythm - explore early, siesta and relax during the middle part of the day, and explore again in the evening. That way we were able to avoid some of the crowds and also some of the hotter part of the day.

Here are some of the places we explored:
Norris Basin

Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone:
Long exposure in the late evening...

Mammoth Hot Springs:
The Mammoth area has really changed a lot since our last visit. Many of the springs are no longer active, but there were still a lot of elk handing around!

 And the Midway Geyser Basin:

 This is Sapphire Pool. Incredible.

 

This is Morning Glory Pool. It's awesome from the air, and still pretty cool from ground level.

And finally, a road bison. These guys (and gals) just don't care about cars. They walked wherever (and whenever) they wanted. We also saw coyotes, maybe a wolf, several black bears, deer, elk, hundreds upon hundreds of bison, and a bunch of smaller critters. What a great place!

Kodiak

Work trips don't usually take me places where I can see friends, but once in a while the stars align. Last week I had a meeting in Kodiak, AK, and got to spend time with friends Natura and Michael, whom Steve and I met while living in Juneau.

They have an beautiful, sun-filled house on a hillside above downtown Kodiak. I loved watching to ships come and go, and could usually be found sitting by the windows staring through the binoculars. I even saw a sea otter!

They have six egg-laying chickens in the yard, and four more young ones that are in the house (in a dog kennel) until they have enough feathers to live outside with the rest. We spent some time trying to get them used to being around people and being handled. For dinner we made fresh pasta using some of the eggs from the outside flock.

The sun came out so we sat in the yard, enjoying the newly-build burn barrel. As the fire really got roaring, Michael realized he'd built the structure over the top of their house's PVC sewage pipe...but further investigation revealed there was enough soil and rock between the fire and the pipe to keep it from melting. Whew!

This is the main harbor, as the sun started to peak through the clouds. Kodiak is a gorgeous town always, but on a sunny day it's spectacular.

The airport for Kodiak is out the road a bit, so as you depart you get a nice view of the town (and the plane's propeller!). In 6 days there, there were only 2.5 rainy days - that's pretty good! My flight out was only 1/3 full, and I asked the airline agent if that was normal. She said 'Not at all, it's nice out so people delay their flights...then complain when the weather's bad and we can't get out!'. Haha, so true!

Admittedly, photos from an airplane window are never good, but you see such interesting things from the air.  The sandy spit in the middle of this picture is the Homer spit. The end of the spit is the ferry terminal, which is where we departed from on our ferry trip from Homer to Dutch Harbor and back.

I can't resist one more. This is just before Homer, I love the swirly patterns of the sediments and the rivers.

Juneau visit

I had a couple of school-related meetings in Juneau this week, so I went back for a week to visit. It was a fun, exhausting, and HOT week. It was sunny and warm every day except the day I landed...almost unprecedented.

The Maritime Festival was going on the day I flew in, and in typical Juneau fashion, I ran into about 10 people I knew while walking downtown.  Megan, Suzie, and Karson, enjoying the festival despite the rain:

Even the flowers are pretty in the rain.

I was fortunate to stay with friends who all have beautiful views...Indian Cove as the weather started to clear:

Then closer to campus, at Jane and Zach's house, we saw whales and sea lions from their deck:

My meetings went well, I got good feedback from my committee, and I was sad to leave. : (
The Juneau Airport has the best view...

Still looks like winter in the mountains as I headed back south.

Portland!

We met Mom and Jeff in Portland for a fun weekend. We spent Saturday driving around wine country and stopping to sample wines and local olive oil, then also stopped at a very busy Multnomah falls. My favorite place was Red Ridge Farms - it was scenic, good wines, and also good olive oil.

Sunday we dodged the rain and went to the Japanese Garden. Everything seemed to be blooming, it was gorgeous and peaceful.

Fishing in WA

I went out on a day trip with the hook and line survey for work...hook and line fishing for rockfish. We weigh, measure, and for some species, tag the fish that are caught by a bunch of volunteer anglers (myself included). We were fishing off the coast of WA, about two hours north (by boat) of Westport. It was a perfect day - not hot, and cloudy enough to not get sunburned, but also not cold. The only bummer was that I had to leave the house at 4 am to meet the boat.

Heading out from Westport

I'm a pretty poor fisherman compared to some of the volunteers that have been going out for a long time. My arms got really sore! I caught ~5 black rockfish, and a whole lot more got off the hook before I got them up.

Our in-house photographer was along for the day to try to get pictures of some of the fish for our website. She has a more elaborate photography set up for times when she's shooting on land.  Here she's trying to get a picture of a small lingcod.

 We also measured the lingcod and then sent it back to grow big.

 

Washington has a state waterfall

...And we went to see it for a quick overnight camping trip.

The eastern side of Washington (over the Cascade mountains) looks and feels completely different from the western side. It's dry and hot in the summer, much colder over there in the winter too. There's a lot of agriculture - apples, pears, cherries, hay and some beef cows, with some other things mixed in too (like wine grapes). And it's a lot of big, wide open space.

I'd heard about Palouse Falls (Washington's state waterfall!) last summer on a work trip to Spokane. Someone mentioned that it was close-ish...but I couldn't take a side trip in a state vehicle and by then it was too hot to visit there anyways. But we headed there this weekend; the highs in Olympia are only in the mid 50s to mid 60s, the temperatures over there are in the mid 80s during the day (and 40-50 at night).  It's about 4 hours from Olympia, so it's not exactly close.

We took I90 there then looped home via a southern route. This (above) is the Columbia River/Wanapum Lake where the interstate crosses. We stopped an Ginko Petrified Forest State Park, which is right off the interstate on the river. Did you know that petrified wood is Washington's state gem?  Me neither.

At the park there's a lot of petroglyphs that were saved from the rising water when the river was dammed and relocated to the park.

Palouse Falls is spectacular. It's in the middle of nowhere, yet there were a lot of people there. There's ~10 rustic campsites all crammed on a grassy spot next to the parking lot, but this is the view just a few steps down from the parking lot:

That's 180 feet of gushing rive plummeting over a cliff face.

An cliff face is where this family of marmots liked to hang out.

There's a bunch of informal (unauthorized?) hiking trails all over the area. We walked to an overlook of the top of the falls. If you're nuts you can follow a tiny footpath along a narrow ledge to the pool at the bottom of the falls (nope, not for me!).

This 'mohawk' of rock was pretty cool. The view of top of the waterfall is from below the far end of the mohawk, so the big hole to the lower right in the picture is where the pool of the waterfall is located.

 Looking downstream from one of the rims.

 Not much of a colorful sunset, but the pattern of the clouds was interesting.

Finally, two more pictures of the falls...Steve with the mohawk in the background.

And technically this is a selfie since our (intentional) shadows are seen on the cliff!

So the verdict: really cool place, worth the drive!

Hiking Olympic National Park

I turned in a draft of my spatial model methods and results yesterday, so today we went for a hike in Olympic National Park because it's 70 and sunny and perfect outside. Tomorrow, I leave for a work trip to Anchorage where it's in the 30s-50s, with a chance of snow. Got to enjoy some sun while I can!

We headed around towards Hood Canal, then up the valley around Cushman Lake to a trailhead that was pretty empty when we left, but really full of people and cars when we got back. It was also pretty cool and cloudy at the trailhead, and about 20 degrees cooler than the sunny day we had in Olympia when we left.  But the forecast said the clouds over the Olympic peninsula would burn off, and boy did they! This was the view of the upper end of Lake Cushman when we left for the drive back home:

We hiked along the Skookum river, or a fork of it, at least. We also crossed the river or small tributaries a couple of times too.

We've had some terrible wind storms here over the past six months, and the trail was littered with downed trees. We had to crawl up and over and shimmy under about four big ones that were too long to walk around (with all the undergrowth in the way).

I think the white trees are dead from a fire a long time ago.  I though they looked pretty with the clouds around. On the sand bar in the foreground there was a lot of elk poop, but we didn't see any elk.

On our way back out the sun started to peek out. The water color of the river was a beautiful blue, with incredibly clear water.

We stopped for a snack in the sun.

Happy April!