Notes From A Bear's Journey

The Bigger Picture     Today was a day of trimming trees for me, nothing too big mind you but just what I could reach with my saw-pole and extender (the trees in our backyard --which were all about 10 feet tall when we moved here-- are now at the 60-foot point; "at least they're done growing," I told the last arborist who had come to do the professional "cleaning," to which he shook his head no and told me that they were all at only about the halfway point...yikes).  Some of the trees in back are box elder trees, native to our area, and the others are a mix of both elms and maple (with one black walnut tree that snuck in thanks to a frisky squirrel whose earlier generations must have forgotten where one of their winter hoards lay buried).  All of them are considered "dirty" trees by many due to the plethora of "helicopter" seeds that twirl down like moths with broken wings, or in the case of the elms, the taffeta paperlike dots of seeds t...

Closing Thoughts on Alaska     At this point, I didn't want to title this "final thoughts" for my vacation adventure covered just the tiniest speck of a rather large land and final is, well, final; in my mind there would likely be many more thoughts to come especially of this different part of the world.  But as with so much of the planet, there was and is simply so much to see and learn and take in that one could feel the increased yearning to return and to keep exploring.  So it was indeed a bit ironic that I ended up reading an older piece from the Anchorage Press about Dall sheep, those big curly-horned rams that crash head-on into each other come mating season (further south they are simply categorized as Big Horn sheep).  During our flight over the fjords we were lucky enough to witness several mountain goats; but we discovered that most of the large Dall sheep venture further north and settle into the vast expense of Denali National Park.  Sa...

The Inside Passage -- Petroglyphs     A few posts back I mentioned that I was walking along a beach known for its exposed and almost camouflaged petroglyphs, and began talking with a man who mentioned that there were similar petroglyphs in Puerto Rico (as it turns out, he was also a passenger from the ship and we had a brief but interesting discussion about other civilations and their designs, particularly those in the area of Tulum from Mayan history).  At the time (and to be honest, still), I knew little about Puerto Rico but there is indeed quite a history of the Taino people and their carved symbols throughout the country (the Fodor's guidebook recommends one particular spot, a rock at La Piedra Escrita, that has over 52 petroglyphs carved onto it).  As I would later discover, many of these petroglyph symbols are located throughout the world, from Sweden (Sweden???) to Korea, Ireland to the Bering Sea.  And it all began on a beach in Alaska. One ...

Democracy in Progress     Today is the day many members of the UK and some of their related countries will head to the polls to vote of staying in or leaving the European Union (in Britain those wanting out are being termed Brexiters).  And with me not being from that part of the world, it would be presumptuous to even pretend that I understood the issues there.  But here's how The London Review of Books and author Francis Fitzgibbon tried to give their own brief summary of what was involved and how the UK's role plays into the EU: The law of the European Union has left few areas of life in the UK wholly untouched even though the EU can only legislate in areas for which it derives what are known as ‘competences’ from the treaties member states have ratified.  The EU alone can legislate on areas in which the treaties have conferred on it ‘exclusive competence’.  The Lisbon Treaty defined under this rubric competition rules for the single market...

The Inside Passage -- Discovery      This journey of the Inside Passage for us has been (to me, anyway) a voyage of discovery.  Little did I know that science is correcting itself regarding starfish and jellyfish (which are now called sea stars and jellies simply because neither is a vertebrate or a "fish").  And I discovered that dolphins make clicking sounds through the water with their pointy snouts while porpoises make no noise and have rounded snouts.  Here's another: sea lions group in colonies on land but throw the entire group into the water and they are suddenly grouped not into colonies but "rafts" (such are the eccentricities of biologists).  I also discovered that the orca female has a slanted dorsal fin while the male's fin is straight (appears to be the same with distinguishing certain types of ferns in the forest).  And in a final bit of this voyage of discovery on the water, I discovered that humpback whales are social and tend ...

The Inside Passage -- Whales      Thar she blows cannot be mistaken for anything other than whales, those rare leviathans that once roamed the seas in vast numbers.  And even in these rich waters of where we were in the protected Alaskan panhandle --and after basking in the warm waters of Hawaii for their migration-- the returning humpback whale population has been estimated to be no more than 500 in this area (the gray whale, which migrates up from the Baja Peninsula in Mexico, is faring better with a population estimated to be over 25,000).  They are both toothless, the baleen curtains of their mouths taking in only small feeder fish and tiny krill (the curtained filter hangs only from their top jaw and dangles freely at the bottom); our guest lecturer said to liken their mouths to sheets of corduroy, the linear stripes expanding from a tight weave to a wide-spread one as they blow out the nutrients-rich water from their mouths.  And here's another dis...

     Glaciers made the fjords, unlike sites such as the Grand Canyon which were made by volumes of running water (such as rivers) instead of huge sheets of frozen water, and now we were heading further north to hopefully view a few of them.  This meant another 400 nautical miles of sailing in order to get us away from the temperate, almost rainforest-like area of the lower panhandle which was so conducive to producing those giant Sitka, spruce and hemlock trees, each adapting to steep hillsides or marshy lands, lands which would now give way to colder temperatures coupled with mineral-rich but sparse soil.  The land here overall is a giant bed of rock and so the vegetation struggles to find a foothold despite its rich-looking appearance on top.  Wind gusts, some over 100 miles per bour, can topple swaths of tall trees as easily as that of an avalanche.  And glaciers, even with their slow pace, can do much the same to the land. Approaching Endicott ...

The Inside Passage -- Fjords The Float Plane with our ship in the background       Today found us stepping shakily onto the pontoon of a float plane, a method of transportation common in these parts of Alaska.  We were in the bustling first stop city (for cruise ships, anyway) of Ketchikan, a city nearly 700 miles from Seattle.   The planned trip now was to a place in the Tongass forest (the nation's largest) to the interior and the misty fjords as the park and national monument area is now known (so proclaimed in 1978).  One would think that we would be quite used to a rollicking platform after spending so many days at sea, this being our first time back and temporarily on land after nearly three days.  And indeed once inside the tiny aluminum container, we were again swept into the artificial complacency of safety, a few quick finger-pointing tips from our pilot about life jackets and fire extinguishers and first aid kits (each about the size ...

The Inside Passage The Lifeboat       Our first foray into the waters of the Inside Passage found us doing two things, winding down and eating although perhaps not in that order. We were on a cruise ship, after all, just two of some 678 people onboard (passengers not counting the crew which alone numbered 400 and represented 50 different nationalities), which was still a far cry from the large massive cruise lines that can easily hold five or more times that number, mini-traveling cities that make one wonder how so much food and water and waste is handled on a daily and sometimes hourly schedule.  Our ship would burn through 9800 gallons of fuel and use more than that in water as we showered and quenched our thirst and dishes were washed and laundry was done. The lifeboat in proportion to the ship     Still, the relatively small ship seemed large to us, the lifeboats here alone holding 150 people each by themselves (during the init...

Pilgrimage     One of our friends is off again, hiking and writing about his adventures back on the Camino de Santiago; he had come so close to completing the journey two years ago, but his knees and shoes got the better of him and he was forced to return.  So he is off to complete the journey, this time with his wife and their close friend (each of whom is a bit more detail-oriented and so have pre-booked hostels and generously allowed him his freedom to wake-and-go at his vampirish schedule, bored as he might be waiting for them hours later as they arrive at a normal hour).  His earlier blog writings (quite interesting reading) gave some of the history of the Camino, while his current writings seem to be presenting a newer, perhaps wisdom-gained insight into the Camino (yes, I did write about some of these tales of the Camino earlier).  They are traveling one of the four common routes, this particular one starting in Spain, the original path (what th...