Atom's Picture Blog

Geology in Action

2012-01-22T05:00:00.000-09:00

You here over and over, Alaska is a very geologically active area. That's certainly true, but you don't usually witness it except during a volcanic eruption or earthquake. This summer i was able to witness some impressive rockslides during the 'ol 26 Glacier Cruise in Prince William Sound.

I was taking some friends on the tour, and while everyone else was looking at the approach of Surprise Glacier, i was studying the high peaks, which had all been hidden in clouds the only other time i had been in the area. Besides seeing some truly incredible calving off a hanging glacier high on the cliffs, i witnessed the cliffs themselves collapsing into a cloud of dust.

Nobody else seemed to notice, and at first i doubted myself, thinking maybe it was a just a suddenly appearing cloud. I couldn't hear anything but it was very high up and i was right next to the engines. On the way back the dust had lifted, and i could see a fresh pile of rubble at the base of a chute, along with fresh dusty rock on the cliffs above.

The rockslide created a cloud of dust that then lifted to reveal a pile of rubble at the base of a long rock chute.

For those who are interested in clicking this is a large, full rez crop of the rock pile (on the left) after the dust had lifted.

The peculiar thing about it was that far below, down at sea level, was a large waterfall disappearing into skree field. Sandor pointed it out to me, noting how strange it was for a waterfall to disappear into a pile of rocks. It was peculiar to me to, not so much that it existed as much as me having absolutely no memory of seeing it the year before. I recognized pretty much everything we had seen that day, but not this obviously unusual waterfall.

An otter relaxes on it's back while the mountains crumble around it.

A few months later i was comparing shots from the previous year and i came across a photo of the very waterfall that i couldn't recall seeing. During 2010 it had been a very different place. In the time since there had been a massive rockslide, ripping the alders off the cliffs and burying a portion of the forest below under tons of rock. Whether it had happened in the middle of winter or just a few weeks prior i have no idea. What was clear was that the mountain, still busy breaking apart, was a very dangerous place to hang out. As exciting as it was to see something change so significantly, it was at the same time deeply troubling when i realized how much time i've spent in pretty much the same types of area.

The waterfall in 2010 cascaded along the boulders all the way down to the forest.

This is what it looked like in 2011. That's a dramatic difference. The water disappears into the rocks and the slope of Alders has vanished.

Above is a direct comparison of the two years. They were taken at different angles but i have scaled and matched them vertically. You can see that most of the vegetation has been wiped off the cliffs, and a large amount of debris has blackened the Baker Glacier. The rockslide i witnessed was off of the highest cliffs. If the original event started up there, the rockslide would have traveled at least 6,000 vertical feet, probably more. Also of note is the rubble at the bottom of the falls. It looks like the rubble must be thick enough to eat up about half the height of the falls last cascade.

A boat speeds off towards massive Mt. Gilbert, more than a 9,500 ft. climb from the water.

The rest of our cruise that day was ideal. The weather was perfect, there was a generous supply of wildlife, no ice choking the fjords, and the warmth had the glaciers putting on a crowd pleasing show of destruction.

Our cruise paused for about 10 minutes to watch a wale.

One day i'm going to get a good picture of a Dall Porpoise. Seems like they come by every time i'm out on a boat, but damn, they are soooo fast and unpredictable. Much harder than whales, which aren't easy either. The first picture i was aiming for the middle but i was so slow i ended up getting the guy in the background. By the time you see them coming out of the water they're almost gone again. 1/500th is the minimum shutter speed that i'd recommend.

Being a baby mountain goat is a hard life. This pair was climbing up the cliffs of the fjord enabling the boat to get very close. The goats started low but had gotten very high by the time we backed off. I have to say i was relieved to leave them alone. I could see that the mother was getting stressed from the proximity of the strange boat full of onlookers. On a couple of instances she seemed to have some judgement problems. I didn't want to see a mistake.

The Tebenkof Glacier fills the valley immediately adjacent to Blackstone Bay and looks inviting. Contrary to it's appearance it sits back well over a mile from the shore. One interesting way to get there might be from Surprise Cove just to the east (left) where there is an actual campground and trails of some sort.

Harvard Glacier more than 20 miles distant.

I always like it when the white ice is sticking up above the green foliage.

It looks like water but it's all ice. Most of the time glaciers crumble away in a million pieces like this, as opposed to calving off huge blocks and pillars.

As usual the final stop was at the Rookery across from Whittier.

The Island Princess shrinks away

I order not to repeat myself i have withheld many images of the actual glaciers on the cruise. To see more, and also see Prince William Sound in a different mood check out my post from last year on the same cruise.

Distant Visitors

2012-01-08T15:32:00.000-09:00

Unbelievable. A blog post full of... people! After 13 years of begging, and multiple years of broken promises, i finally had some of my best friends come and visit me this past summer. The Lehoczky-Escobar family finally showed up in Alaska in June and brought 2 of their 4 children with them. I have never done anything up here with children, so i had a lot of learning to do.

Orion and Amadea doing some bouldering at Fern Hut.

The biggest learning curve for me was that i had no knowledge of how slow travel can be with kids. Our two mile walk to the end of fern valley took 4 hours round trip, making for an average speed of 1mph. After that i kind of scratched some options off the list of things to do. We had a good time, it was great to see my friends, and we did a reasonable number of things during the short time they were here.

Yalli and Orion make their way across icy Crow Creek on a human powered tram. I was impressed at how well they did. It's actually a lot work!

Sandor documents the ordeal while waiting his turn.

The weather was a little spotty but not too bad. I was sure it was going to rain at any moment in the Talkeetnas, but it never did, and even cleared up by the time we left. Girdwood was similarly cloudy. We went down to Seward one day to get some better weather, and although it was sunny there was also a frigid cold wind making it uncomfortable to walk along the waterfront. We did have some nice days in Anchorage, and a jackpot day of perfect weather in Prince William Sound.

Fisher exercises his formidable powers of persuasion on a new victim.

Amadea finds a tunnel to explore under the boulders.

Sandor and Yalli pause to admire a beaver dam when they should be admiring the awesome horn of granite behind them.

On our way back Orion disappeared after running off into the tundra like a crazed lunatic. Thus there are virtually no pictures of him on this trip.

It started to clear up once we were leaving. Typical.

Meanwhile, underwater in Seward.

This cool bird at the Alaska SeaLife Center had a staring match with Orion and Amadea.

~~I don't remember what it was called~~ A very cool looking bird called a Rhinoceros Auklet. It can hypnotize small children and command them to do it's bidding. A wizard of sorts.

Also a cool duck. Puffin on the left. This tank was for rehabilitating birds. Many of them would dive for food, and on the next floor down you could watch them from below.

We made a quick visit to Exit Glacier, since it's so accessible.

On the way back from the 4,500 ft. climb to the summit of Mt. Byron. Perfectly safe for kids.

Throwing rocks at rocks.

Hey Sandor and Yalli, we were going to take you here for a picnic, but you didn't stay long enough so i guess you missed out!

My ATV Christmas in July

2011-12-25T19:01:00.001-09:00

Last summer i was suffering from a mysterious foot injury and wasn't able to do any significant hiking because of it. The weather was pretty nice though, and it was driving me nuts not being able to get out into the mountains, so i decided to change my strategy. I've wanted an ATV for years, and in July i finally splurged and got one.

Once i had it i had to find out where i could ride it. Initially options seemed limited but soon i found out there were far more places i could use it than i expected, even some trails in a nearby National Park. You learn a lot on every ride, and it wasn't long before i was able to handle intermediate trails and river crossings. Still, i tried to stick close to home for the most part, not, for instance, driving 8 hours out to the Wrangles.

The header picture is from the Birds Creek Trail. The one directly above and below are from the Chain Lakes Trail, which i originally learned about from a ridiculously hardcore mountain biking book. This trail was very challenging for me, and my machine overheated because i was not aware that the previous owner had completely buried the radiator in a brick of thick mud.

I had to turn around here at this great view of Castle Mountain. Thunderstorms were approaching and the wind picked up as it got sucked up into the clouds.

Just above tree line you start getting a good view of the mountains

Just above that is this nice lake.

I got a 2009 Polaris Sportsman 500 EX. After adding a waterproof luggage compartment for the back i was able to put all my photo gear in it and safely ride through deep muddy water. It's allowed me to get to new places i've never been and see mountains previously out of site from areas i could access on foot.

What i've learned so far about ATV riding:

1. When you are riding an ATV you are "Living Life in God's Country"

2. Often ATV's become so damaged they must jettison all excess weight in order to get back safely. Some of the heaviest items are beer cans, and body panels.

3. Although they are equipped with winches and racks that make it super easy to bring along a saw or shovel, ATV riders cannot remove even small fallen trees on the trail. Instead it is necessary to make a new trail, or several new trails, around the fallen tree.

4. Likewise, if there is a 50 yard long deep mudhole on the edge of a bluff such that riding through it causes the water to splash over the side of the bluff, it is impossible to dig a 1 foot deep channel to the bluff edge to assist in draining the puddle.

5. Meeting someone else in full ATV gear is like two Stormtroopers meeting. You have no idea who the other person is, but you assume you are both working for the Empire.

6. Based on the lack of books or websites with useful trail information, i have to assume most ATV riders are illiterate.

8. ATV trails can be so incredibly exhausting to navigate that you may not have any energy left to go hiking when you get to the end of them.

7. Despite all the above, ATV's are awesome.

The Jim Creek area is probably the most popular place for ORV use. It's got marsh, rivers and streams, wide open dirt and gravel, and this cool area of forested sand dunes.

After 12 miles of crossing tributary streams and endless pools i called it quits for the day and turned around here. It's the closest i've been to the Knik Glacier, but it would still take around 12 more miles of riding to get there. Maybe a good overnight trip next summer so i'd have the energy to explore the glacier.

Unfortunately, i have found that riding for several hours seriously affects my tinnitus, even with earplugs. I don't know if it's the vibrations or the extended rides. So this winter i'm pondering weather or not to try to modify the machine to reduce noise and vibrations, or simply stop using it. It's kind of heartbreaking because i've found a new activity that i really enjoy.

They say the skilled or daring can cross the Kings River, but that is out of the question from what i've seen of it.

Don't Mess With The Butcher!

2011-12-09T10:15:00.001-09:00

Somehow we didn't catch any fish in 2010, so the pressure was on to find sustenance in 2011. My fortunes turned during the first trip in a couple of years into Resurrection Bay. It's a bit difficult to type now because i've got my right arm in a sling for the next month, so i'll keep it brief.

Sealions in Resurrection Bay

Was a misty day it was that day.

Giant icebergs from the Bear Glacier loom over the forest in front of them.

A WWII gun bunker on a rocky island has become a bird sanctuary.

I missed a great picture of a whale breaching completely out of the water next to this arch.

On the way back from near Montague Island it looked like the sun had come out. Here you can the icefields covering Kenai Fjords.

These lingcod were the meanest fishes i've ever seen. One of them ate my foot when i wasn't looking.

Here's another, after spending the afternoon gasping for air in the tank, but still so evil that it has eaten the fish lying next to it.

Some of our all important halibut. And after that, some of the less important non-halibut.

Another blurry whale picture. I was sleeping at this point.

There is a long narrow chain of mountains that you must navigate around as you exit the bay, then you wrap around and come back up the backside. They are made of old lava and look pretty fun to try to hike around on.

Dall Porpoise, the fastest of them all.

The butcher was a very nice guy, it turns out.

Anza-Borrego Desert

2011-11-23T20:30:00.001-09:00

Based on the recommendation of an acquaintance, i decided to try and fit in a look at Anza-Borrego State Park, just west of the Salton Sea. I had never heard of it, but it turns out it's the largest state park in California and the third largest state park in the country after Wood Tikchick in Alaska and the ridiculously huge Adirondack Park in New York.

As usual, i spent far more time barely scratching the surface of the Salton Sea than i had planned, and by the time we arrived in Borrego Springs it was almost 5pm. We were famished. Busting down the doors of the visitor center just as they were reaching for the lock we took another recommendation and went to this place called the Palms Hotel, where it was said existed very good hamburgers.

The Palms Hotel, built in 1958, had it's own private runway and catered to groups of movie stars who wanted a secluded location where they could partake in debauchery.

Borrego Springs is an awesome little town with no trafficlights. Located in the middle of Anza Borrego Desert Park, the town rests at the bottom of some sizable mountains.

The town has an old connection to Hollywood, and a number of movies have been filmed in the surrounding desert, including Serenity and the finale season of the X-Files. For the X-files they built an Anasazi Village, then blew it up with sidewinder missiles.

Walking onto the isolated property is like stepping back into another time.

There was nobody at the hotel, i don't know what day of the week it was. The hamburgers were great, and i'm not even a fan of burgers. The shade was great too (but i enjoyed the heavy desert heat in the sun), and the warm evening breeze coming down from the shaded canyons brought back all kinds of memories of my distant desert life.

Maree sips on cherry coke. It was REAL, that carafe is full of cherries.

Next to the dining area was a large grassy lawn full of squirrels. The squirrels were grazing on the grass and steadily following the line of the sun, always looking through the newly shaded blades but never crossing the threshold into direct sunlight. It was fun to watch.

The Olympic Pool was very inviting.

In no time at all i had scarfed down a 1lb burger and we wasted no light in trying to do a little hike. Behind the hotel is a trail that lead to a real oasis, covered in tall palms, the namesake of the town. The hike is just a couple of miles up a large alluvial fan and into a canyon. The advantage of being late was that the entire hike was in the shade.

On the trail to the oasis looking down valley towards town. On the left is a large log, part of a desert Palm.

The Red Ocotillo, pictured at the top of the blog is a famous desert plant that blooms with bright red flowers a few days after a rain. I had never seen one before, we just happened to show up when the desert was in full bloom. There was more wildlife in the area than i've ever seen in the desert. There were little quail look birds running around all over the place, bunnies hopping around, bees and birds were looking into the flowers, and of course reptiles.

I just put this on here as example of how either digital sensors or computer monitors cannot display some colors. This it not the color this flower is supposed to be and i don't think the sensor was able to render the detail and variations of the petals. On the screen it's just a burned out magenta. I took a picture with my phone first, which looked terrible, then my 5dm2, which looks only slightly better as far as color is concerned.

The entrance to the canyon, which actually stretches towards the left.

Near the entrance of the canyon the stream finally started flowing and we couldn't help notice the parade of large dead palms scattered all over the ground, with no standing palms in sight for miles around. Apparently there are some powerful floods that come out of the canyon on occasion.

Unfortunately i could tell we simply did not have enough time to get to the oasis and back before nightfall, so i called the hike off early. I wanted to use the sunlight to see what else might be down the road, like some big sculptures of prehistoric beasts build on the site where the creatures were found.

After a long twisty ascent we made it to the top of the mountains. That area down there is some mid level plateau. It was very cold on top and quite windy. Snow seemed possible and was visible on some of the peaks.

I liked Borrego Springs, and the Anza-Borrego Desert was truly unique in my experience of American deserts. I'd assumed it would be just like the Mojave desert, but there is definitely a different ecology in the area. Technically, it's part of the Colorado Desert, i think, and then the Sonoran Desert is East of that. The Mojave is to the North. There's a lot to see in all that land.

This is where i saw Sasquatch, running through those misty trees.

The Salton Sea

2011-10-30T20:46:00.002-08:00

The Salton Sea is my favorite environmental disaster, because it's entire history AND future is a disaster. Historically it was known that the Colorado River would flood over it's banks in some years, and water from the flooding would head towards the Salton Basin. But in 1905 an exceptional flood caused the river to overflow the headgates of the Alama Canal, an irrigation canal for farmland in the Imperial Valley. A levy breached, and the resulting torrent eroded a new channel so quickly that the entire flow of the Colorado River diverted into the dry basin. The rate of erosion was so fast that an 80 foot waterfall developed along the former canal path.

The river flowed into the basin for TWO YEARS before engineers were finally able to close the breach. After it was all over the sea had grown in size to cover over 525 square miles of former desert, including submerging the town of Salton. People said it would evaporate, but after 100 years it is still the largest lake in California. This accident, and subsequent flooding episodes in the Imperial Valley were major reasons for building the Hoover Dam decades later.

Everybody knew there should not be a big lake there, and with no source of replenishment, the lake would eventually dry up. But that didn't stop land prospectors from building several townsites and resorts all around the shoreline. The lake was stocked with fish, and soon massive numbers of birds started hanging out, to the point that the area was declared a national wildlife refuge.

The lake continued to dry up, becoming saltier all the time. The fish became locked in a crazy cycle of explosive reproduction followed by mass die offs due to algae blooms. The resorts failed, the towns were abandoned, and government spending was required to preserve all of that new wildlife that shouldn't have been around in the first place.

A few years ago i saw a great documentary on the place called "Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea". The documentary was filmed in 2004 and showed surreal scenes of salt encrusted, half submerged towns and glassy water right up to the highway. I visited the lake in the spring of 2011.

In the 7 years between seeing the film on tv and seeing the lake in person great quantities of water had disappeared. The lake is far from the road now, and i certainly didn't see any submerged towns, although i did find ruins that obviously had been flooded in the past. Water levels aside, the whole area is still very surreal.

The ironic thing about the lake is that for all the fuss about how to preserve it and how much money it will cost, there really isn't any thing to worry about. Even if it dries up completely will still be a lake in the future as it has in the past. In fact, it will be the actual ocean sometime in the future.

When i walked up to one of the smaller buildings here a big angry owl flew out the door and buzzed my head.

In one of the formerly flooded structures.

The sea sits directly on the San Andreas Fault, and the surface of the lake is 225 feet below sea level. In the distant past the whole basin was part of the Sea of Cortez. Over a few million years, the nearby Colorado River deposited so much sediment in it's ever growing delta (from it's excavation of the Grand Canyon), that it eventually damned up the whole width of the Sea of Cortez, creating what was then called Lake Cahuilla. But the basin, like the Sea of Cortez, is part of a rift valley system.

As California slowly shears by the rest of the country the valley is likely to once again be part of the nearby ocean (just as Africa's rift valleys will be part of the Indian Ocean). Even now, the area separating the basin from the ocean is just 30 feet above sea level. When it happens, the Sea of Cortez will reach all the way to Inyo California, not far from Palm Springs!

The water is brownish, foamy, and smells bad. Toxic stuff seems to be everywhere, yet, while we were here a family in a minivan pulled up and their daughters waded into the lake to play. The parents didn't seem to think anything of it. It was very unnerving.

The beach "sand" is literally made of fish bones.

I spent a couple of hours driving around the lake, but that was not enough time at all to see the multitude of strange things scattered throughout the area. We really only had time for two stops on our way to Anza Borrego, but those were full of things to look at.

Here is a youtube video that does a good job describing the place with good photography in just a few minutes:

Goodbye Salton Sea, i dont' know why but i hope to see you again.

Halloween Nightmare

2011-10-27T10:04:00.000-08:00

Nightmare In Cordova from Adam Elliott on Vimeo.

Cordova has a dark side. I suppose any small town would that has existed under four different nationalities. At least some people may see it that way. To the people who live there it's just history or a part of their heritage. But like a freaky family heirloom you may spot in a friends house, some of the scattered remains of Cordova's past emanate an eery atmosphere for visitors.

Abandoned long ago on a hill in a dark mossy forest, the old elementary school

is permanently haunted.

A few miles from the abandoned school is an old timer graveyard on the shores of Eyak Lake. This cemetary is larger than it first seems. Trails lead of into the woods and up the hills. The deeper you explore the more you find, even well after you're sure you must be beyond the boundaries. We arrived shortly after the snow melted away, when the plants had just started to poke out of the ground. The sign reads "Pioneers of Alaska" but i suspect it may be old enough that some of the residents were buried in Russia.

Many of the graves, like these, must be completely invisible most of the year, either covered in snow or covered by vegetation that grows very quickly in the long summer days. At this point the plants have just started to come out of the ground.

Many of the ferns were still curled up.

The Most Haunted House in America

2011-10-09T20:14:00.001-08:00

Maree found out there was a haunted house in Sand Diego, and so she nagged me about it for days. Finally, on our last morning we were ready early and i couldn't find an excuse not to go. The Whaley House is in old town San Diego and is purported to be "the most haunted house in America". Of course, if you google that you'll find a dozen other candidates that claim the same status.

After going inside, i have to admit it's a pretty weird house, with bizarre wall treatments, creaky floors and dark rooms. In the 1800's it not only was the home of the Whaley family, it also contains a courthouse, theater, and a small store. At least 5 people have died on the site. James Robinson was hung on the site before the house was built in 1852 and one of the Whaley's committed suicide in 1885. Others died of natural causes.

Even aside from being haunted, the house is full of preserved furnishings, amenities, and even toys of the times, making it very interesting historical museum.

You should not stay in here for too long.

The babies room is especially haunted.

In the front lobby the house has a cool book of ghost photography. It's jam packed full of images of inept camera users, like slow shutter speeds, light flares on dirty lenses, and malfunctioning red eye reduction reflections (mysterious floating red orbs!) are a few of the culprits.

Ghosts typically do horribly frightening things like, uh, walking around. Since most ghosts died long ago and are not familiar with modern technology so they spend much of their time opening and closing drawers and cupboards, most likely searching for nacho cheese or some other valuable substance that can only be enjoyed by the living, like beer, not realizing that these days those items are kept in a refrigerator.

The museum offers a night time ghost hunting tour, where you can roam around here in the dark with a flashlight.

The creepy theater was sort of stuffed into an attic like room, with about a dozen chairs for spectators.

San Diego, California

2011-09-26T09:20:00.000-08:00

People who have lived in San Diego complain about the weather. They say it's just too perfect. People will complain about anything. Many of the Hawaiians that live in Alaska have told me the same thing about Hawaii. "You just get tired of paradise" they say.

I just got back from a short trip where the weather was sunny and cloudless almost every single day. A few of the days were identical. But when i got back to Alaska i was thrown back into cloudy fall days, and i have to say it was refreshing. There may be some truth to the idea that a monotony of perfect weather can get old.

The beach at Point Lomo. I wanted to get down on the beach and to do that i needed to find the stairs at the far end, but i ran out of time, unfamiliar with the streets. It worked out well anyway.

Everyone always tells me San Diego is super nice. Some people have even told me that it is too nice to live in, insofar as life is too easy there. I don't know about that. After a brief two days in the city it seemed pretty darned livable to me.... The best Mexican food in the country, great weather, clean parks, a beautiful coastline, the only thing that bothered me was the frequent drone of Apache Helicopters patrolling the border and coastline.

Historically San Diego was the home of the Kumeyaay Natives for 10,000 years before being claimed by the Spanish in the late 1700's. Then it became part of Mexico for 30 years before anchoring the US border in 1850. It is the oldest city in California.

Downtown San Diego. Embarcadero Marina Park is a pleasant walk along the waterfront. The people in the distance made us get out of the way because they were apparently doing an Oakley Sunglasses photo shoot. They said i wasn't pretty enough to be in the picture.

Meerkats. Wildlife photography is soooo much easier when the wildlife is imprisoned.

They have no self respect.

The zoo was not quite as great as i'd heard, but was certainly above average. It was possibly the most crowded zoo i've ever been too. What i've noticed about zoos is that the herbivores seem to do alright, while the predators seem to suffer greatly from the confinement. The San Deigo zoo was a pioneer in creating cages without "the cage". There are few, if any, bars and most animals can be observed without fencing in the way.

The Elephants had a lot of space for a zoo.

A glimpse of the city from the gondola. The zoo is part of Balboa Park, a huge collection of museums and parkland originally built for the World Exposition of 1915.

This bird wanted me dead.

There were a couple of walk in aviaries that were nice because the birds were flying all around you in a large greenhouse setting.

The primates looked typically unhappy under constant observation.

Our hotel, (Best Western Hacienda in Old Town) looked really cool on the outside, but had no elevators, and was stretched across a huge 7 story plot of land. Unfortunately the rooms were sub par and the staff was careless and unthoughtful.

This is inside what i think they said was the oldest building in San Diego. A ranch home in Old Town. I wish our hotel room had been this nice.

This is San Diego today. People come to this famous tram station for it's magical healing powers.

Downtown has a nice outdoor mall called Horton Plaza. I don't usually go to malls but Maree had to go to the Hello Kitty store, so i had nothing to do for an hour. The center picture is from Old Town.

A nifty restaurant at the marina park downtown.

The city also has photogenic smog that makes for nice sunsets.

Los Angeles, California

2011-09-13T09:54:00.000-08:00

Until this spring, i had only been to Los Angeles twice in the past. Once for a couple of days with a friend who lived in Huntington Beach back when i worked in Sequoia National Park, some 15 years ago, and then a few years ago during a 10 hour layover on the way to New Zealand. The first time i did typical dumb tourist stuff like walking around in Hollywood and it left a bad taste in my mouth. If the choice is between living in a giant forest at 7,000 feet, or hanging out in seedy Hollywood, the answer is clear. I was so jet lagged the second time that the only thing i remember is a nice meal and a something like a dinosaur hedge fountain.

This past spring, i went down there for the third time to visit my friend Jimmy, and to finally fulfill my promise to Maree to take her to some roller coasters. She is a roller coaster fanatic and has been begging me for years to go to places i have no interest in just because there are roller coasters.

Jimmy and his wife Michi took us to a bunch of good restaurants, to their friend's beach house on Newport Beach, and to ride roller coasters at both Knots Berry Farms and Disneyland. This worked out really well. I got to visit my friend, and Maree got to go on roller coasters. It worked out doubly well since i haven't been to either of those parks.

Grand Central Market has been around since 1917.

Jimmy took us on a short Blade Runner tour. This is the Bradbury building, very nicely renovated. In the movie this is the dank building where wear J.F. Sebastian lives.

The Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown is home for the L.A. Philharmonic . A pretty neat building, as are all of Frank Gehry's designs, it looks as strange on the inside as it does on the outside.

Knots Berry Farms was somewhat disappointing in its look and feel. Although they had more manly rides than Disney, the park layout and decor is unattractive. And it's a lot smaller than i thought it was, while being pretty much just as expensive as Disney. Disneyland was smaller than i expected, but the outlying areas associated with the park were larger. I think what i liked best was the Matterhorn, one of the rides not available in Disneyworld.

We had a great time. It was nice to get away from Alaska during pre-breakup. I'd have more pictures but i decided one day to stick with just my phone, and as soon as i tried to use it i found out the battery had died because it spent the whole night looking for a signal in Jimmies subterranean apartment.

Ready for phone pictures? Michi, Jimi, Jeff, and Maree on Newport Beach.

Newport Beach. Jimmy's friend Neha spends a lot of weekends here and allowed us to stay the night on our way to Disney. Thanks Neha!

The scenery during the wait for the Indiana Jones ride, Maree in front of the Magic Kingdom? And some 1960's looking architecture.

Disney generally feels pretty safe, but if you don't pay attention to where you're going you could end up in dire straits.

Toon Town ... Jimmy wore attire to blend in perfectly ... some surprisingly spooky treehouse.

Jimmy and Michi on the Matterhorn. Maree and Jimmy at Indiana Jones.

Maree was super excited. Jimmy was very sophisticated all day long. Michi was super bored because she hates Disneyland.

Sheridan Glacier

2011-08-27T14:35:00.003-08:00

As you take the road out of town from Cordova the mountains break apart and the flat lands of the Copper River Delta open up while you cross bridge after bridge. The Chugach Mountains are still visible to the north, bearing forth a procession of huge glaciers pouring out of them. The rivers emerging from the ice pass under the road in braided streams, often with wide sandy shores that tempt access to the ice miles away. A number of unmarked gravel roads of varying quality branch of from the main road.


The vast landscape of Sheridan Glacier

I did know of one road that appeared to go all the way to the mountains, based on what i saw on a map. The road was unmarked though, and i chose incorrectly on my first two attempts. The third day we were there i finally hit it, and after several miles through forest the road ends in a mossy clearing, right next to Sheridan Glacier. From the lot you can go straight to the glacier, or take a trail up the mountain next to it.

There were some cool bright rusty rocks in this shallow blue pool.

What looks like a pond is actually a deep crevasse. The rocks that look like they are "floating" on the far right are actually resting on an invisible glass ledge.

The Sheridan Glacier is perhaps the only glacier i've been to so far where you can step directly off of grass and onto the ice. The trail to the glacier follows along a large old moraine, and at this time the glacier is ramming right into it. To the west of the moraine is a growing melt pool that has flooded over the trail and drowned some trees. To the east the trail follows the shore of the main melt pool, which is large and interesting enough for some kayak exploring.

After the rain and wind stopped the water in the extensive meltpool area revealed some seriously surreal, abstract imagery.

I had forgotten crampons or an axe on our trip, but the ice was textured and flat, and we were able to walk a long distance with just regular shoes, until Maree was too uncomfortable. I dropped Maree off back on shore and went out to get some pictures. The weather conditions were just too interesting to leave. A cloudy day with a bit of rain here and there, but virtually no wind, and generally warm temperatures (for a glacier).

This is part of the toe (front) of the glacier. It had a lot of arches, bridges and tunnels, with different colored water from spot to spot.

An iceberg floating by like a spaceship.

This pool looked like frozen waves on rough seas.

The overcast skies provided us with another benefit. We saw iceworms! I never thought i'd see one, they are apparently very rare, especially in the daytime. First we just saw one, it was featureless and black, impossibly living in the ice of the glacier. It looked like something that would crawl out of someones eyeball in the X-files. After a few dozen yards the ice was covered with so many of them we had to watch our steps. I picked one up on my finger. It appeared to writhe in pain so i put it back on the ice. I imagine my finger may have felt like a hot iron to a creature that lives in ice.

The weather turned nice 15 miles up the glacier.

These serracs were miles away. They must have been enormous. The background is foggy here, but in the previous pictures the seracs are located at the bottom of the right hand slope in front of the distant triangular mountain.

Maree wouldn't get any closer to the crevasse.

Just underneath the white surface the ice turns blue, like at the bottom of all these little holes.

An Iceworm!

This is how big they are. On my finger i could barely feel it. Visibly it was freaking out, so i put it back down right away.

We passed through an area of 1,000 square feet where the iceworms were everywhere. It starts to look kind of gross. Makes me think twice about drinking glacier water.

Maree crosses a large dirty area on the way back. It's easy to get lost in the size of these places.

Part II: Sheridan Creek

After several hours on the ice we returned to the car. The area was just so nice that i decided to walk up the forest trail for a while until it got difficult. There was a perfect stream in the woods that emerged from a small moss covered canyon, causing the trail to take another route. That stream had all the aspects of a perfect photo, from what i could see, it just didn't have the elements in the right place. Looking up stream as the forest walls narrowed was very intriguing, so i went back to the truck, put on my hip waders, got my tripod, and jumped right in.

For a while a faint trail wound through the forest. Looked like the moss was trying to devour the trees.

Moss covered cliffs and debris. There was so much moss around, i got the feeling that if you fell asleep on the ground you might wake up covered in the stuff.

Time to jump in!

Wading up the ice cold stream was one of the most fun unexpected little hikes that i've had in a long time. I entered the canyon, navigated several tricky deep spots, and after using my dormant Tai Chi skills to slow motion climb up through a threatening waterfall and over a rock dam i made it to the center of the gorge. It was a perfect spot.

In the grotto i had momentarily found the perfect stream.

I couldn't go past this point. I thought i would make a picture here, and i tried to move that narrow log since it ruined the image. That thing was amazingly wedged onto the rocks in three separate places. It wouldn't even hint at budging. Next time there's a flood it's going to be smashed by another one.

On the way back. I'll miss this stream.

Cordova, Alaska

2011-08-14T01:40:00.007-08:00

Cordova is located about 120 miles east of Anchorage Alaska, and is an exceptionally small town. It's no wonder they never repaired the road. It's even smaller than Valdez, although it feels bigger due to being spread out over more land. At the same time, since it's not tourism oriented, downtown feels much smaller than Skagway, a town with half the population.

Since 1790 when it was named by the Spanish, the population has exploded to 2,300 people.. But the real population explosion didn't start until high grade copper was discovered many miles away at Kennecott Mine. A railroad was built, and Cordova began shipping out millions of tons of copper ore until 1938. Before the copper faded Cordova became the Razor Clam Capital of the World. That industry ended for good when the 1964 earthquake caused critical areas of the sea floor to rise above the water, exposing the already over harvested clam beds. Cordova was hit again, and hard, by the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Even with all the hardships of recent times today Cordova is still undoubtedly a fishing town and a proud one at that.

We had heard there was an abandoned cannery to explore, but the only one we found had been partially converted into a hotel. The largest building also had things going on inside it. I think it may become some sort of museum. The beach and surrounding areas still had a lot to offer in terms of interesting ruins.

Between the ferry terminal and the old cannery is small area full of beached, rusted out boats. Relics from times past, some looked like they were being worked on for future use. The middle picture here is actually part of the Million Dollar Bridge, not the boats.

The Cordova Museum has a small room jam packed full of historic relics and antiquities. It was in the museum that we learned of a distant ghost town called Katalla. Reachable only by sea or air, Katalla was the site of Alaska's first oil wells, way back in 1902! I had never heard of it.

More photogenic boat carcases can be found on the east side of town.

Getting to Cordova we took the fast ferry from Whittier. They are not kidding when they say fast ferry. That thing can go almost 50 miles an hour! Loaded full of cars and trucks the whole trip, including loading/unloading takes 3 hours for a 100 mile sea voyage. It was a bluebird day when we went and the scenery alone is worth the trip. It's also the nicest ferry i've been on. It blows away the ferries down in Washington.

Mt. Gilbert is possibly the most visible mountain in Prince William Sound. It rises some 3,000 meters out of Hariman Fjord, behind the foreground mountains.

This is my favorite island in the sound. Just two trees and a bit of grass on a rock.

Cordova approaches.

Our hotel lobby was a little crowded.

Downtown Cordova late at night in early summer.

I was surprised how non-touristy Cordova is, although that seems to be changing. The town is in a fantastic location for tourism with unlimited mountain wilderness. It's covered by incredibly lush rainforest that i haven't seen anywhere else to such a degree, except maybe Olympic National Park. That's because it rains for 125 days. After that it snows 127 inches. But, being more oriented to the fishing industry we ran into a few minor problems.

The town does not have a good selection of hotels to stay in. Our hotel was rather poor but even the "good" ones were lacking, so don't expect a luxury lodge when you go. Additionally, a large number of stores and restaurants close on the weekend. If you aren't prepared, finding food when you want it can be challenging.

Cordova has the oldest working ski lift in North America. I guess that means there is no money to upgrade it, but still, it's pretty awesome to have a ski lift in such a tiny town. It's reachable in about a 3 minute drive from downtown. We walked up the slopes a bit that morning for a nice view of the surroundings.

The morning of our first full day the clouds were doing crazy things on the mountains. These were pouring over the tops at a high speed all morning.

With that said, i had a great time in Cordova. We did find some exceptionally good Mexican food in a bus shack. All the people we met were friendly and helpful. The mountain scenery is gorgeous, and there is a lot of history to find in the area. Outlying lands offer unlimited hiking and and adventure. We were very busy for the 3 days we were in town, and it seemed like we just scratched the surface.

This is another museum but it was closed on the weekend.

Wooded neighborhoods watch over the harbor.

As ice melts in the Arctic, more Polar Bears will be forced on land to forage for food, like this one, emerging from the water after a long swim.

A high and rotten bridge.

After dinner one night Maree started laughing when i was making fun of this guys rusted out truckbed. I thought i was funny but she was laughing at a Raven. It had taken a net float out of a storage box and carried it up to the top of a rusty shack. Once on the apex it looked like it tried to throw it off the top but dropped it. It was awkward looking and very strange behavior. But the bird did it again, and again, until i was astonished to realize the bird was playing with a found toy.

Unfortunately by the time i got my camera ready the game had it's final run. The float bounced the wrong way, as pictured below, and fell into a pile of rubble and bushes where the Raven couldn't get at it. It wasn't to sad about the turn of events though. Withing seconds, another Raven who had been watching from a distance, came over and partnered with the game player. Then went back to that storage box (on the side of an empty boat trailer) and started rummaging through it together so see what other treasure they could find in there.

This was a great piece of property for sale above Eyak Lake. The edge of this lot was literally the boundary of the National Forest. From here it was a short walk to a hanging valley full of meadows and waterfalls. On the other hand you can expect snow in your yard until after Memorial Day.

An easy to miss falls on the side of Eyak Lake.

The Million Dollar Bridge

2011-07-29T23:31:00.000-08:00

We went to Cordova. I would have gone to Cordova long ago but you can't drive there and if you're going to cough up enough money to fly locally in Alaska you may as well cough up a little more and go somewhere warm. So we took the ferry.

We happened to go at the end of a long stretch of fantastic weather. The forecast suggested that our travel day was the last day of good sun for several days, so when we got off the ferry at 7:30pm i decided the best thing to do was to grab something to eat, check into our lodging, and drive out of town to the end of the road.

The Child's Glacier is three miles wide and several hundred feet high.

That road is called the Cordova Highway. It's mostly gravel and it goes east out of Cordova for 50 miles before it becomes impassable to cars. It was built originally as a railroad by the familiar names J.P Morgan and the Guggenheim's. The rail line connected Cordova to the 200 mile distant Kennecott Mine in the Wrangells to the Northeast. From the mine the rail originally traveled west until it met the Copper River, at which point it turned south and followed the river as it cut it's way through the Chugach Mountains. The rail then crossed the huge flat delta and terminated in Cordova, where the copper was loaded onto ships. It was built in the early 1900's and abandoned in 1938. About a decade later it was converted into the Copper River Highway and linked Cordova to the rest of the state along Alaska Route 10.

After driving through dense mountains surrounding Cordova the land suddenly opens up into vast wetlands as the highway travels through the extensive Copper River Delta.

When the highway reaches the center of the delta and crosses the main channel of the river the landscape changes from lush wetlands to what has the look of desert wastelands.

Eventually the highway comes back to the mountains, which erupt up out of the flat delta.

In this view of the bridge you can see how the section in the foreground (the formerly collapsed section) is more than two feet off of alignment with the rest of the bridge.

Today the road ends on the Cordova side at the Million Dollar Bridge. One section of the bridge collapsed in the 1964 earthquake and the highway has been abandoned ever since. It's truly a bridge to nowhere, but it's a fantastic destination.

The bridge was built in between two enormous glaciers. To the west the Child's Glacier terminates in huge cliffs at the Copper River. Chunks of it break off into the river as you watch from the opposite shore. To the east the Miles Glacier marks the westernmost edge of the 3rd largest icefield on earth. From the Miles Glacier you can travel across ice for over 200 miles, well into Canada. It's a true barrier, and after the Copper River no other inland river makes it to the coast until the Alsek, a distant 250 miles down the coast. The distance in between is what is known as The Lost Coast.

A fisherman is dwarfed by the Child's Glacier. The river between the glacier and the man in these pictures is a quarter mile wide.

From here, at the bridge, the Miles Glacier looms 5 miles away. The edge of the largest icefield on earth outside of Greenland and Antarctica, continues from here for over 200 miles. It's size distorts perspective. The reason the alpenglow seems to dip closer to the horizon on the right side of the photo is because those mountains are 30 miles more distant than the ones on the left. This is the end of the road.

It's a very interesting location. The Miles and Child's Glaciers follow the same path from opposite directions. The Copper River smashes into the Miles Glacier, turns 90 degrees, goes under the bridge, smashes into the Child's Glacier, turns 90 degrees and then behaves like a normal river. The bridge was damaged along this same line, one section of it is now nearly two feet to the left of the rest of the bridge. It's all part of the barrier between two crustal plates known as part of the Bagley Fault. The Bering Glacier in the neighboring Bagley Icefield also follows the same line for 100 miles. The Copper River, though, had been following it's southward path for many years before the existence of the surrounding Chugach Mountains.

Portland Oregon

2011-07-15T10:57:00.000-08:00

Although i've been to Oregon before and lived in Seattle for 4 years, i had never done anything in Portland. I've been down the beautiful Oregon coast, up the Columbia River Gorge, and once spent two days at pristine Crater Lake, but i had never done anything in Portland other than to get gas on the way through.

That finally changed this past fall the week before Thanksgiving. I drove down to Portland from Seattle and spent 4 days wandering around town in the rain. The first day had my hopes running high, it was just past the peak of fall and the town was beautiful. That night though a huge wind storm blew most of the leaves off and the following days were plagued by sometimes torrential rain. I didn't spend as much time outside as i wanted, but what i did see told me it was a pretty city.

Portland has a lot of very pretty city parks, like this one up on a strange big hill.

Portland has a great Art Museum relative to the size of the city, and many other interesting smaller galleries scattered around town. They have a pretty good zoo,(and if you want to avoid the crowds go there during a major rainstorm). The city has a lot of fantastic restaurants for every meal, and they have very good beer.

I finally upgraded my ancient, generations old iPhone, to an iPhone 4. I was shocked that the iPhone 4 actually has a usable camera. So now you can expect phone pictures on this blog, like these. That's my finger in the first one. It took a long time to learn not to do that.

Maybe it was more apparent than usual after spending 3 weeks in Manhattan, but what struck me most about Portland was the friendly attitude i encountered everywhere that i went. It helped that i was from Alaska, as that seemed to be a location that was on everyone's mind as a vacation spot of interest. Even so, i found my time being sucked up at times by conversations with perfect strangers. One night a friend of a friend, a person who's existence i had just learned about, met up with me and showed me around his part of town just so i'd have something to do that evening. Thanks, Sterling, for the time and the fine Scotch!

All the leaves blew off the trees and onto the street 4 hours after i got there.

A Portland residence. Portland must have a lot of recycling laws, because this guy has 6 different kinds of garbage cans in front of his garage.

I couldn't tell if these were wood or resin. The iPhone is bad in low light.

Portland is full of neat little shops like this one.

As nice as Portland is, i wasn't there for fun and games. I had come to receive treatment for chronic Tinnitus and what i didn't know until then had a name: hyperacusis. While tinnitus is a sound caused by your brain trying to fill in areas with sound where it isn't getting a signal, hyperacusis is a problem with hearing everyday sounds at an abnormally loud perceived volume. It often occurs along with tinnitus, and some believe they are related. The hyperacusis i was experiencing had been worse in the four months following my introduction to tinnitus. During that time I found restaurants, construction, and retail stores like Home Depot with backing up forklifts to be deafening to the point that i tried to avoid them altogether. The really weird thing about it was that it was so loud to me that i'd have sworn you'd have to yell to be heard, but i could hear anyone talking in a normal tone of voice without any problems at all.

One night it didn't rain for a few hours so i went walking. Portland has hundreds of tons of bridges and crazy complex highway overpasses. This old double decker, which raises in the middle accommodates trains and pedestrians on the deck, and public trains and cars on the upper deck.

On the bridge. The tracks in this one were occupied by robot trains. There are actual signs warning that the trains had no drivers in them.

I went to the the Oregon Tinnitus & Hyperacusis Treatment Center, run by Dr. Marsha Johnson. Dr. Johnson, who is on the board of the American Tinnitus Association, was more helpful and demonstrated more genuine concern about my problems than any of the other doctors i spoke to over the phone or in person over a period of three months. And she is about as close to Alaska as you can get on a plane.

Due to the type of tinnitus i was experiencing, i was a good candidate for something called cochlear retraining therapy. Cochlear retraining is a long term treatment that teaches your brain to filter out the bothersome noises of tinnitus by mapping out perceived problem frequencies and embedding them into a white noise "mask." The idea is that the patient listens to this masking noise in the background of specially chosen music every day for two to four hours for up to two years. During that time the patients brain will learn edit out the offending noises. That's the gist of it. It's an FDA approved treatment and has an 80% success rate in improving tinnitus. There are no claims that it will cure it, but some patients do report a complete removal of the sounds in their heads.

It takes four days to get set up. Dr. Johnson ran some tests on me and we mapped out the sounds in my head. Unfortunately, my hearing loss was pretty screwed up and i hear four frequencies of sounds ranging from low to high. The program is only designed to treat one sound, so i had to make the tough choice of choosing which sound i wanted to get rid of the most. The least bothersome noise i hear sounds a lot like the refrigeration sounds in the frozen foods aisle at the grocery. I went with the highest pitch noise.

After the frequencies are matched, the doctor has to order what is basically an extraordinarily expensive mp3 player from the company that developed the program. In the U.S. it's called Neuromonics. If things go well a few days later you can leave with the device in hand, and start treatment immediately.

Thirty minutes outside of Portland is one of the prettiest waterfalls in the country. Multnomah Falls is in the Columbia River Gorge. The two falls together plunge 620 feet over cliffs made from old lava flows. Driving along the gorge and looking at the rainforest growing over strangely carved basalt cliffs i couldn't help but notice the similarity to Hawaii.

You can walk on a paved trail to the top of the waterfall, and from there several more miles through the rainforest.

Shortly after this bend in the creek it plummets off a sheer cliff for 542 feet (165 m).

It's been 9 months now that i've been on the program and my tinnitus has improved greatly in that time. It's a very slow, subconscious process, with days that can still be challenging, and others that i barely notice at all. I've changed some of my habits. For instance, i used to like a completely quiet room to sleep in. Now i sleep with a fan on just outside to generate white noise, which masks some of the sounds. Only in the last three months have i really been able to enjoy music again. Listening to low quality music or music that has lots of constant high frequency noise can still be irritating so i try and avoid that as well. I've found that the most important factor is simply getting enough sleep. Nothing makes a larger difference in volume of the tinnitus than a lack of sleep. Stress can also be a major contributor. In the meantime i'm supposed to make a couple of more trips down to Portland for checkups on the therapy.

Nothing i've ever dealt with has affected me as much as tinnitus. It is apparently the number one injury for American troops in battlefield. I'm lucky enough to be living in an age where they have only recently begun to develop working treatments for the disorder. It's also a unique affliction in that researches seem to be very close to finding a real cure for the problem in our lifetime.

Back home in Snoqualmie. This is the restaurant from the TV show of the same name, still serving pie!

The Sound of Silence (Or Lack Thereof...)

2011-07-03T22:03:00.002-08:00

Yikes, it's been a month without a post, so here's a long one. I'll blame it on summer visitors. Before i get started i'd like readers to know that things this year are much better than last summer as described below.

Last spring i was feeling motivated and had planned several multi-day off trail hikes. I got an early start on the training to make sure i was in good condition when the right days came along. In late May, right after Memorial Day, i began to hear an extremely high pitched ringing in both my ears. I noticed it on a walk with the dog and Maree up in the mountains. The ringing wasn't that loud, but the pitch was annoying, and it was worse in my left ear. I didn't think much about it but two weeks later it was still going on, and it was often made worse by driving on the highway. I didn't want to go to the doctor though, because i had just blown a ton of money on doctors and gotten nothing out of it for an entirely different condition that in the end i fixed myself. I was also very busy trying to get things ready for a slew of visitors in June. Plus, i had ringing before three years ago at the same time of year and it eventually went away.

Another week went by and one night i woke up at 2:00 am to the worst sound i've ever heard. It was deafening. It was like someone was trying to use a table saw to slice through metal sheets inside my skull and it had an overlying electrical component to it. I wanted to shove in icepick in my head. I don't know why, but for some reason i didn't go to the emergency room. I realized later that sound was my brain trying to make sense of the cilia suddenly dying in my inner ear. I lost enough hearing that night that i can no longer hear some very normal sounds in my left ear. I can barely hear cymbals in a drum set. This was the beginning of my experience with tinnitus.

Empire State Building from a doctors office.

Near another medical facility.

Of course, i did go to the doctor after that terrible night, but it was too late. The sounds i heard all the time now were exacerbated by very normal every day sounds like turning sheets of paper, the soft crinkle of plastic grocery bags, the sound of tires on the road (especially the sound of wet streets under the tires), water running through small pipes in a bathroom sink, compressed audio on TV, nylon brushing on nylon, even leaves rustling in the wind.

All those noises would make the tinnitus louder, and the tinnitus was already always louder than whatever else was going on. It would never stop. It began driving me insane. I couldn't sleep and i had trouble paying attention to conversations. I began to feel a great anxiety all the time, to the point that i couldn't eat any more. In about two weeks i lost 16 pounds and i became so fatigued from lack of sleep i felt like i might collapse at work sometimes. So it was no surprise that i fell into depression.

After you have had your fill of typical NYC tourist sights you will become interested in a more thoughtful exploration of the city. Trinity Church has several Churches and graveyards around Manhattan. They are very old for America (NYC has been inhabited for 400 years!) This one was in Harlem and was a nice place to wander around.

Here's a pretty non-touristy tourist destination. The High Bridge opened in 1848 as an aqueduct and pedestrian bridge connecting Harlem and the Bronx. Although closed for the last FORTY years, it remains the oldest surviving bridge in the city.

Local doctors surmised that the hearing loss was most likely caused by my hay fever allergies, which were pretty bad that year. My eustachian tubes connecting my ears to my throat had swollen shut at some point, preventing my ears from regulating the pressure behind my ear drum. It didn't feel any different to me but as i kept changing altitude (going up the mountains several times a week for training) the pressure increased in my ears until that fateful night when some of my cilia died. I don't know what put it over the edge, maybe a pressure system moved through town that night.

If you want to get away from crowds, this bridge is for YOU. I was up here for 20 minutes and didn't see a soul. Getting here requires a bit of walking through a largely residential area of Harlem. That is underwear hanging on the barbwire. Gotta love NYC.

They REALLY don't want you going on the bridge, unless you have a short ladder. I did not have a short ladder.

Peering through a small hole in the big black doors you can see what looks like a pleasant walk across a cobbled brick path with wonderfully low railing. Man, i really miss the days of low railing. The picture below is looking back at a strange old watertower build along with the bridge. You can see a pretty cool shot of the interior of the tower on the wiki page here.

I had to start taking sleeping medication and anti-anxiety medication to rest and eat. I was very depressed, and at some point this allergy medicine called Singulair had a reaction with Lunesta sleeping pills and made me have terrible suicidal thoughts. I couldnt' believe it when i read the label on the allergy medication and it said "may cause suicidal thoughts". It's just allergy medication! I knew something was up because i have NEVER EVER thought about killing myself. I've never even been depressed without good reason (like the death of a loved one). It had gotten to the point that i began to think about where i should do it, and how.

I was absolutely hopeless. I couldn't imagine living in my condition for more than a little while. So at that point i decided to go see a psychiatrist. I had never done that before, but i figured i had nothing to lose. The bad thoughts stopped soon after changing the ridiculous allergy medication, and i didn't need the sleeping pills after i received some anti-anxiety medication (psychiatrists make a ton of money in case you're looking for a new career).

After not too long the psychiatrist wanted me to commit to a year long anti-depression medication treatment, but i knew (and endlessly point out to every doctor i saw) that if i could just get the ringing to improve i wouldn't need to do that.

Near high bridge i wandered into the woods and found a small pocket of.... NATURE!

Please ignore the fork in the lower right of the image, and the spray paint on the upper left of the metamorphic rock cliff. And please imagine snowy and/or tropical mountains instead of the low income housing of the Bronx in the background... and the industrial train yard.... and i promise that is a pool of WATER, nothing else.

On the other side of Harlem (by the way, Harlem is not where i was staying but i spent a lot time walking around there because i'd never been) the subway briefly comes out above ground and has one elevated station stop.

There's a good place to the left of here called Dinosaur Bar-B-Que.

There are tons of places in NYC had never seen but recognized immediately from playing Grand Theft Auto, like this bridge.

In October, my friend Sandor, offered to fly me to NY, where he lives, to see some really good doctors about my ear problems. I was there for 3 weeks, and after a ton of tests and massive loss of blood, the several doctors i saw determined that the best option for me, since the ringing was not caused by anything like a brain tumor (yes i even had a brain scan), was a therapy called cochlear retraining. This is a sound therapy where they map out the sounds you are hearing in your head. They then embed these sounds into a kind of white noise that they play in the background of some specially designed music. Listening to this music through headphones for 2-4 hours a day teaches your brain, over a period of 9 months to 2 years, to filter out the tinnitus, or greatly reduce it.

I had heard about the treatment before i went to New York but it is expensive and i wanted to be sure it a symptom of some other problem. The only problem is that they can only do it for one frequency, and i am hearing 3 frequencies of sounds. So i had to pick the most bothersome noise for treatment. Since it takes a long time several checkups are required to measure the progress. Although they offered the treatment there in New York City, i opted to have it closer to home, at a well known facility in Portland, Oregon called the Oregon Tinnitus and Hyperacussis Treatment Clinic. So off to Portland i went.....

I think my favorite area on the island was down around Wall Street, oddly enough. There the city is the oldest, and the streets are much narrower, curved, and have a more organic feel rather than a grid like the uptown areas.

A neat closed off road where you can eat outside. Almost looks like Europe!

Manhattan has reclaimed acres of land from the water west of the World Trade Center site, much of it made with all the dirt they had to dig out to make the foundations for the towers. Some of it is used for an upscale downtown neighborhood.

Inside the glass dome from the previous image is this kinda strange computer designed interior. But it's also a nice large space.

Visitors gaze at the construction of the new tower site.

This is what the construction of the new tower looked like at the end of October 2010.

I am very grateful to my friends who offered me a place to stay for so long while i tried to set up a long series of appointments with popular doctors who were always on vacation or moving into better places. And i cannot stress enough that if you hear ringing in your ears that is bothering you, you need to get to a doctor sooner rather than later or the ringing could get MUCH louder. Tinnitus and/or hearing loss will change your life forever.

Although i did lots and lots of walking i didn't take many pictures during my time in NYC. I was still wearing a sling the entire time i was there, so carrying around a camera was cumbersome, and any serious shots were out of the question. By the time i was about to leave my arm was feeling good enough that i thought i might try taking a tripod with me to do an HDR at an interesting place i found in Harlem, but the light was never right for it in those last days. I think at least some of these shots offer a bit of information about other parts of New York aside from what you typically see in vacation photos.

Mono Lake

2011-06-03T08:28:00.000-08:00

When i was a kid i used to get World magazine. World had a spin off magazine for more scientifically minded kids produced by the same company, although i can't remember what it was called. That magazine, back in the early 1980's, was the first time i heard of Mono Lake. I was spellbound by the bizarre rocks sticking up out of the water like cave formations. It looked like an alien planet, and as a child it seemed so remote i thought i'd never go there.

At that time the lake was in serious danger of being swallowed by Los Angele's endless appetite for water, as the formerly fertile Owen's Valley had been in the 1940. In fact, Mono was being drained by an extension of the very same aqueduct that destroyed Owen's Valley.

Los Angeles didn't want the actual lake water because it's a saline lake in a basin with no outlets. Instead, the water commission siphoned off the water from the tributary streams around the lake. It wasn't until 1994 that court cases were finally resolved in favor of restoring the lake. By that time the lake had lost 1/2 it's volume to evaporation (meaning the salinity doubled), and the ecosystem was in shambles. Today the lake is 11 feet deeper, and much work has gone on in the last decade to repair the state of the surrounding streams.

The tufa towers catch the light in a manner that is similar to the pillars of Bryce Canyon.

I wanted to get to those tuffa formations in the distance. I knew when sunset was but i underestimated when the sun would drop behind the Sierras. We were literally racing the light to get there before the shadows of the mountains beat us.

The odd thing about the whole distaster is that if it hadn't happened, people probably wouldn't be interested in visiting the lake at all. As the lake levels dropped it began to reveal surreal rock pillars called tufa.

Tufa forms in a variety of ways, but the main mechanism at Mono Lake creates tufa towers up to 30 feet high. The towers only form underwater at the bottom of the lake, where springs release water rich in calcium. The spring water bonds chemically with carbonates in the lake water and precipitates out of solution as calcium carbonate (limestone). The limestone grows slowly around the vents, creating rock formations that bear an uncanny resemblance to speleoforms (which only grow in caves and only out of the water).

The limestone tufa form all kinds of bizarre shapes. The rock is fragile, but that doesn't seem to stop busloads of visitors from immediately climbing all over it and posing for pictures. In the absence of crowds it offers a serene fantasy landscape.

Mono Lake lies at 6,400ft. in the high desert, directly east of Yosemite National Park. Mono Lake in it's present form has been around for at least 760,000 years. Sediments suggest it may be a remnant of an ancient lake that existed as far back as 3 million years ago, making it a contender for the oldest lake in North America. When i saw it i thought it was a collapsed caldera, like Crater Lake in Oregon. A basalt bench protrudes above the water far out in the middle of the lake. It's only a coincidence though.

A chain of cinder cones have made their way up from the south, stretching all the way up to the lakes shore. The most recent eruption happened right in the middle of the lake only 350 years ago. That eruption created an island that has since become a protected breeding ground for migrating birds.

Another unique and highly noticeable aspect of mono lake up close are the alkali flies. There are billions of them on the sand at the edge of the water and in the nearby grasses, lying in mattes. They often lie still until you approach, then they swarm around in a black cloud no higher than your knees. The constant smacking into your legs is uncomfortable but it's not nearly as annoying as mosquitoes. The flies don't bite, they eat microscopic algae in the water.

From a distance Mono Lake doesn't look interesting at all. Up close, though, it's a different world from the lands surrounding it. I found it very relaxing, so much so that we went twice for the sunset. I imagine it can be quite harsh in winter, but in late summer the evening breeze is just right, there are birds all over the place feeding on brine shrimp. There are rough dirt roads that stretch around one side of the lake, canoeing/kayaking are allowed and seem like a pretty fun way to get to some of the off shore tufa towers. At night the stars are fantastic in the dry air.

The view from our room in Lee Vining. For some reason i liked it.

Yosemite National Park

2011-05-20T09:29:00.000-08:00

Yosemite National Park is the hardest national park to spell correctly. Oddly enough, as many places as i've been in the North America (and even California) i had never been to Yosemite until this past September. I planned a few hikes in the park and then a week before i was supposed to go i was in a freak accident. Some woman's psychotic dog purposely smashed into my legs (on a big trail in the city) so hard that i flew head over heels and landed on my shoulder and head on a rock. The impact severed two of the tendons that hold my arm to the rest of my skeleton. I am still not recovered from this incident even 8 months after surgery to replace the tendons. In fact, the surgery has failed, and i'm looking at another one. Whether or not i'll be able to do much hiking with a pack on my back this coming summer is, at this point, still a mystery.

I have to admit that the Half Dome is a mighty impressive sight. More so than i expected.

Yosemite Vally as viewed from Glacier Point. In addition to crowds we dealt with smoke from forest fires. You can see it creeping in already from the right side of the photo. By late afternoon it was ruining the views even for short distances in the valley bottom.

My plans were destroyed. I showed up at the park wearing a sling and was confined to easy walks and viewpoints. This was driving me nuts, not only because it is a great place to hike, but also because it was Labor Day weekend - the worst time ever to go visit Yosemite. There were so many people, combined with the park service deciding it was a good idea to do some road construction that weekend, that we actually left the park on the first day, unable to deal with the crowds we were confined in. It was so crowded that two of the areas we wanted to visit were actually closed -- due to overcrowding!

Maree relaxes on a boulder at Tenaya Lake. This was my favorite area. It is about as perfect an alpine lake as you can imagine. The rocks are warm, the water clear, and one side even has a white sand beach. In this bottom picture you can see a man with his grandkid wading in an extensive shallow area.

We had better luck on Monday after the weekend. I was still disappointed though, to find that Yosemite Falls, the one hike i thought i could do, was bone dry. I had no idea that could happen, and i started to suspect all those old Ansel Adams pictures had been Photoshopped. Apparently by late summer it is quite common for the falls to not exist.

Not a good picture, but i posted it to show the character of the landscape. This type of stuff is very fun to wander around exploring.

Tioga Lake at 9,600 ft (2926m), is man made but very pretty.

Yosemite Falls has the title of the tallest measured waterfall in North America, but i'm going to have to argue about that. For one, it doesn't even flow half the time in summer. If you are going to count intermittent falls, which it clearly is, then that really widens the list of candidates. I can think of some huge 3,000 foot cliffs in Zion that have waterfalls when it rains, and the Alaska Range is developing some big falls in summer right off the top of some of the peaks.

Secondly, saying it's the tallest "measured" falls is just silly. It doesn't mean anything. It's definitely not the biggest falls around, anyone who has seen a lot of falls can just look at it and tell. There are numerous waterfalls in British Columbia nobody feels like "measuring" that are larger, like Desert River Falls, B.C. 830 meters (2,723 ft), James Bruce Falls, B.C. 840 meters (2,756 ft), Alfred Creek Falls, which is 2,297 meters (7,536 ft), etc.. etc.

Although lower in altitude and less than a mile from Tioga Lake, Ellery Lake (another dammed stream) already bears the signatures of a drier climate. From here the road descends into the high desert of the Mono Basin.

Lastly, when listing the height they seem to be counting the upper falls, the cascades in the middle, and the lower falls all as one single waterfall, even though the upper and lower falls are separated horizontally by nearly a quarter mile. I don't think that counts as one fall. But that's me. In any event, researching this just a little bit has made me realize how ridiculous it is to make a competition out of water sliding off of stuff.

Another feature Yosemite is known for is it's groves of Giant Sequoia Trees. We saw some of those, and i have to report that Sequoia National Park has a much better selection of the giant trees. In fact, it has the biggest of all of them. Sequoia also has spectacular granite canyons just as deep as Yosemite, it has Mt. Whitney (the highest in the lower 48 states and a hike that i highly recommend), and it is far less crowded. Can you tell i was grumpy that weekend?

Grant Lake, another pretty reservoir, leads back into the June Lake ski area.

It's not all bad though. Yosemite really impressed me in the highlands and outside the park on the eastern range. Tioga Pass Road climbs up to just shy of 10,000 ft. (3,000 m) and it's a very nice drive. Many trails and stopping points along the road offer easy access to the highland meadows and mountains. This is a HUGE advantage over Sequoia, where one must spend several hours trudging uphill in order to get to the pristine tablelands above treeline. The other huge benefit of the road is that it goes straight through the park. In Seqoia if you wanted to hike from one end to the other, or climb Mt. Whitney when you live in the Giant Forest, you have to make a 5 hour drive south to the Mojave Desert and then back north to at least Lone PIne.

Lower down on the east side of the range are a series of beautiful lakes, some of them reservoirs. One area that was a big surprise is outside the park in the the desert. We took a loop drive to an area called June Lake. Its a hidden valley that looks similar to the Tahoe area. Based on what i saw i imagine it's much less crowded than the park on a non-holiday. I plane on returning there at some point.

On the ground here is a huge campground and "Silver Lake", which mainly seems to be a fishing lake. A good trail ascends from the right into the upper valleys. In that area is a place called Lake of 1,000 Islands. It's on my list of things to do.

Ghost Towns: Bodie, California

2011-05-06T09:17:00.000-08:00

Ten years after the California Gold Rush of 1849 W.S. Body and E.S. Taylor spent three days exploring the streams northeast of Monoville and came back with ore samples of outstanding quality. Neither man would live to reap the benefits of the discovery. Body died under unknown circumstance while traveling through a blizzard between camp and Monoville that very winter. Taylor was killed by Native Americans two years later.

Although word spread quickly about the gold find, Bodie never really became a boomtown until 1876. Maybe because of the more famous nearby gold towns of Aurora and Virginia City miners in Bodie kept selling themselves short, closing down their mines and selling the claims before the gold petered out. Then, in 1875, a cave-in at a mine known as the Bullion Lode revealed a large shelf of gold previously undiscovered. Within 6 months Bodie was on it's way to becoming the third largest city in California.

Bodie was a harsh place to live and work. At an elevation of over 8,300 feet in the high desert it is well above treeline and has temperatures that fall below freezing 300 days of the year. Add to that monster snowstorms that piled the snow up to a record depth of 28 feet in 1911 and you've got a less than ideal townsite. Pneumonia was the number one killer, and incredible amounts of wood had to be shipped in by wagon not only heat during the long winters but also building materials in the summer.

But that didn't stop people from coming. During it's heyday Bodie had reached a population of 10,000. There were 65 saloons among the 450 businesses in town. It had it's own Chinatown, Red Light district, and even 4 opium dens. It was a great place to raise children.

Walls were thin and rooms were small, being heated with wood stoves.

Although the population plummeted by the beginning of the 20th century, the town lived on into the age of the automobile. There are a couple of old car husks by a few houses, and there is an old gas station. In 1962 the town was purchased by California and made into a state park. What buildings were left have been preserved in a state of decay. I love this idea, because it preserves the mystique and character of a ghost town while at the same time keeping out looters, and making sure the buildings don't succumb to the elements. I've been to many ghost towns where nothing is left at all.

One of Bodies 65 Saloons.

A solid wood globe decays in the classroom. Bodie had almost 10,000 residents. Of those 615 were children. There were four teachers.

Most of the buildings are locked up, so what you do is walk around looking in windows. You can't see into any of them unless you press your face up against the glass, so every building is a surprise. As you venture farther away from the main street the structures gradually become empty but occasionally come across some that are still inhabited. That's awkward, peering into someones window and seeing them walk by a door. They put put signs up on the inhabited houses.

The nicest house in Bodie still stands. Jessie McGath built it for his new wife in 1879. Today it is known as the Cain House, after James Stuart Cain, who bought and lived in it with his wife until the 1940's.

These are the largest buildings still standing, aside from the mill.

The Miners Union Hall has been turned into a small museum and is densely packed with artifacts. This is a glass funeral carriage.

The town runs well up the hillside and a cross-street downtown runs so far north that our legs got tired before we made it to the old chinatown. Along the way we saw the jail and the old bank vault. Past the car lot is the cemetery, which was disappointing relative to the rest of the townsite. Although it seemed spacious when we arrived, by the time we left Bodie there were hundreds of people walking around

The town is large and situated on two or three long streets. The mill still stands too, and a guided tour is available through that twice daily. We were there for several hours and didn't go on the mill tour.

All in all, Bodie is by far the best ghost town i've ever visited. It's well worth the time to visit if you are passing through the Mono area.

Historical information for this blog was taken from the book Bodie: 185901962, by Terri Lynn Geissinger. It's available at the Bodie Foundation website.

Denali National Park

2011-04-23T19:40:00.000-08:00

Every year in Denali National Park you can enter a lottery to drive your vehicle all the way to the end of the road. This is kind of a big deal because there is only one road and normally cars aren't allowed on it more than a short distance inside the park (to the first campground). Instead you must pay a noticeable fee to ride on a bus. There are many buses throughout the day, and you are free to get off of the bus at any point, catching the first bus that comes by in either direction when you are ready to continue.

The road starts off in forested valleys. There is a lot of wildlife too see almost immediately. We saw a single limping Caribou walking along the river here. It is eerie to see an animal you know is doomed to die. It may have gotten it's injuries from a very recent attack.

After the first hour the land opens up into vast plains and empty braided river valleys.The first distant view of Mt. McKinley along the road was peachy with haze early that morning.

If you do win the lottery you won't know until September, and the catch is that you have to wait until the end of the season, after the buses stop before they let you come by. There is a 4 day window for lottery winners to make the drive, and you have to obey the same excruciating speed limit as the buses. Because of the late notice and the short window just a couple of weeks later, it's generally not feasible for non Alaskans to take advantage of the lottery. We like it that way.

Lone Wolf

Dall Sheep

I'm disappointed in these blurry Lynx photos. While only people from the lower 48 will get out of their seats to look at a moose, everybody jumps to their feet when a Lynx is spotted. I was caught off guard as we drove through an unattractive shaded area. Although i was sitting on the correct side of the bus, everyone else was jostling for position, rocking the bus all over the place while i was pulling the trigger.The Lynx was moving too fast to make any adjustments.

I've included this one just to illustrate how well the cat blends into it's surroundings. A few seconds later and it was gone. Lynx feed almost exclusively on Snowshoe Hares, and their population goes through boom and bust cycles to match those of the Hare. The Hare follows 10 year cycles and as of 2010 the population had passed it's peak and began plummeting. Many Lynx will starve to death as a result, and they will become an even more rare sight. The Hare cycle affects a wide range of other animals, including eagles, fox, coyote, owls, and even moose and sheep.

Golden Eagles will not lay eggs during years that coincide with a low Snowshoe Hare population.

This past September i went to the park on the last day the buses ran for the season. I decided to go only to the Eilson Center viewpoint (going to the Wonder Lake campground takes hours longer). It's the first time i've been there in almost 10 years, and in that time the park service has built an entirely new visitor center at Eilson.

A tour bus is already dwarfed as it drives towards Denali, at this point still distant at more than 40 miles (64 km) away.

This mountain has been climbed only once in January. One day i'd like to climb one of the mountains in that grey range. I bet the view is ridiculous from there. All i have to do is walk 17 miles from the road across trailless wilderness and cross a river, then climb the mountain.

Like my dog, Mt. McKinley appears much larger in real life than it does in photos. It's one of the biggest things you'll see anywhere on earth. In fact, it's MUCH larger than Mt. Everest in both vertical height and mass. Mt. Everest is 29,000 ft.(8,839m) but it rises out of the Tibetan Plateau which is already 17,000 ft (5,000m) high. So it rises 12,000 ft (3,657m) above you. That's impressive.

In Denali, you can stand on the banks of the McKinley River and stare at the summit rising 18,400 feet (5,608m) above your head, and you may be at a loss for words. It's much more impressive than the Grand Canyon. Here's a picture comparing the two mountains.

When it's behind the clouds, as it is 66% of the time during summer, and the clouds clear, people routinely can't find it because they don't look high enough. This happens so often that in the new visitor center the park service has drawn an outline of the summit on one of the windows so people know how high to look.

I imagine this is the kind of stuff you see in Tibet and Nepal. I should go verify that. This is some piddly wink mountain off the side of McKinley. It's called Peter's Dome.

It was well below freezing the morning of my bus ride, and also well past the peak of fall, but there was surprisingly little snow on the mountains, especially after our incredibly wet summer. But, even in a dead "waiting for winter" state of being the scenery was still spectacular, and the passengers on the bus, many of them locals, were a much more relaxed crowd that you'd meet in the summertime.

Back at the hotel the Nenana River was flowing swiftly through a more hospitable landscape.

Dawn from my room. Those clouds worried me without warrant. You can tell by now the day turned out great.

There were only two hotels still open, and the one i was in was half closed. It reminded me of back in the years when i worked in National Parks and we closed the hotels ourselves at the end of the season. Fortunately there was still an awesome beer and pizza restaurant open across the street.

This is the crazy entrance to some guys property. It's right on side of the road with no place to park a car. There is nothing on the other side of that door except a trail that runs down the side of a hill. The door says PRIVATE.

I always drive by this place, and i finally stopped to take a look on the way back from the park. The gorge gets narrow but twists around and goes for some distance clogged with trees.

I didn't realize i hadn't posted a full view of the mountain.

Lost Lake

2011-04-09T04:00:00.001-08:00

Near the end of summer, in late August, the rain stopped, and we saw the sun. Since it was a lost summer, i decided to go to Lost Lake. I'd bought a bunch of new camping gear in spring that i hadn't gotten to try out, so borrowed a bear canister from my neighbor and decided to make it an overnight trip.

After breaching treeline the land opens up and the trail pass by various tarns.

You can approach Lost Lake from the North or the South. Regardless of which side you choose to start from, it's more than 7 miles to the lake. Since it was a shorter drive i started from the North. That route begins at Primrose Creek Campground, near the headwater outlet of Kenai Lake. From there it ascends 6 miles through dense forest to timberline. Upon exiting the forest you are treated to spectacular views of glaciated peaks on the East side of the valley. The last mile or so is a pleasant stroll across numerous tarns and alpine meadows

Lost Lake as approached from the North. This whole area of mountains and valleys is already 2,000 feet above the Kenai River.

The lake itself is huge, and tucked away on a massive plateau high above the lower valley. The plateau is so large in area, with it's own mountains and valleys, that you'd swear you were at ground level when you get there.

I decided to camp on this long peninsula.

As i have mentioned before, it had been raining all summer long and i went on this trip two days after the rain stopped. The trail was a serious mud sucking bog all the way up to tree line. The unpleasantness was multiplied by the fact that horses are allowed on the trail certain days of the week, and i happened to be there on one of those days. After a rainy summer of doing largely nothing, the sudden shock of doing something difficult was so undesirable that i nearly quit after the first mile.

I have to admit though, it would be a great trip on the back of a horse. An even better option would be floatplane. Two of them landed on the lake after i arrived and dropped off passengers in an area around a bend out of sight. In fact, i waved one of the planes down an tried to buy a ride back to Kenai lake, but the pilot wasn't interested.

A front and back view of the Big Agnes Seedhouse SL1. The width at the front is 43 inches and 31 inches in the back.

After the planes left there was no one else visible anywhere. I set up camp on a long narrow peninsula that stretches out into the middle of the lake. It almost bisected the lake, with only a 40 foot gap between it and a shorter peninsula reaching out from the other side. I imagine it must have been a moraine.

Sunrise on Mt. Ascension

That spring i'd bought a Big Agnes Seedhouse SL1 one person tent. It's extremely lightweight less than 3 pounds. This trip was a test for it, as i had planned on bringing it along for a multi day hike through the Talkeetnas.

It sets up easy enough, but i discovered a notable flaw. As the night wore on the temperature dropped well below the dew point, and the tent collected copious amounts of water. I am of average height, but the tent is so narrow that when i sat up my shoulders would touch the net walls, covered in dew, and that moisture would immediately transfer to my shirt. That's not good at all, having wet shoulders in 40 degree weather. There are many people much larger than me. Additionally, the vestibule out front of the tent is too small to reasonably accommodate my boots and pack, so those items were drenched with dew in the morning. My review of the tent, then, is that it is not suitable back country mountain travel, unless as a backup. I think it would be fine in the desert (excepting dust storms). Big Agnes makes a two person tent, called the SL2. It only weighs 12.5 oz. more (including the footprint), and i bet that one wouldn't have the same problem if only one person was in it.

One last look at Lost Lake as i was leaving.

The Lost Summer

2011-03-27T08:51:00.000-08:00

The summer or 2010 was one of the coldest, rainiest, and gloomiest summers on record in Anchorage. It rained for 31 days straight, breaking the record for the most consecutive days of rain in a row. And i'll let you know the weather didn't improve after that, we simply had one day when the rain paused for 24 hours. So aside from having fun with visiting friends and family, i didn't get much done in the way of hiking. Eventually i just started hiking in bad weather, either on trails i've done before just to get out of town, or in small areas i've always felt a nagging impetus to explore as i drove by.

One of those places was Bird Point. It's a little peninsula in Turnagain Arm covered in lush grasses and spots of thick trees. From time to time i've taken the dog out to some rocky shoreline near the road. The exposed stone benches there are worn smooth by the glacier that carved out Turnagain Arm, and it's a great spot to watch the tide go out in a dizzying rush of rapids.

I was trying to stick to the shoreline, but these muddy areas stretched well inland. Generally i had to walk around them because the mud alternates between being as slippery as ice when you set foot on it to forming concrete around your boots when you settle in.

The "frosty" grass is covered in mud from the high tide.

Because of the nature of the rocks, and the extensive mudflats on the west side of the peninsula, i've always thought it might hold some good opportunities for black and white photos, something i don't have a large supply of. One cloudy day i put on some fishing waders and drove out there to check it out.

Near Bird Point i spotted a juvenile grizzly on the beach. It was very skinny, eating discarded scraps of salmon washing up on shore from nearby Bird Creek. I don't why it wasn't over at the creek, unless it had been chased off by bigger bears.

Like most wild vegetated areas in Alaska, being there in the flesh is a whole different experience than watching from the comfort of a car. The beautiful grasses hide swampy water underneath, and if you think heading towards a more open area is a good idea, you'd be wrong. In those areas the water is too deep for the shoulder height grass to grow.

Crystal Lake. I've been here half a dozen times - but never in the sun.

On the way up to Crow Pass. This stream comes from a small glacier just a little higher up that i've never bothered with.

The woods aren't much better, choked with thick brush and alder navigation that i'm all too familiar with. I explored only about half of what i had planned before i'd had enough hardship and called it quits. Just before that point i did find some old remains of a homestead in the woods on the far side of the peninsula. I have no idea how the owner was getting back to the road, there were no signs of any path. I think that before the 1964 earthquake the whole area was 6 to 8 feet higher, meaning those flooded fields of grass would have been solid ground.

Raven Glacier, on the other side of Crow Pass, is another glacier that has melted dramatically since my first encounter with it. A rainy summer can actually do more damage to the ice than direct sunlight.

On the way down from Crow Pass i visited the cabin where we used to spend our holidays. It has a new owner now, and they have ripped off the large wrap around deck, thus the second story door in the air. The solar panels are new too. Goat Glacier is in the upper right.

Here's a short video showing some scenes in this group of blog posts:

Summer 2010 Activities from Adam Elliott on Vimeo.

26 Glacier Cruise

2011-03-13T03:13:00.001-08:00

There are at least a half dozen trips in Alaska that i have never done, partly because i kind of save as options for when i have visitors. One of those things is the 26 Glacier Cruise out of Whittier. The Alaskan coastline is littered with tidewater glaciers tucked into an endless maze of fjords stretching from Homer to Valdez. I've been on the well known cruise out of Seward, which takes you into Kenai Fjords National Park, but i'd never gotten around to the one in Prince William Sound. I decided the time was right when my sister was visiting last summer.

I hate doing anything that requires advanced reservations in Alaska. The weather is just too unpredictable, but in the case of the cruise i knew they often were full ships. So we booked our tour, and of course it was raining when the day came to leave. It's not the worst thing in the world, because the glaciers are still visible at sea level, and so is most of the wildlife.

About 1.5 miles off shore from Esther Island is Egg Rock, a sea lion rookery.

Right across from Whittier is the well known Kittiwake Rookery. There are 10,000 birds that nest on these cliffs. After that i lost count.

A Bald Eagle is actively consuming a Kittiwake off to the side of the rookery.

The vessel for this tour is called the Klondike Express, and it's a seriously impressive ship. A 127 foot catamaran, it can reach a top speed of 50 mph (80kph) while carrying 342 people. It cruises at only slightly slower, at 44 mph (71kph). That's a very satisfying speed, and will get you a long distance in a short time. On the other hand, if you see something cool out the window and want to take a picture, then by the time you're ready whatever it was you wanted to photograph is long gone, and the boat certainly doesn't stop. It's got to navigate through 145 miles of water during the tour.

During the long stretch of the cruise you will pass through an active commercial fishery. There were a ton of boats out there, some were quite large. I found this portion of the tour surprisingly interesting. The fishermen were very busy.

One of the boats in the fishing fleet was the Kodiak, (a boat featured in the TV show Deadliest Catch.) If you think all these crab captains just go home for the rest of the year and sit around once the season is over, you're dead wrong.

Purely by chance, the Captain Bill Wichrowski happened to be on deck (behind the red bearded guy). As you can see, he looks exactly the same as on TV. He's even wearing the same clothes!

Entering the fjords introduced a staggering number waterfalls pouring out of the clouds.

I didn't realize until i wrote this post that on the other side of this mountain is a place near Anchorage i've been wanting to go for years: Inner Lake George. From here it's 13 miles away. When i tried to get to the Eklutna Glacier a few years ago it was also 13 miles from me in the other direction. The only thing in the way at that time was a mile high cliff. Weird that I had ridden my bike 13 miles to get to that point.

The border between the ice and the rock is always interesting to me. After all, that's where all the carving occurs.

The tour is set up well. The longest, most "boring" part of the tour comes first, as the Klondike zips through open waters for 30 miles to a place called Esther Island. During this time the crew serves lunch, and before you know it the ship is navigating a narrow strip of water called Esther Passage. The passage is flanked on both sides by lush mountainous rain forest. After Esther the boat finally gets into glacier territory.

For people who see a lot of glaciers, this kind of scene is particularly exciting, at least it is for me. Usually you see a large glacier pouring out the end of a valley, like the one covered in debris here, or you see a smaller one working it's way down from it's mountain cirque crowned with rocky peaks, like the picture above this one. It's rare to see a glacier pouring over the top of an unknown landscape with no clues to what lies beyond. It definitely makes me want to get up there and explore.

As we arrived at Surprise Glacier the sun miraculously came out from behind the clouds.

I don't know how this happens, but in this picture a large portion of the glacier appears to have been turned completely on it's side, creating vertical strata in the ice. On the other hand, maybe it's just that dirt deposits have drained vertically down the side of ever thinning blades of ice. It's something i hadn't encountered before, and i couldn't walk up there to find out.

During our cruise we skipped College Fjord, the part i had been most looking forward too. The captains decided the weather was too bad, and told us the glacier had been calving so furiously all summer that the closest they could get with the boat was still miles away from the glacier. Instead we spent more time at Surprise Glacier. This worked out well because the sun came out and we got to witness several chunks of ice fall into the sea.

The sun came out and felt great. These fjords are refrigerated.

Then we got really lucky and the wind died down. The water started looking glassy.

The Klondike continued to amaze me when we were in the fjords. Due to all the rain we were having that summer the glaciers were calving like crazy, some of them choking the fjords with miles of icebergs. The Klondike was not frightened of the ice. It often hit ice bergs of impressive size. You could feel a tiny jolt due to the entire ship instantly changing speed as the ice absorbed it's momentum.

On one occasion when we were having trouble getting closer than two miles to Barry Glacier. The captains slowed the boat to a standstill. After a few minutes they spotted a gap opening up between large bergs. The captains gunned the engine and the large ship jumped right into action skipping through the narrow lead with no delay, as if it were a vessel ten times smaller.

The bottom of Surprise Glacier reminded me of old wooden beams, split under centuries of pressure.

The top of the glacier was covered in seracs constantly breaking apart.

Blocks of ice plummet into the ocean. Since we didn't go up College Fjord we were able to witness several episodes of calving on Surprise Glacier.

A close up of the falling ice. It's hard for me to comprehend how many pieces it can break into on it's way down. You'd hear a loud crackle and then it was like the ice was exploding.

On the other side of the fjord were still more glaciers. In the middle of this picture you can see some black dots in the ice. They are not sealions.

The were otters swimming around and relaxing on the floating bergs! I didn't know otters did this kind of stuff.

Our cruise still had one more surprise. With all the ice floating around the crew dragged some up on deck while everyone else was busy gazing towards land. On the way back they chopped up this ice and served glacier margaritas. I couldn't resist, i'd never had a mixed drink with glacier ice. They are great. The ice is very hard and melts slowly. It is difficult to break it with your teeth.

Mary Beth and Danielle at Cascade Glacier. The funny thing about this is that if you look up our location in Google Earth we would be under solid ice just upriver of the confluence of Cascade and Barry Glaciers.

Pictures of Picture Takers

2011-02-27T03:21:00.001-09:00

During the summer of 2010 I had three sets of summer visitors back to back. Unfortunately the weather was far from ideal during much of that time. Below are pictures of some of the things we did.

My friend Jeff came up first and was here in Alaska for Summer Solstice, the best day of the year. The weather was pretty bad most of the time Jeff was here (I think it was the first time ever that it rained here on the solstice), but that was ok, because he used to live here, so he wasn't seeing things for the first time, and we were inebriated most of the time anyway.

I took Jeff up to Black Lake. A pretty nice hike for a 12 minute drive from home.

From there we headed down to Williwaw Lakes, and took the looonnggg way around the front of O'Malley back to Glen Alps. That trail, by the way, is a stunning example of poor trail design.

After a lucky break of fantastic weather in Seward, i took Jeff to Exit Glacier, on the edge of Kenai Fjords National Park. In this picture all the forest in the foreground is brand new, advancing towards us as the glacier retreats behind us.

The short excursion to Exit Glacier offered me a very fun new thing to try out. I've been to Exit several times, it's one of the only things most people get to see in the park, and it's a very easy, paved walk up to the glacier. Along the way is a spur trail, that takes you along a very strenuous hike up to the ice fields. You can read my post on the Harding Ice Fields for more information.

At Exit glacier are a million signs warning you not to go any farther. These signs are around for good reason. On the other hand, it always irritates me because Exit Glacier has divided, at the bottom, into two toes. Each toe currently occupies a rough rocky ravine. This has only developed in the last 10 years, as far as i know, you used to be able to walk up to the toe at ground level, on the gravel benches by the river.

I noticed that at this time most of the river is coming from the far toe, invisible from the official trail. So i decided we should go and see what was over there. I wondered if there would be an ice cave. Through a bit of work we found a way to clamber over the bottom of the glacier and it's cliffs, and do a bit of tricky hopping around to avoid stepping in any water. What we found was worth the effort.

Here you can see the deep narrow gorge and the glacier high above in the distance. This gorge was present even when it and everything else in the picture was under ice, as recently as a decade ago.

The river we walked along emerged violently and suddenly from a roaring gorge. There was no way to enter the gorge, so we had to backtrack and climb up the backside of the cliffs. That in itself was a little sketchy, and as Jeff pointed out quite accurately, it was similar to caving, but without a roof over our heads. From our perch on the cliff we could see up the gorge to the glacier, still a ways off. We tried to push on but the terrain was too dangerous and seemed to get worse as we went on. I was satisfied.

Lying on my belly, i was able to edge over the side of the sloping cliff for this wide angle straight down view of a violent waterfall in the gorge. It was very loud here.

Jimmy at Portage Glacier.

The day after Jeff left Jimmy arrived. Jimmy was only here for 4 days, so we were pretty busy trying to make the best of it. Except for the first day, Jimmy ended up being pretty lucky with the weather. I was able to get us out away from the clouds into nice areas.

I have a book showing everthing from here to those cliffs on the right, all under about 200 feet of ice in the 1980's.

A beautiful day above Whittier. One of those times when it was cloudy in Anchorage all day.

Jimmy at the Matanuska Glacier. His first time on a glacier, first time in crampons, first time with an ice axe.

Some really cool seracs. At least this post has pictures with people for scale.

Every time i go toe the Matanuska Glacier it looks totally different. The last time i visited i was sure the lake at the glacier was almost gone. This time it was bigger than i've ever seen it.

This was as far as we got before we had to turn around due to time limits. Jimmy did not want to turn back.

After Jimmy left my sister, who has never visited me, and her boyfriend Danielle (whom i had never met) came up at the beginning of August. Danielle is an Italian working and going to school in the United States. Neither of them had been anywhere close to Alaska. I can't even remember how long they were here, and i think they got the worst of the weather. Still, we were able to do things and had some good sun now and then.

Mary Beth and Danielle at Gold Cord Lake.

Fisher came along, got wet, and started shedding in the heat, the room temperature heat.

Fisher got so hot he had to seek solace in the inadequate shade of fireweed.

Fisher on the way back to the mine. Looks like Fisher is hijacking this blog, so i'm calling it quits for now.

Zebra Slot Canyon

2011-02-12T03:34:00.009-09:00

A few years ago, i was browsing Google Earth, looking at remote areas in the desert that were well away from roads and trails, just to see what was there. I came across some some interesting sand dunes in the Escalante area that i had never heard of. Open fields of dunes are somewhat rare in the American Southwest, and these appeared large enough from space that i was intrigued. The problem was they were miles away from the nearest road, and getting to them would be a cross country trek across very hot terrain.

Since my Blackstone Bay experience i've become more interested in cross country hiking. Last year, revisiting the sand dunes in Earth, a few photos had been added to the area, revealing that the sand dunes were indeed large and interesting. Additionally i found the location of two noteworthy slot canyons very close by. I had heard rumors of, and occasionally seen a photo of Zebra and Tunnel slot canyons, but i never knew where they were. It turns out they are both within a mile of each other and some distance to the south of the big dunes.

The normal way to get to Zebra Slot is to hike in from the Hole in the Wall Road, over 3 miles away, and return via the same route. I don't like backtracking, and if i wanted to see Tunnel Slot and the Dunes that would add on miles of backtracking. I thought it would be fun to design a loop hike using sattelite imagery. I found a less used sand road to the east that would make a great starting point for the loop, incorporating all three destinations and offering a look at bare rock wildlands in between. The total hike would be between 10 and 12 miles, depending on how far along the dunes i wanted to go.

The route that i actually ended up hiking. The black line is one mile long.

A closer view of the "wildlands" that i traversed on the way from the Start to the Dunes and Tunnel. The beige patches are old sand dunes that are generally stabilized with plants. I tried to stay in the white bare rock areas, which was sometimes not easy because the horizon was often obscured in the sand. The large green plants are Juniper trees. The smaller speckles are mostly Sagebrush.

When i first got to the rocks i followed a long drainage with larger and larger waterholes. Some were dry, some were wet.

Starting at one of the ends of the Spencer Flats road i made the three mile walk to Tunnel Slot. I'm still bad about bringing maps with me, so i was using my iphone as a gps from time to time. I highly recommend NOT doing that, as the iphone (at least the iphone3) is a terrible navigational aid. You have to be moving for it pinpoint your position and show your direction. As soon as you stop moving it looses your direction. So if you are walking off trail, through endless small obstacles, you can only glance at the screen for a second or two to get your bearings. It also uses immense amounts of battery power.

It was a cold, windy morning (it had been 25F that night) but I made it to Tunnel Slot without any major problems. In fact, i was hugely surprised that i navigated so accurately across the terrain. I came right up to the back of the Tunnel, which was nice because the front of the Tunnel was flooded, so i didn't have to feel disappointment in not knowing where the tunnel went.

Acres and acres of open bare rock. I love it. In the foreground are what they call Moki Marbles. They are iron rich mineral deposits, some of them perfect spheres. In some areas there were so many of them that you literally had to watch your step.

The beginning of the Tunnel Slot wash is fairly unappealing and somewhat choked with dead willow bushes. If i hadn't just walked back along the top i would never assume this led anywhere of interest.

The canyon opens up briefly and then squeezes shut abruptly. You can see the tomb like entrance to the tunnel up ahead.

The tunnel looked about 60 feet long and was full of water. The water at the entrance looked more than 3 feet deep, and was hard to avoid unless you ran along the wall bouncing back and forth Prince of Persia style.

From the front of Tunnel Slot to the front of Zebra Slot is 1.5 miles. This was the only part of the hike where there was any semblance of a trail. The trail was largely just the sandy riverbed, so there may as well have been no trail at all.

Looking back down the "trail" between Tunnel and Zebra slots.

During this time i came across two pairs of people. The first pair was an older couple with a dog who didn't seem like they had the strength to make it all the way to Tunnel Slot. I am sure they perished. The second pair of people were a couple from Amsterdam, and the guy was a photographer. They unfortunately arrived at Zebra Slot exactly as i was getting ready to enter it. They were very pleasant, and being a photographer, he was patient about waiting while i went up ahead. The slot was far too narrow for more than one or two people to be in it. In fact, there are only a couple of spots where two people might be able to get around each other.

A mile and a half later i was approaching the outlet of Zebra Slot up ahead.

Wait, is that a bit of blue sky?

I spent about 40 minutes around Zebra Slot, and then continued on to see if i could make it to the dunes. The rock landscape was getting more interesting as i followed the wash north of Zebra Slot, but it also was getting more confusing. I followed the sand for over two miles before i came upon the large dunes. Along the way i passed a fantastic oasis, with two trees growing out of wet sand, and a small pool at the base of a slide.

Zebra Slot Canyon. On the right you can see some of those Moki Marbles embedded in the wall.

The canyon continues for a while and then ends at a dirty pool and dry waterfall.

Looking up. Zebra Slot gets it's name from the stripes in the walls.

The sun had come out and the wind died down. The temperature on the rocks skyrocketed until i wanted to take off my shirt. Amazing, considering i started out wearing a coat and gloves. The area must be an inferno in the middle of summer. After i got hot i had to do some steep climbing and i ended up dizzy enough that i had to take a break, realizing for sure that i was sick with a cold. I'd been denying it until that point.

Above the oasis i came upon this landscape of fantastic smooth white rock withe red stripes and pink hues. It the bright sun it was almost to much to bear.

It wasn't much longer before i reached the dunes. I had planned on walking along to their northern end, but i was tired and low on water, so i headed back. I made my way 3 miles across stabilized dunes and patches of bare rock, and i erred on the side of caution, coming back onto the sand road about 1/4 mile from the truck, which was at the end of the road. I didn't want to miss the end of the road.

This was a crucial decision point that i hadn't planned on having to make. Looking at the imagery i knew that i would encounter a pyramid shaped mesa and that i would need to walk to the left of it to get to the sand dunes. I never expected to walk up to TWO pyramid shaped mesas that were a near mirror image of each other! By this point i was getting tired, so choosing the wrong path would probably have used up the rest of my recreational willpower reserves. This was where i had to choose because the watershed divided, forking off toward each distant monument. I chose correctly.

Finally, the Big Dunes! I was too tired to bother climbing up them. Once again i've taken a picture with nothing for scale. The top of the cliffs over there is 300 feet higher than the rock i was on, and i still had at least three miles of walking through sand to get back to the truck.

On the way back i'd only driven about a mile before i came across a compact Chevy sedan, bottomed out and abandoned in the middle of the road. I couldn't believe someone would even attempt take that car all the way out here, so i got out to take pictures of it. While i was taking pictures the driver of the car came walking down the road. He was a German tourist (actually a teacher on a sort of exchange program) and he wanted to know if i could help him.

Of course i helped him. He was about 11 miles from the nearest paved road and it was close to sunset. Although i was impressed with how far he got the car before it became stuck i berated him for being foolish enough to try it. I just walked 10 miles and i was hungry, sick and dirty. I didn't want to do anything but take a shower and get some dinner before the restaurants closed in Escalante.

First i just offered him a ride back to town where he could get a tow or buy a tow line. I told him i'd come back tomorrow with him if he needed me to. He was freaking out because he claimed he had to catch a plane the next afternoon (the next day i doubted this was true because i saw him walking into the Capital Reef visitor center at the same time he said he had to be on the plane).

ATTENTION TOURISTS: NOT THE RIGHT CAR FOR THE JOB.

So we tried to dig his car out for a while, which was hopeless. I told him i'd seen a large camp halfway up the road, and that those guys might have a tow rope. The camp was still there and the guys camping were making dinner. We had arrived at exactly the wrong time, but one of them was generous enough to put aside his dinner, get on his ATV, and follow us back. He had a winch but for some reason he thought the best thing to do was try and tow the car even farther down the road to this turn out area. The sand was deeper down there so i couldn't understand why he thought that was the thing to do. He was being very generous with his time though, so i was patient while he failed.

I finally convinced him to try and tow the car backwards to the point where the surface was more firm. The car was so well beached that the ATV just kept towing itself back to the car, instead of vice versa. So we had to dig it out some more (we found out the wheels weren't really touching the ground), and nearly burned up the engine of the car before we finally got it moving toward safety. All in all it took and hour and a half for me to help that guy with his car. He was certainly excited to be free from his predicament.

Broken Camera

2011-01-29T17:39:00.002-09:00

Last spring i went back to Utah for some more exploring. This time around my area of concentration was going to be the more remote areas of Capital Reef National Park, since i've been to most of the easy to get to places. I also wanted to take a look around the Escalante River, possibly driving down the Hole in the Wall Road.

I rented a Jeep, but they didn't have it upon my arrival in Grand Junction, so they gave me a new, full size Silverado instead. I didn't want something that big, but the truck was a comfy ride and had a lot of power. It worked great in the sand.

The second bit of news for me was that on the day i arrived there was a freak blizzard. The whole region was getting pounded by snow and high winds, and the temperature plummeted 30 degrees overnight. Power was out in several of the small towns where i planned on staying.

I decided to stick around in Grand Junction for a day or two, and visit Colorado National Monument, a little park i'd always ignored (pictured at left). This turned out to be a blessing, because not only is the park worth visiting, but i found out when i stopped for my first hike, that the brand new hiking shoes i had purchased for the trip turned out to be two left-foot shoes. I hadn't tried them on since i left the original store.

The good part was that they had the same store in Grand Junction, and i was able to exchange them for a proper pair of shoes the next morning.

The horse preserve. There's a nearby coal mine too.

I had never been on the interstate through south central Utah. It had some nice scenery too. Here the interstate cuts through the San Rafael Swell.

Afterwards i tried visiting a Wildlife Preserve outside Grand Junction with wild horses living in it. I thought if i was lucky enough to see wild horses, they might look pretty cool in the snow. The road though, was made of that super slippery grey clay that makes up the Book Cliffs. The road was very icy, and where it was melted it actually felt more dangerous than the ice. I was only able to get down the road a few miles before i came to a locked gate. Apparently that road becomes impassable in snowy weather.

A view from Boulder Mountain across Capital Reef to the Henry Mountains (the last mountains in the contiguous U.S. to be put on the map. The video features the mountains from a similar distance on the other side.

My 8 days in Utah were cursed by continuing bad weather. High winds and temps in the 20's created frigid wind chills, and large sandstorms. A few days i devoted to sightseeing from the vehicle. I went on a 60 mile dirt road through capital reef, checked out some roads near the Henry Mountains, Dirty Devil River, and White Canyon, saw some interesting ruins, and revisited the Needles District of Canyonlands for two days. The Needles did not fail to impress, once again.

Down a selectively chosen dirt road near Escalante i came across a promising hiking area.

The farther i walked the more the place molded itself into my favorite type of terrain. It was close to sunset though, and i had to get a hotel room, so i decided to come back later.

Two days later i stopped by in the morning. I walked considerably farther, until i got to this place. There was a way down, but by this time i was sick with a cold, and i could tell that i really should enjoy the hike down this canyon later in the spring, or summer, or fall.

Unfortunately i don't have any pictures of most of those activities, because my camera broke on that 60 mile road trip through Capital Reef. The camera bounced off the armrest in the truck and hit the carpeted flooring. It was only a two foot drop at most, but it must have hit at just the right angle, and at the moment that the truck was bouncing back upwards. It would no longer take pictures, and it was the morning of the 4th day of the trip!

The last photo i took before the camera broke. It broke somewhere in view up the road.

It would, strangely, take video without any problems. The problem was with the shutter. So i have put together a video of some of the places i visited during that time. The locations are places i visited with the truck. I decided that since it was broken there was no reason to carry it along while i went hiking (and i noticed the difference in my backpack).

Spring Roadtrip 2010 from Adam Elliott on Vimeo.

Buckner Building: The Winter Palace

2011-01-14T03:00:00.025-09:00

During the middle of last winter i was contacted by a Canadian author. He was interested in a picture from my Buckner Building Post a few years ago. In particular, he was interested in calcite formations leaching out of the concrete ceiling. He was working on a book related to that subject. Unfortunately, i didn't have a full resolution file of the image he wanted, in fact, I didn't even take the picture, Maree did, so i told him i'd just go take a new picture of it, and look for similar items of interest while i was in there.

The Green Room

It was the dead of winter, early February. I had never been to Whittier in winter, because..... well.... there's absolutely no reason to ever go to Whittier in winter. But i got lucky. The timing worked out so that when i was able to go out we had a freak warm front complete with Chinook winds. The temperature that day was about 42 degrees, delightful!

Since the Buckner Building is condemned, the snow plows ignore it. There are no nice shoveled entryways, you have to climb up out of the street and find a way in.

This was the first room i entered from the outside. Looked like a cafeteria.

The warm weather of course made the ice roads in Whittier extremely slippery, I was wearing some grippy springs on my shoes (they were a lifesaver) but i hadn't accounted for the amount of snow Whittier gets in winter. They had over 5 feet of snow when i arrived. Many of the first floor rooms had snow ramps coming in through the windows, and i had to use one of these to get inside.

I believe this was part of the adjoining kitchen area. Beyond this room it was very dark for a long time of searching.

These rooms divided by the the joints were cool because the snow on the ground in many of them was so clean. The room would generally be very dark and the light would be coming down through the joint illuminating this very pure looking snow.

As i've mentioned before, much of the Buckner Building is flooded. I wondered what it would be like in winter, and, as i had heard, it was very slippery. There was about two inches of solid ice in the flooded areas, and the warm weather had melted a few millimeters on the surface. This made the ice a mirror under the right lighting conditions. It was pretty cool.

This time i found the rumored jail! The jail had some very tall, narrow cells in one part of it.

In a dark area of the building this single wall was illuminated by a joint in the ceiling. Some very strange stuff was going on with this wall. It looks blurry but it's not. On the right are calcite formations and everywhere else are strange ice formations.

Deeper in the jail. I brought a remote flash that i was playing with. All these half open doors are frozen into the floor.

From that point on i spent the next few hours looking for the calcite formation. I couldn't find it anywhere. After about two hours of wandering around i heard other people. I ended up coming upon them in a large dry area on the third floor. They were doing some kind of teenage goth fashion model shoot. We talked a little and i could tell they were familiar with the building, but they had never seen what i was looking for. Eventually i had systematically explored the first 4 floors of the building and it was almost sunset. The last place i decided to check out i found it! Maree's description, from what she could remember, was off by 3 floors.

Some jerk left the door open to the high radiation area.

Also of note: I found the floor where the elevator is open. No way was i going in there. The sign inside says "Off Limits To All Troops."

This is what all the effort was for. It might seem strange, but it's really pretty rare to see a door with a complete calcium column attaching it to the ceiling. I was glad i brought the flash because it was pitch black here.

In a nearby shower room i found these light fixtures. If you look close at the distant one you can see.....

A light bulb encased in stone! That's not wax or paint, it's calcium carbonate. I don't know what's crazier, a light bulb inside rock or an unbroken light bulb in the Buckner Building.

So i got my shots and had to run back through the building to get to my car in time to make the next tunnel opening. The light would be gone soon and i didn't want to be stuck in Whittier in the dark. The fashion shoot guys got out right before me. I was stuck behind their truck the whole way back to town. It was a good time.

On last look before i headed back through the train tunnel. It turned out to be a nice sunset that day.

The Lihue Sugar Mill

2011-01-01T11:11:00.004-09:00

Kauai and the other Hawaiian islands used to be major producers of sugar. There are irrigation canals (like the one we swam at) all over the island to provide water for sugar fields and electricity at several mill sites. The Lihue Sugar Mill on Kauai began, incredibly, in the mid 1800's, and continued to produce sugar until it was shut down in 2001.

The following history is from The International Directory of Company Histories, by Gale:

"In 1849 a German ship captain named Heinrich Hackfeld docked his 156-ton boat Wilhelmine in Hawaii after a 238-day journey from Bremen, Germany. After deciding to become a permanent resident, Hackfeld opened a general store which became very popular with the imported laborers who worked on the islands' isolated plantations. Hackfeld's small venture quickly expanded into other lines of business, including boardinghouses and real estate. Hackfeld later opened a trading house, exporting Hawaii's primary agricultural product, sugar, and importing building materials. Hackfeld's company became one of the largest in Hawaii, operating retail stores and hotels, trading a wider variety of products, and purchasing thousands of acres of property. Several years later Hackfeld died and ownership of the company passed to his family."

This area near the front of the main building looked like a shop.

"In July 1918, soon after the United States became involved in World War I, the American Alien Property Custodian confiscated H. Hackfeld & Company on the grounds that it was owned by "enemy aliens." All of the company's assets were taken over by a group of competitors, including Castle & Cooke, Alexander & Baldwin, and C. Brewer. The company was incorporated and its name was changed to American Factors (a factor is a commissioned agent), and its chain of B.F. Ehlers retailing outlets was renamed "Liberty House." Under the new management American Factors became more involved in sugar production. Demand for sugar remained high during the Great Depression and World War II, which kept American Factors profitable and allowed it to continue paying dividends to stockholders."

These things must have had conveyor builts on them originally. There were sugar cane husks lying all over the bottom of the machinery.

"Although it continued to diversify during the 1950s, American Factors remained primarily involved with the production of sugar. However, in 1959, the same year Hawaii was made a state, airline companies acquired long-range passenger jetliners which made Hawaii suddenly more accessible to the American vacationer. Just as suddenly, demand for hotel space and land began to increase. As a major landowne, American Factors recognized this as an opportunity to exploit its hotel and lodging interests. Many of its existing properties were improved, additional facilities were constructed, and several parcels of undeveloped land were sold to developers at a sizable profit."

On one of the highest floors were large empty foundations of machinery or tanks that had been removed.

You can continue to read the history of the company up the the present day here, but what happened was that due to changing political and economic environments, and debts, the company entered a long decline (for 30 years), and eventually got out of it's sugar production operations. What was of interest to me, was that the company at one point bought a hotel company called Fred Harvey. I used to work for Fred Harvey when they operated the hotels on the rim of the Grand Canyon, so it was a big surprise to find i had a connection to the company that built the Sugar Mills in Kauai.

These looked like boilers to me. There were a lot of electronic panels up here, and this is where the homeless camp was too.

The Mill is impossible to miss any time you drive by Lihue. There is a large conveyor belt covered with impenetrable plants and vines, that goes right over the road. Eventually we couldn't resist and decided to take a look at it one day. It's a huge operation, with the main factory being 5 or 6 stories high, and numerous other buildings nearby.

The floor was not safe here. In the distance roots from plants were stretching all the way from the roof down to the ground.

Outside was an enclosed open air area that was far more decayed, and overgrown by plants. These may have been an older kind of boiler or oven. Underneath they had fire kilns.

On one of the upper floors we discovered that the factory is occupied by homeless people. We found a camp of sorts with beds, a cooking area, books, even drawings. It was all rather filthy, and the people who occupied it foolishly threw all their garbage down a caged (as in open air) elevator shaft, leaving it to rot and seriously stink up that whole area of the building, right next to where they slept.

This office looked like it was very recently occupied.

There were, what looked like child's drawings inside this first aid room.

Maree was sure the homeless people were going to come back and kill us, so she made me stop taking pictures long before we'd seen everything. A few striking things about the interior were that in the "husking and crushing" area there were still husks of sugar cane lying all over the machinery. There was also an interesting sub-floor area that had water flowing through canals in pitch black darkness, in some places making very strange noises. Below are some pictures Maree took.

There were a disturbing number of women's shoes on one floor of the building.

The sub level was very dark. Me in a flash.

The homeless camp.

Some parts were so overgrown they were nearly inaccessible. I can't believe the factory was just shut down in 2001.

Kauai Hiking

2010-12-19T03:50:00.002-09:00

Maui offers virtually no hiking at all, except in the National Park, and there are few trails even there, especially down by the sea. Kauai has lots of trails, and has some of the best scenery in the world to hike through. I had 4 or 5 hikes in mind, but only managed three. One hike was along the Na Pali Coast, one was just a short jaunt to a freshwater jungle swimming hole, and one was a long 11 mile loop hike from the top of the island to the high cliffs along the Na Pali Coast.

Na Pali means "the cliffs" and this part of the island stretches for 15 miles. There the coastline is completely undeveloped. The only trail at the bottom starts at the end of the road on the north side of the island and runs for 11 miles to a place called Kalalau Valley. We began the trail and followed it for two miles to the first beach. Beyond that requires a day use permit. The hike was strenuous, but not as bad as we had heard. Maree had brought big rubber boots and i had worn gaiters, because everyone we talked to said it was one of the muddiest trails they'd ever been on. When we were there it was so dry it was almost dusty, so our extra preparations just made us hot.

Some of the plant scenery along the trail to the first beach.

The big hike i did is called Nu'alolo/Awa-'awapuhi Grand Loop. It starts at the top of the island at the Nu'alolo Trailhead. That trail leads 4 miles to spectacular Lolo Vista, which offers view of the ocean and the adjoining valleys. From there you can take a connector trail, known as the cliff trail, for just over two miles to Awa-'awapuhi Trail, from which you can get back to the road in 3.7 miles. Unfortunately to complete the loop you must walk down the road for 2 more miles.

I had gotten up early to try and make it to Waimea Canyon so i could get some pictures of the sunrise before I started my hike. I forgot that people actually live on the island, and have normal lives, and I got stuck in some morning school traffic in a couple of small towns along the way. I missed sunrise, but a Japanese photographer who had already been there for two hours told me that the sun rise wasn't worth seeing anyway, because it had been so hazy.

This is a beautiful sandy beach in summer. I've seen pictures of it. In winter strong deadly currents rip all the sand away and store it off shore.

I got some early morning shots and continued up the mountainside to the trailhead, which was difficult to find. There weren't any signs, and the trailhead was questionable. There were several other trails nearby that looked equally legitimate. I wasn't completely sure I had taken the right path for a couple of miles.

The Na Pali Coast. It's all the rain that carves those intricate features.

It's a strenuous hike, and you lose a lot of altitude that has to be made back up at the end.You lose 1,400 feet in the first 4 miles and coming back you gain 2,000 feet. Additionally, the trail is dangerous. The ground is made of wet clay in many places, and I fell down hard twice in the first twenty minutes. I was more careful after that.

When you get to Lolo Vista, you walk out of the forest onto a very high, sparsely vegetated volcanic ridge. The view from the end of the first canyon arm is one of the best valley views i've seen anywhere. You sit out in the open, perched on top of one of those crazy shaped canyon walls, peering down thousands of feet to the jungle canopy and the ocean. It seems incredibly remote, until you hear a rooster in the bottom of the valley where nobody lives. I had to wonder if there was any escape from those things.

The view from Lolo Vista is amazing. From here i took a trail that runs along the side of the cliffs on the right side of the picture (not visible) for two miles,
all the way around the back of the valley.

I hung out for about 45 minutes on the cliff, looking down at helicopters flying in the valley far below me. A huge cloud materialized out of thin air, and instantly filled up a large portion of the valley below. A helicopter down there had to make a high powered, emergency escape over a nearby wall to get out in time. It was an impressive maneuver, and an eye opener as to how fast the conditions could change.

This is what it looks like off the side of the Cliffs Trail. By the time i had to scramble across the landslide i was glad i couldn't see down any more.

I figured i'd better get going, and started on the two mile traverse of the cliffs. Ominous signs said the trail had been washed out and was very dangerous. My guidebook said the same thing. I've been on many trails that claim to be washed out, but most of the time it means the trail is a little eroded, or at most has become narrow in a place or two. In this instance the trail was really washed out. After about a hundred yards the trail disappears at a very bad area. At this point the trail is not on the top, but along the side of the valley wall about 100 feet from the top, and thousands of feet from the bottom. In place of the trail was a loose, muddy rockslide, made up of softball sized rocks. The slide is about 25 feet wide and the other end of the trail starts 10 feet higher than the near side. There is a tremendous amount of exposure.

A weird part of the trail through a dense patch of skinny trees.

It was enough to make me reconsider, especially since I had a new found fear of the wet sloping clay that the good part of the trail was made of. I had become angry about the fog that had rolled in, obscuring the views, but in this case I think it was comforting, keeping me from seeing how far down I would fall if i slipped.

This area was back in the nook of the valley, where a waterfall would normally fall off the cliffs. The fog felt nice and the birds seemed to love it.

The rockslide gave way a little with each step, but I made it across quickly, and that was the only area where the trail was damaged. It's scary, but aside from the vista that two mile stretch was the most interesting part of the hike, even in the fog.

I took my time on that portion of the trail, saving my energy and hoping the fog would lift, but it didn't, until I was well on my way back to the road. I did the trip in 5 hours, and a group of old hikers from Seattle picked me up on the road and gave me a ride the last mile back to my car. They had done the same hike several times before the trail was damaged, and said that second viewpoint that I couldn't see from the fog wasn't nearly as nice as the first one. So that made me feel better.

Some views out the helicopter of the coastline. The big wall on the left side of the upper picture is the same wall on the right side of this lower picture (blurry because we were flying closely past it). It shows how incredibly thin some of this high cliffs can be.

Flying so low over this stuff was a real thrill.

Kauai: Stuff To Do

2010-12-05T02:00:00.003-09:00

Kauai was much less crowded than Maui, and generally less developed from a tourism standpoint. I liked that about it. Beaches are plentiful all over the island, and they are only crowded around the resort area of Poipu. We spent a lot of our leisure time at sparsely populated beaches on the north end of the island. That meant driving, but the driving is better than on Maui, and the North half of the island is incredibly beautiful. This blog covers some of the activities to do on the island besides lying around on the beach and eating.

Beaches are all over the place, but there's much more to do on Kauai than walk in the sand.

Kipu Ranch ATV Tour

Maree stands under Mt. Haupu near an area featured in Jurrassic Park.

Our ATV tour was more entertaining than I had imagined it would be. We decided on an outfit called Kipu Ranch Adventures. Our guides were great guys, very friendly and knowledgeable, and funny without being cheesy. They worked hard, kinda, and seemed to enjoy their job. The tour is all within the boundaries of a huge 3,000 acre ranch, and visits numerous Hollywood movie sites. It also offered a view into a hidden, privately owned valley that is not visible from any public roads. It was given by the King of the island to a family of ranchers for a period of seven generations. That time period has nearly expired, and the fate of the valley in uncertain at this point.

From a pass near the top of Mt. Haupu we were able to see the private, hidden valley of Kipu Kai, where they filmed much of Six Days and Seven Nights.

On the way back down the mountain, this part was on a thinly paved road.

You can choose to ride a typical ATV or ride one of those two person vehicles. I chose the latter, because i'd never driven an ATV with a steering wheel and wanted to try that out. I had also hoped that maybe Maree could drive some times so i could take pictures, but they only let one person drive, and it was WAY to dusty to pull my camera out while riding. Sometimes visibility was close to zero during the faster moving sections. They warn you to wear clothes that you can throw away and they weren't kidding. The volcanic red dust didn't wash out. I was glad i brought my camera in a waterproof bag.

This is part of the hill in Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark, where Indy gets chased by natives in the first scene in the movie.

Above: After our tour we were pretty filthy.

Left: The tree where Indiana swung from a vine into the water is still there, and now it's a rope swing! More on swimming holes below.

Our guides told us this is how they season their pigs, with flavored soda. Like chickens, feral pigs are all over the island. With fish, pigs, and chickens running rampant, it would not be easy to survive here.

Hiking and Swimming

The ocean was pretty rough while we were there, as it typically is in winter, so we stuck with land activities for much of the time. Maui offers virtually no hiking at all, except in the National Park, and there are few trails even there, except at 13,000 ft. Kauai has lots of trails, and has some of the best scenery in the world to hike through. I had 4 or 5 hikes in mind, but only managed three. Two hikes were along the Na Pali Coast, but i'll get to those in the next blog post.

Part of the trail along the irrigation ditch. Nearby the ditch goes into a low 800 foot tunnel that you can walk through, bent over, if you desire.

In the distance is the mountain where the wettest spot on earth is supposed to be. It's normally covered in waterfalls. Our helicopter tour took us back there.

We did another short hike to a freshwater jungle swimming hole. Getting to the trail head in our crappy PT Cruiser was more of a challenge than the actual hike, and i ended up getting a flat tire. I didn't notice the tire until 6 hours later, but still, it's pretty pitiful since the road wasn't what i would consider a bad road.

The swimming hole. There's a concrete damn up there, and the irrigation ditch comes out of the tunnel on the left, then continues to a lock system off to the right. The water was incredibly cold, and a strong current would initially pull you quickly towards the little falls, then spit you out to the side.

The road that the Cruiser couldn't handle. On the way back we picked up a Canadian hiker and gave him a lift back to his car, about 4 miles down the road. He had just finished working on the Olympic preparations in Vancouver, and had decided to get out of town once the Winter Olympics officially began. He was a nice guy.

Another option for swimming. On the north end of the island are some large, ominous sea caves. Now after many years of changing tides and currents the caves are inland. Some are dry but this one was filled with deep fresh water. A sign claimed you would die from a cave in if you tried swimming.

Helicopter Touring

The helicopter, tour was a much better value for our money than the one we had on Maui. The helicopter will take you around the entire island, over and through remote canyons, past endless waterfalls, and along the entire Na Pali Coast. It was the most scenic flight tour i've ever been on (other than the Ruth Gorge in the Alaska Range), even though it was raining for much of the tour. This time our helicopter was smaller than the one we had on Maui, and it had doors on it. The windows go all the way down the side, offering great visibility, but as i feared, the reflections on the glass were out of control, even with a polarizer. And I had to bribe someone to get a front seat.

This is an area of immense scale, one of the most sacred sites to Hawaiians, where water gushes out from a huge overhang beneath immense cliffs on the wettest part of the island. It was dark back here.

Turning around from the waterfalls you can see the deep narrow valley we were flying through. This was my favorite part of the air tour.

We flew up a long steamy looking jungle valley. The rain may have made this portion of the flight more interesting.

I think this was over the Kipu Ranch area.

The National Botanical Gardens

We weren't originally going to go to the Botanical Gardens on the south side of the island (not the gardens to the North), but on our last day we had to burn up 7 hours after we checked out of our hotel before we could get on our plane. I didn't want to get dirty doing something like hiking or swimming, so we went to the gardens. I can't say i recommend the place. It's divided into two areas. A "good" area that costs $40 to get into, and a mediocre area, which still costs $20. Additionally you can't just drive up and walk in. There is no parking in the garden, and the 15 minute shuttle ride only goes in and out once every hour. I've been to several other botanical gardens that are of better quality and much cheaper to get into, and compared to the plants you can see everywhere else on the island, it's just not worth the money.

This was one of the prettier areas.

There's an area of the gardens that you also have to pay extra for for and be driven too, where there is a grove of very large versions of this kind of tree.

Next Time: The Na Pali Coast

Kauai

2010-11-21T09:43:00.001-09:00

Kauai is the smallest and oldest of the 4 large Hawaiian islands. It also claims to be home to the wettest spot on earth, some areas that get an average yearly rainfall of nearly 39 feet. Kauai's age, combined with the rain, results in an island that has been heavily eroded over time. In sharp contrast to Maui and the Big Island, the volcano that created Kauai has been carved into an ornate, cliff ringed plateau rising abruptly 5,200 feet over the surrounding landscape. Deep canyons run off the mountain, carving cliffs c into fantastic shapes littered with high waterfalls that evoke a lost, primitive world. It's no surprise that over 70 movies and shows have used the island as a backdrop.

The north end of the island looks like Cambodia, but instead of rice they are growing Taro.

Another result of all the rain is that Kauai has rivers. No other Hawaiian island has rivers. But to say it is so rainy is misleading. Like many of the islands, most of the rain falls on one side. As the trade winds smack right into the Na Pali coast, the air is forced straight up the mountainside, and through adiabatic cooling produces rain at the top. The southern portions of the island are much drier, often enough to expect sunshine every day.

In sharp contrast to the north, the south end of the island looks semi-arid.

Waimea Canyon on a cloudy, rainy day.

Waimea Canyon on a sunny day.

Waimea Canyon at dawn. Are you getting it yet?

My first night on Kauai I discovered that it is a cursed island. In 1992 Typhoon Iniki did a substantial amount of damage to the island. The entire ecosystem of the island was changed when a chicken farm was destroyed, releasing all the birds into the wild. There are no predators on the island, and as a result the whole place has become overrun.

We had flown in late and didn't check into our hotel until 11pm. At 3am I woke up to roosters crowing. It was so loud it sounded like it was right outside my window. It went on until I got up later that morning. The first thing I did was go outside to see how far off these roosters were. They were directly outside my window. Additionally, they were on the porch, on the walkway to the car, all over the parking lot, in fact, there were roosters and chickens all over every surface of the ground in all directions. They were actively reproducing. To kill a few was pointless. I thought I would go crazy.

It was enough to make me completely re-prioritize my vacation. We spent the morning finding a new hotel to stay in, being sure to not only look at the rooms but also to walk all over the grounds and count chickens. Before noon we found a nice resort that was almost chicken free. I found out at night that they had large feral cats that helped take care of the chickens in the area.

The lithified cliffs near Poipu are a fun walk offering tidal pools, hidden surfer caves, and a secluded beach at the end of the cliffs.

This tidal pool had a lot fish and sea cucumber to mess with.

On one occasion, Maree and I were eating some sandwiches at a community park, in a covered picnic area to stay out of the sun on a hot day. There were some tennis courts and ball fields around us before the park stopped at the edge of the jungle. We were the only people there, but in no time at all chickens and roosters began to emerge out of the thick trees and walk towards us, slowly, like zombies. Some of them would try to half fly over the fences, others took their time and walked around the long way. Withing minutes there were two dozen chickens and roosters at our feet, milling about and eyeballing our sandwiches. Maree began to get nervous, the roosters began to compete for position, and still more chickens streamed out of the jungle. It was such a crazy experience I deemed Kauai the victim of a Zombie Chicken Apocalypse. I dove at them and they scattered like frightened lunatics.

Locals encourage you to kill the chickens at your leisure. I set about the task wholeheartedly, but they seem to have adapted to constant attempts on their lives and have become quite skittish. Even running over them can be challenging. I did manage to smash into one with the corner of my car, on the last day we were there. It squawked, and in my mirror I saw it tumble of into space like Darth Vader's damaged tie fighter.

A close up view of a Taro field.

This bridge was really fun to drive over.