After the incident with the Romulan spy Selok in 2357, Commander William T. Riker stated: "Some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you."
I think that Commander Riker was trying to explain something about the bipolar nature of life...sometimes it's just ok, sometimes it's really great....I went fishing for pink salmon at Allison Point but the salmon weren't running yet..however we did get some seagull and eagle pictures....
We saw a little bear and a bunch of bald eagles in Valdez.
Yesterday we drove 30 miles to the summit so I could race down to sea level...
Unfortunately, the process of removing my front tire to get it into the back of the CRV broke the bicycle front brake...
I'm ashamed to admit that I wimped out and elected not to make the steep downhill run with only a rear brake....when I was 16 my motorcycle had no brakes and I dragged my heels to stop...how our values and risk tolerances change as we age.....
So for fun I dug out the 2007 Pics of our Kayak trip to the Columbia Glacier ice field near Valdez....
We saw an Orca....
Mrs. Phred (white hat) is dressed to go kayaking....
Captain Mike is a tall thin older guy with a white, scraggly beard. He’s wearing an officer’s uniform with the one stripe of an Ensign on his uniform. Somehow he manages to look faintly disreputable with part of his shirt untucked from his pants.
I’m surprised when he clips on a speaker headset and keeps up an interesting monologue for nearly three hours. It’s about 40 minutes over to the bird islands. The bald eagles are here in numbers. They like to eat gull chicks for breakfast. Mike has a theory about why the the eagles are here earlier this year. It has to do with a poor lobster catch and less food for the gulls to eat as the fishermen change bait in the traps less frequently. We watch some gulls dive bombing an eagle. Mike says the gulls are hungry and less interested in protecting the chicks...maybe so.
Mike starts off with an interesting explanation of the tidal currents that rip though the narrow opening we are navigating between the Atlantic Ocean and the huge saltwater lake, the Bras D’Orr, one of the largest in the world. Sometimes one shore is flowing out, the other in and the middle is ripping trying to fill or empty a big lake though a small channel.
We see a lot of puffins, razorbills (kind of like puffins), great and double crested cormorants, seagulls and seals. There are also black guillemot, great black-backed gulls, herring gulls and kittiwakes.
Captain Mike keeps up an interesting line of patter, explaining about the regions “ferryman” pirates, which makes the place sound a lot like it used to be Somalia.
He has strong opinions about the seagulls, who are exploding in population due to their tendency to eat anything including landfill material. He explains that the gulls eat rodents, which answers one of my big questions. That is... why the bird islands around this area don’t have rats to prey on the bird nests like the islands up in the Aleutian chain.
The puffins dig small nest holes in the rocks over many generations by sharpening their beaks. It reminds me of the legendary small bird that sharpens its beak on a mountain once every 1,000 years and eventually wears the mountain away. Captain Mike says the seal population has exploded since man killed off the orcas and now the seals are underweight due to over population and over fishing. Mike expounds on the lobster over fishing in the area. There are lobster traps everywhere and the catch is dropping 20% a year. Each of the 300 local lobster fishermen is entitled to 275 traps. They have to come out every day to change the bait in the traps. He says they get 70% of their catch in the first two weeks of the six week season.
Anyway, it’s all very interesting local color and I snap a lot of bird Pix. The puffins are fairly nervous because of the bald eagles and spend most of their time out in the water. They have little wings like penguins so they can fly though the water, but they have to flap pretty hard up in the air and take off into the winds. On this trip, the juice is definitely worth the squeeze.
International Falls, Minesota Voyageur National Park, Minnesota/Ontario Border
We drove across the Mississippi River yesterday. It was very small here on the Canadian border, almost a stream. It’s interesting to think that one could start here and canoe down to New Orleans. Someday, I’d like to do a long canoe trip. The Yukon and the Mackenzie have always been appealing.
I’ve discovered damselflies. They seem to be attached to the RV in great numbers. They are an order of the order Odaonata, which also includes dragonflies. Apparently there are 5,000 known members of the order. I had no idea that dragonflies had so many close relatives. This is a beautiful land of lakes and deciduous and evergreen forests. The rocks are part of the 2.5 billion year old "Canadian shield": hard granite rubbed low and round by millions of tons and eons of glaciers.
The news coming out of British Columbia on the west coast is very strange. Feet clad in running shoes have been washing up on the beach. So far there are five right feet and one left foot. The left foot doesn’t match any of the right feet. The femurs seen to have been severed by a power tool.
We had a National Park boat trip lined up today. It was 20 miles though forest islands to the Kettle Falls Hotel. There was a two hour break for lunch at the old hotel, twenty miles from the nearest road. I took a 1,510 page copy of Norman Mailer’s “Harlot’s Ghost” with me and made a little progress on it after lunch. Mrs. Phred had a hardcover Tony Hillerman’s: “Talking God”. I read “Harlot’s Ghost” when it came out in 1991, but my advanced age permits me to re-enjoy a good book with no recollection after a few years pass.
The Voyageurs used to hump nearly two tons of beaver pelts in big canoes from the northwest over this natural string of lakes and rivers that extends from here and far westward though the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean.. The park sets aside 56 miles of the old waterway that marks the border between Canada and the US. The treaty of 1783, at the end of the Revolutionary War, treated this water communications highway as a natural dividing line between the two countries.
The boat ride up and back was guided by a young bearded .ranger. I think his name was Brendan or something else that sounds Irish and starts with a “B”. He did a great job, pointing out bald eagles, double breasted cormorants, white pelicans and loons.
Strangely, white pelicans don’t dive into the water after fish like the brown ones in Florida. They lack air shock absorbers under the skin so they get in a line of twenty or more and chase the fish up onto the beach. I really like this pictute of Mrs. Phred. I think I said something funny just before the picture. It looks just like a picture of her with her sister at age two. The eyes never change.
There is a lot of bootlegger history up here on the border. I used to drive past the windowless “Blind Pig” bar in Tampa’s inner city frequently and wonder what was inside. I learn that it’s a bootlegger term. You leave the booze on an island. The customer arrives later and removes the hooch and leaves payment. After a time the bootlegger retrieves the money. When I was in college I considered being a park ranger. They live in beauty and have cool hats, but they don’t make much money.
