Darkness and Light

DARKNESS. Once again, Team Leslie has made it to the Winter Solstice, the darkest day of the year no matter where you live, but especially noticeable up here in these Alaskan parts: about five hours of daylight. (For those of you who have been hitting the hard eggnog recently, I'll do the simple math for you...) That's nineteen hours of night, people. Some serious payback for those days of sunny frolicking at midnight during the summer!

LIGHT. But what a chance to appreciate that invaluable visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum! From a morning bonfire with cocoa, through to x-country skiing in our forest, candle-making, fairy crafting, and Solstice celebration crackers, we took the whole day to unplug, play and connect with the light...

Indigo says, "Thank you bees!"

Working away to make...

Fairies!

Homemade crackers complete with a snap and a crown!

HAPPY SOLSTICE EVERYONE!

Used to it

So I think I've just gotten used to it. And by "it" I mean Alaska. This past month-plus without a post is not due to any crazy circumstances. Team Leslie did not get ravaged by a polar bear nor freeze to death on the way to an outhouse. In fact, we've been happy as clams. Alaskan clams. And that's the problem... when I'm not looking at the Alaska Adventure through a lens of novelty, it's much more difficult to find blog writing inspiration!

Team Leslie: Happy Alaskan clams.

WILD LIFE. Take yesterday for example. I walked out the door of my school building only to find a Mama moose and her baby blocking Ice Cream Newton. I waited patiently, said a good loud, "Heeeeeey Mooooooose!!!" and waited some more. After about two minutes they finished nibbling their exposed ground vegetation and moseyed (or should I say "mooseyed?") on their way to a new patch of delicious sticks. Now if this had happened last year I would have had the camera out, documenting every snort and stomp. This year I didn't think twice and of late have even budgeted in a few extra minutes to my commute time to accommodate happenings like moose in the parking lot, caribou crossing the highway, or traffic lights out due to a lack of power. Ho hum.

TEMPERATURE. Or this past weekend... Day time temperatures were consistently below zero while the overnight's hit thirty below. Last year we would have been a bit intimidated. This year what did we do? Skied out to a rustic backcountry cabin to celebrate the long Thanksgiving weekend! We would all play outside for an hour, and then hustle our bustle inside to warm up by the woodstove, drink a cup of cocoa, and do it all over again. Believe it or not, with sufficient layers and some exercise to keep the blood pumping to those exposed skin cells, a person can stand being outside in such frigid temps without much bother. Truly! And the benefits are outrageously cool:

• Sound travels better in cold air than warm because the air molecules are closer together, right? (Say, "right.") So with such cold temperatures, the sound traveled like nobody's business. We could howl at the moon or call out our names and they would echo off the surrounding mountains for ten seconds at least. Even better than in Death Valley. Hoo ya!
• The snow was so cold and dry on the lake near the cabin that we could ice skate through it like it wasn't there with only a delicate swooshing sound and a puff of sparkling powder. We were able to skate around an island on the lake, passing wolf and snowshoe hare tracks. Double hoo ya!
• The cold, high pressure air was accompanied by clear skies; coupled with the sunset gracing us in the afternoon, we had hours of star and planet gazing. The first night also offered up some Aurora Borealis action with shifting ribbons of green stretching across the sky. Hoo ya doesn't even come close to honoring this spectacle... no words do.

Admittedly, some family friends who were planning to join us made the ski out and then promptly turned around when their kiddos started howling in the cold. And the toilet seat was a little hard to take upon first sit. But the amount of pure joy and family fun made it one of our better weekends ever. And that's saying something. Some pictures of the venture follow, as well as a video which I believe can only be seen from the true blog site.

Scientific evidence... it was really f-ing cold.

But playing keeps us warm!

Past the carrier stage - Indigo can ski herself!

Come to Papa!

Yikes.

A morning skate...

Geared up again and ready to roll.

An afternoon ski!

Friends who stopped by one afternoon and brought their kids - can you find them?

Catching the sunrise after 10 AM.

MODIFICATIONS. I've already mentioned a few, but there are some elements to our day-to-day seemingly normal routine that might strike folks from the Lower 48 as "notable." Like always remembering to plug in Ice Cream Newton before going to bed so our engine block heater can get nice and toasty and she'll will start up strong in the morning. Or skipping buying bananas (always dark green) or fresh spinach (always slimy) at the grocery store. Trading in the bear spray (they're hibernating) and instead bringing a headlamp or flashlight with you if you're going outside past 3 PM (it's dark).  And checking the aurora forecast when we check the weather report. The list is probably much longer, but as I said, my novelty lens is a bit foggy of late!

RECREATION. For a long time you've heard about the skiing, the skating, the romping about on mountains. Well one tradition we've had in California, Oregon and now here in Alaska is the Pre Season Ski Movie Extravaganza. Either at an official ski-porn event with all the free schwag and a huge screen, or at a friend's home with buttered popcorn and little ones blocking the projection, we always manage to celebrate the coming snow recreation with a movie night. And often each family presents their own little slide show or home movie compilation of last year's shenanigans. This year things rose to a whole new level.

Act 1: Team Leslie's 2012-2013 Ski Season featuring some respectable shots set to the newest Justin Timberlake (for those of you who know J and his hippy curmudgeon ways, this recent genre preference may come as a surprise... I love it).

Act 2: The Dura Family's "The Next Generation" movie with a heavy focus on all the small kiddos slipping and sliding on the white stuff with big smiles and bigger helmets.

Act 3: Our friend and dentist Tom's movie with an opening scene from a vantage point within his plane. Set to AC/DC's Back in Black, Tom proceeded to share footie of himself and his friend (also with a plane - apparently the safe thing among bush pilots landing on snow fields is to always take two planes... just in case. Who knew the buddy system extended past kindergarten field trips?) as they flew and then landed deep in the Alaskan wilderness in the midst of some very impressive mountains on a blue bird day. They got out, toured above glaciers, climbed high on rocky outcroppings, and skied down chutes into beautiful wide open bowls, their GoPro helmet cams capturing clips that Tom wove together in a rhythmic back and forth that mirrored their figure eight turns. It was just a day trip. Wow.

Act 4 was the actual purchased ski movie with all of its high production value and X-games talent, but I was still stuck on Act 3. Mind you, we have some very althletic friends from other states who capture some darn good skiing moments, neon thongs and all, but this was different. Personal private planes? Monstrous glaciers? Wilderness the size of most countries? In your homemade ski movie? Only in AK.

So that's about it for now... the Alaska Adventure lives on for sure-sers. I just need to stay mindful of it, for you and for me!

Scat-tastic

SIGNS. I'll keep this post short and sweet - or rather, short and stinky. Team Leslie enjoyed a spectacular day in the mountains this weekend on a trail called "Hidden Creek." Apparently, we were not the first ones to meander that way... Not only did we see fairly fresh bear tracks (it had rained the night before, which we assumed would have obliterated older tracks, so these were likely from earlier in the morning), but we also stepped over tens of piles of fresh bear scat. Most of the piles were filled with barely digested cranberries - the usual fare seen in the poop of our large furry friends at this time of year - and I admit Indigo even reached down and touched some declaring, "Mama! You can't even tell that these passed through the bear's body!" This was followed by a "Yes, amazing," a deep breath and a scramble to find the wet wipes. Moving on, there was also one exceptional pile that had something besides berries! (Yes, I just referred to poop as exceptional. And I wonder why my kid isn't afraid to touch scat.)

Where Hidden Creek meets Skilak Lake.

Bear track #1 - in the mud

Bear track #2 - in the sand

I spy salmon vertebrae and ribs in the scat pile!

Upon re-reading this post, I realize that some of the more gruesome among you might have been secretly hoping for a piece of jewelry or a shriveled human finger... sorry folks. Just evidence of salmon consumption, which for us was a first! Although this does give me some great ideas for Halloween tricks up here...

Mix one cup of raw cranberries and a half a hotdog fitted with a plastic costume jewelry ring.  Pour mixture in a heap in the yard of your neighbor...HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Mysteries of the Unknown

MYSTERIES OF THE UNKNOWN. When I was a kid, there was a commercial on TV for some sort of book series. The catch line went, “Is it a coincidence? Or a mystery of the unknown?” Does anyone else remember this? The eerie music, the narratives about mothers knowing their children were in trouble even though they were halfway around the world… Well, lately we’ve had our very own Mysteries of the Unknown, some Alaska-style, and some, well, just mysterious. In the spirit of the coming creepy holiday, enjoy:

DIAMONDS. I have always been a strong dreamer – full color worlds with warm water and written words and people long forgotten in my waking mind. Well a few weeks ago I dreamed that my brother Chip had proposed to his girlfriend Kate with a purple diamond ring. I woke up the next morning and texted him about it, joking that perhaps I had intuited a real happening. He got back to me in amazement that no, he had not proposed with such a ring, but just that night before he and Kate had dined with a couple who had recently gotten engaged with, yes, a purple diamond. A coincidence, or…

BLOODY BROOK ROAD. I grew up in Amherst, NH on a street with a gruesome name and an awesome brook (clear, for the record) to play along. We then moved within the same town to the much more civilized "Manchester Road," preferably spoken with a snooty accent. (For those of you who know the Porn Star Name Game where you pair up the name of your first pet with the name of your childhood street to generate a fictitious porn star name, “Ruffles Manchester” has a much better ring to it. Yes – feel free to take a moment and try it yourself… strangely fun.) Anyway, this week I found myself on a road trip to Seward for work during which I befriended the wife of a coworker, Oakley. Oakley and I ended up chatting about growing up back East and we quickly determined that she had lived in New Hampshire. In Amherst. Off of Manchester Road. “The house with the red barn and the duck crossing sign?” “Yup.” Indeed, for a short while we had been neighbors. (I guess that makes us Porn Star Name Game sisters… It’s been a pleasure driving with you, Jemima Manchester!) A coincidence, or…

NATURE HEARTS. Back to my brother again. A few days after the purple diamond incident, on a camping venture in Acadia National Park, Chip snapped a photo of himself holding a heart-shaped rock and sent it to my mother. The same afternoon, while hiking in the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, I snapped a picture of a heart-shaped hole in a leaf and sent it to my mother. No, we had never sent pictures of heart shaped things to her before. A coincidence, or…

A LESLIE IN ALASKA. As you’ve heard me point out again and again, the State of Alaska is humungous. Twice the size of Texas. Stretches the length of the contiguous US. Yada yada. So keep this in mind as I share about “running into” our friend Sean. Running into someone in Alaska is like finding a needle in a haystack, accidentally no less! And that’s just what happened. Team Leslie had detoured from our normal route home from work in an effort to acquire a much needed rake. (FYI the fall leaves have long since bid farewell to their branches up here and are sitting in soggy layers awaiting the coming freeze to finish the job.) As we pulled out of the hardware store lot, a man wildly waving from a car window caught our eye. Sean! Sean, whom we had lived and taught with in Yosemite. Sean, whom we had played and skied with in Oregon. Sean, who in this case, had been invited up to the resort town of Girdwood to give a company presentation and had decided to add a few days onto his trip (his first to Alaska), rent a car, and explore a bit. Although he knew we had moved to Alaska, he had no idea where we were living up here (Shocking, I know, but he had not followed the blog!) and hadn’t thought to look us up. Driving through Soldotna, only hours after getting off his plane in Anchorage, he noticed Ice Cream Newton, my frizzy hair and J’s big beard and knew he had found the proverbial needle. A coincidence, or…

Sean, back in our Oregon days.

Just for fun, if you have a recent Mystery of the Unknown to share, please add it as a comment here. To me it feels good to honor the serendipitous moments that weave through our days. And for goodness sake, let us know if you’re going to be in Alaska! We can only rely on this trend of coincidences so much…

All Things Being Equal

EQUINOX. A day of the year when we have an electromagnetic balance... most of my life I passed this occasion by, not ever noticing the 12 hours of light matched with 12 hours of darkness. FYI, the Autumnal Equinox was last Sunday, September 22nd, at 20:44 Universal Coordinated Time. If you missed it, fear not; you can still look forward to the Vernal Equinox in a mere, six short months! (In case my writing does not convey it, please soak the word "short" in a serious bath of sarcasm. Our weekly weather reports have already featured snow. Winter, thy name is Alaska.)

Backyard campfire on the Equinox - note the darkness - haven't had that in awhile up here!

These days I anticipate the Equinox like a major holiday... something akin to Thanksgiving or Easter. We plan harvesting adventures; we create costumes and decorate our bikes for the potato parade; we get out the ingredients for our Equinox and Solstice breakfast of choice: crepes with various fillings (think homemade cranberry sauce and goat cheese... beyond delicious) - folded in half for Equinox, or spread out in a circular whole for the Solstice. Yes, we are secular holiday culinary nerds. Praise the Parsnip!

Kim and Jodi, cranberry picking in the forest... but where's baby AnnaBeth?

There she is! Happy as a clam stashed in the cranberry bush!

Some of our cranberry harvest.

Team Leslie - Ready for the potato parade!

Community garden goodness - bags of potatoes and cabbage!

Indeed, we may be some of the very few people in Alaska putting a holiday name to our now "second annual" traditions, but we are not alone in our actions. Stories in the work place revolve around weekends spent gathering low-bush cranberries, processing hunted meat, and picking green tomatoes from withering vines. And not just the crazy hippies like us... SUV-driving, fashionistas and gun-slinging (I love how often I get to use that phrase up here), wool jacket-wearing grizzly men... we all unite in this gleaning of the gardens and forests in an Alaskan frenzy before the frost. Compared to last year, Team Leslie is feeling professional. Gallon bags of berries and filets of salmon in the freezer, jars of dried mushrooms in the pantry, and some of that moose meat sausage that I found so unusual last year, in the fridge. Mind you, we did not kill or prepare the sausage. It was our generous neighbors again... freshly ground and spiced and delivered down the driveway, like the bear meat last week. Today I learned that the top floor of our neighbors' home, a sort of tower with 360 degree gorgeous-o windows overlooking the lakes and mountains, has a single small window with a sliding pane. Why? In case they spy a moose in the yard and want to jam a gun through the window and take a shot from above, of course. I bet Architectural Digest hasn't featured that one.

Fall Ponderings

CANNERS UNITE. After my story of panic, an unbelievable number of you wrote in with similar anecdotes, most ending in victory, of canning everything from apricots to salmon. Who knew?!? Sue in Chicago. Brad in San Fran. Jade in Hood River. Karen back from Europe. Rachael about to be married. All of you and more share the common bond of forcing mashed food into cylinders to eat another day! And it appears that you LOVE it! I am honored and somewhat skeptical to be joining this diverse and dedicated crew. Honestly though, thank you for your inspiration... Look out high bush cranberries, I'm a canner.

AUTUMN. Is here. Complete with falling leaves, pumpkin donuts at the Moose is Loose, fireweed whispies, and cool, crisp days. As some of you might remember from the blog last year around this time, autumn in our parts is pretty short lived; Alaska likes to showcase summer and winter, and then fall and spring get the short end of the stick. So unlike New Hampshire and Oregon where you get plenty of time to admire the foliage and visit various u-pick gourd farms, we have about 2 weeks to pack in the fall festivities and then it's time to bust out the snowshoes and the Christmas lights. Here are some glimpses into our attempt to live it up while we can!

No snow on the trail, yet.

Where's the snow? (Don't worry, he found some...)

High alpine color.

Fireweed seeds!

A good one!

Not a good one (but boy is it pretty!).

Couldn't help but collect a few 'shrooms on my ride! It's an addiction.

The epically fun game of leaf catching.

Sunset fishing (not catching) for Silver salmon on the Kenai.

Fresh-picked raspberry muffin making.

A really good deal - the neighbors took advantage!

MEAT. Today I had the following conversation with my dad on the phone:

"Guess what we had for dinner last night, Dad."

"Salmon?"

"No. Think a little higher on the food chain..."

"King Crab?"

"Umm, I think that's lower on the food chain. Well, I guess it depends on how you think about it... Anyway, we had black bear."

"Good God! (pause) What was it like?"

I went on to explain how we'd gotten the bear meat from our neighbor; he had just returned from a week-long moose hunting venture and, finding no one at his home, stopped by our house to share in his excitement. He had successfully gotten a moose, but had also gotten a black bear. Apparently his little family hunting cabin closer to the mountains has frequent bear visitors, so he was smart and tried for  both a moose tag and a bear tag on the off chance that he would get super lucky. ("Stayed up all night to get lucky..." Gotta love a little Daft Punk amidst a hunting story.) FYI, a tag is the hunting license one needs to legally take down a particular animal. There is a lottery for geographic areas with a limited number of tags given out for a season. Well, super lucky he was. And a few hours later he knocked on the door again with a bag full of meat - a "filet mignon" cut of bear. Wow. Our dear neighbors back in Oregon would deliver vegan cupcakes... this was different.

I've found myself thinking really hard about black bears since the meal, more than I've ever thought about a cow or a chicken or a fish. Mind you, our family used to celebrate "Vegan Wednesdays" when we ate no animal products on that day of the week for more than a year. J and I figured that if our family of three did that, it was almost like we were half a vegan! It was an eco-friendly, ethical-friendly choice. But also hypocritical - "Bacon Saturday" and "Butter Thursday through Tuesday" pretty much canceled out the deal. So I guess you could consider us food agnostics; we are aware of the choices out there but have yet to settle on the best one for us.

Back to the bear... This animal was wild and alive two days ago. A big mammal, like me, exploring the forest and getting ready for winter. The times that I have seen a bear in the wild it has taken my breath away. Something about knowing that our natural places can still support such large animals... that there are still the wild spaces and intact food webs and genetic hardiness to handle our changing world. Amazing. And in stark contrast with this wonder is the fact that I ate one. Like I said, I'm still thinking about it quite a bit. I am thankful to have moments like this to give me pause. To make me excruciatingly mindful of something so simple as eating a meal. To make me consider my place in the world and my actions. And as I sit and think, black bear "left overs" sit in our fridge. What an odd thing.

Canning Panic

JELLY. Jam. Preserves. Smashed up, squished, gooey, ooey fruit. Practically once a day for my whole adult life I have twisted off the cap of a jar of sweet berry goodness and slathered it on a croissant or a sandwich or a dark chocolate brownie (good one, hmm?). But up until this past week, I had never made the stuff myself.

Enter the Alaska vibe and this odd deep-seeded desire to harvest and create and enjoy nature's bounty. I would normally add "survive" to the list but I'll be honest: there is no way in hell Team Leslie could survive on our buckets of collected produce and fungi... maybe for a day or two, but then we'd be toast (without jam). Anyway, our homesteader groove has been strong lately and so we embarked. Indigo and I had seen a recipe for jelly made from fireweed, that gorgeous fuchsia flower growing prolifically in any open space during the summer months. So we diligently stripped every fireweed stalk we came across of its petals and froze them in lovely purple baggies... boiling them yielded a pink, fragrant juice. Next came the pectin powder, the sugar, and the... PANIC.

(A brief interlude about panic... My philosophy is this: the only people I know who deserve to feel like panicking on a regular basis are ER doctors, of whom we know many. The rest of us? Not worth it. Unless life or limb are at risk, we should take a chill pill and settle down. Ironically, panicking is not part of the job description for our dear ER doc friends. Perhaps, as an outlet, they should take up canning...)

I took a closer look at the little folded paper guidelines tucked in the pectin powder package and discovered an overwhelming set of directions for canning. (I should confess that when buying said pectin powder at the grocery store I noticed a whole canning kit... "A canning kit? How hard can it be? We've got cans, lids... we're golden.")

• Lids need to be kept hot in a near boiling water bath.
• Jars should be sterilized and remain warm.
• Jam should be added to jars with haste, lids screwed on tightly, and can rack submerged into boiling water bath for five minutes with several inches of water above and beneath.
• A "popping sound" indicates that the seal is not sufficient.
• A sloshing consistency indicates that the jelly did not set properly.

Hot lids? Sterilized? Can rack? Not sufficient? Not set properly? AHHHHH! A sweet Mommy-daughter project turned into a full fledged disaster zone. In a sad attempt to create a "can rack" and a "boiling water bath" I folded up some aluminum foil into a fan and jammed it down into a steel pot of water, cranked the heat to high, and chucked in the lids. A minute later I sloshed our virgin jelly into the jars, capped 'em, and, taking a deep breath,  gingerly submerged them onto the aluminum foil fans. The Homesteader Gods were not in my favor. The jars began to jump all around, clinking and clanking and flipping over, the foil floated to the top of the pot, and the water began to boil over.

"Indigo! You need to give Mommy space, now."

"J, I need your help, now."

There was yelling. Tongs were wielded with vigor. Someone may have been hip-checked out of the kitchen. In the end, two little four-ounce jars of fireweed jelly sat on a dishtowel on our counter. And we waited for the tell-tale popping sound...

No pop! One for us and one for Great Grammy.

Bolete mushrooms - just dry fry, no canning. Ahhh... (and who doesn't love that funny little instrument man on the cover of the mushroom guide?)

The Magic Hour

HUNTING. We recently had our new neighbors, Alaskans through and through, over for dinner for the first time. It's moose hunting season right now and that inspired the sharing of many gun-slinging tales. Now, not a hunter myself, I thought I still had a decent idea of what a trip out to get a moose might look like. I envisioned hiking through the forest, gun slung over my shoulder, maybe a canteen for water and a little hip satchel with snacks. Apparently I've read one too many Little House on the Prairie books. Our neighbors enlightened me with some of the logistics a modern hunter needs to consider. Like how if you take down a big animal like a moose away from a trail or forest corridor, you need to make your own corridor to bring the moose out (think chainsaws and four-wheelers). Or how most animal activity happens during "the magic hour," that chunk of time right before and after sunset, and it's super hard to see with the low light; thus if you happen to get a lucky shot, it's dark by the time you actually have a kill on your hands. Compounded with the off-the-trail factor mentioned above, you could have yourself an all nighter just cutting a path through the darkness to your moose, let alone the effort to butcher, wrap, and haul the meat out on your four-wheeler. Our neighbor told of being surrounded by a pack of wolves for several hours in the dark as he cut his way through the forest en route to his moose. His mom, back at a camp site where she could hear the wolves howling in his vicinity, kept calling his cell phone to make sure he was still alive.

For those of you, like me, still stuck on the image of the hunter on foot, I was informed that it takes a reasonably fit person 10 trips to bring one moose out. My teacher-mind feels a word problem coming on:

Question: You're out on a hunting trip and you proceed five miles down a trail. With luck on your side, you meet a moose and are able to shoot him right there, without needing to leave the trail. If it takes you 10 trips to pack all the meat out, how many miles did you hike in all?

(find answer at bottom of post)

Because we have absolutely no pictures related to hunting or chainsaws or four-wheelers, I am including a few extremely random pictures from the past two weeks... enjoy!

Yep, J has got his Alaska groove on. (This man teaches small children.)

Indigo's favorite kind of hunting. (She doesn't even notice the bugs anymore...)

Likely the last dip of the year down in Homer.

Fat tire fun!

Answer: You bring a chainsaw and a four-wheeler.

Dry Landing

WET LANDING. It has officially been one year since Team Leslie arrived in the wilds of Alaska and began sharing our stories of trials (think "moose watch") and triumphs (think kayaking with sea otters). To commemorate this landmark and to celebrate our last days of summer before a return to the working world, we went off on one more trip to a back country yurt across Kachemak Bay only accessible by water or air. I must tell you that this trip marks a serious level of advancement for us as Alaskan locals. In order to even attempt to meet with success, we needed to proficiently do the following:

1. Pick an area we wanted to explore using a map.
2. Find a rentable yurt or cabin in said area.
3. Hire a water taxi to deliver us to said yurt.
4. Pack and dress appropriately for said water taxi and yurt and exploratory trip.

We thought we had it in the bag, but apparently knowing the proper steps did not necessarily lead me to taking the proper actions. You see I had my heart set on a hike I'd read about before we even arrived in the state: the Grewingk Glacier Trail... A sapphire blue glacier. A glacial lake full of calved icebergs. A roaring creek away from the lake. And a HAND TRAM, hanging above the creek, to get us there... powered by our own muscles and inspiration. Yesssssss!!! (I can not express to you how up-my-ally this sort of thing is.) So I looked at a map, chose a yurt right near the trailhead, hired the water taxi, and prepared to go with my trusting husband and daughter.

http://dnr.alaska.gov/parks/aktrails/ats/ken/emeraldlk.htm

Luckily, a chance conversation with a Homer shop-owner a few weeks before our excursion revealed the following information:

1. The map I looked at had not accurately shown the terrain - like impassible tidal marshland between our yurt and the trail head (see the word "mud" on a better map above).
2. Thus the yurt we rented, at Right Beach near the Glacier Spit trailhead, turned out to be completely wrong; it was only connected to the trails via kayak travel. In fact, what we wanted was the yurt at a place called Humpy Creek... which would likely be experiencing a huge run of humpies (pink salmon) during our visit, attracting the majority of bears from the massive Kachemak Bay State Park to our area. Super.
3. Now to get to Humpy Creek, our water taxi needed to be carefully scheduled according to an incoming tide and we would need to have a "wet landing" - unable to pull up to solid land, we would drop anchor off shore and need to wade or swim to our yurt site.
4. Long story short, despite having a year in Alaska under out belts, we were not appropriately prepared for any of this!

Soooooo, I hopped back on the phone, canceled one yurt, found another yurt, canceled our first water taxi, checked a tide chart, scheduled another water taxi, switched our duffel bags out for dry bags, and grabbed both bottles of bear spray. Obviously, because I am able to type this and do not seem extraordinarily emotionally altered, we must have all returned safely and were not mistaken for humpies by fish-crazed bears. Phew.

Almost there!

As fun as we thought...

But harder work than we thought!

Morning at the yurt.

Crossing Humpy Creek.

"The tide is coming in fast - please come grab me!"

Wet landing.

Mission accomplished.

DRY LANDING. So despite bumpy (or should I say humpy?) learning curves which include the anecdote above, Team Leslie feels like overall, our first year in Alaska has been a relatively "dry landing" so to speak. From mountains to sea, we have taken advantage of most opportunities to learn and explore, and we have found joy in both the dark days and the sun drenched nights. If time, technology, and you are willing, I plan to continue chronicling our Alaska Adventure into the next chapter... Thank you for joining us on this wild ride!

Yee ha!