Furry Neighborhood Visitor

Wild Blueberries

"Ling Lake II"

A picture of the bull moose. He is only about 200 yards away. I was going to include a picture of the grizzly, but he was about 500 yards away (little brown dot in the photo). Click on the photo for a better look.

On Saturday, I woke up early in the morning anxious to go hiking and fishing with our neighbor Tyler. As I gathered up my gear and started to walk a few doors down to meet Tyler, Something caught my eye. I looked down the adjacent street that runs perpendicular to our street just in time to see a black bear jog across a front yard! I had to do three double takes for it to register. I couldn't believe that the first bear I am seeing in Alaksa is 100 yards from our house, in our neighborhood. After I spotted him I quickly headed down to Tyler's house and the safety of his truck. I told Tyler and we circled the block to catch another glance of the bear. We saw him walking down an embankment down a fenceline and he disappeared into the woods. I was bummed that I wasn't quick enough to get a picture (but I thought getting to the truck was a priority).

Already excited by what we saw before our hike, we headed ot the trailhead of my favorite lake so far in Alaska. It of course now has only a code name. - "Ling Lake II." As we hiked the 5 miles to get to the lake, we saw a grizzly bear, black bear and one of the two huge bull moose that me and Chris spotted on our hike into Ling Lake II. We also flushed a group of 4 ptarmigan. They were just starting to turn white for the upcoming winter. Our fishing was successful as well. I caught about 5 grayling and a bunch of small dollies. The biggest grayling was 14-15 inches (the biggest I have ever caught). It was a really pretty purplish color. Tyler took my picture with it on his camera, but I haven't gotten a copy of it from him yet. Any bigger, I would have liked to take it home and get it mounted, but I turned him back to grow bigger for next year.

Another highlight of our hike was the discovery of a nice wild blueberry patch. I have been hearing that this year was not a very good year for blueberry picking, but these berries were in really good shape and ripe. They were right next to the lake on a southern-facing slope. I am thinking that they got extra rays of sun from the reflection of the water. I picked a whole Gatorade bottle full of them. I also ate handfuls of them as I picked. They were really sweet. In fact, Shannon made blueberry pancakes tonight with the berries that I picked. They were fabulous.

Photo Enlargement

I found out that you can click on any photo we post on the blog to see an enlarged version. This will also enable you to print the photo in a better resolution. Just thought I would share this useful tidbit.

Fishing, Fishing, Fishing (cont.)

Here is Chris' silver I eluded to in the previous post.

Fishing, Fishing, Fishing

One of Ryan's Doll Varden caught by Symphony Lake


Chris with one of his Dollies


Shannon's first-ever halibut


The guy with the skate he caught


Our halibut haul (72 lbs of halibut fillets).

During Mom and Chris's visit, Chris was excited to hit the rivers and lakes to catch some fish. I was happy to oblige. So, we started by hiking to a graying lake called Symphony Lake. We took a small detour during the ten mile round trip day hike, so the total hike was 14! Chris's guide (me) isn't very experienced yet. But our 4 mile detour did yield us an awesome animal sighting. We saw a wolverine. These fiesty creatures are like a huge badger and are almost impossible to see in the wild. It all happedned so fast, we weren't able to get a pic. We did make it to Symphony Lake and caught some nice grayling. The lake hold some trophies, but we weren't lucky enough to pull out a whopper. We also caught some dolly varden out of a river on the hike back. We also saw two nice bull moose and some dall sheep (the dall sheep were specks on the mountain about two miles up the range). No bear close encounters, thank goodness.

The silvers weren't running very thick yet. But we worked hard in the evenings and mornings to hook up with some and Chris was able to catch a nice one. Notice in the picture that the fishing area is surrounded by mountains with a glacier in the background. A beautiful spot!

To end the trip, we headed down to Ninilchik to fish for halibut. We had a great outing. "The seas were rough that day, my friends (George Costanza)." We had 3-4 foot swells which made for a rocky boat ride, but we were able to catch pretty much all the halibut we wanted. You can only keep two each so we tried to keep the bigger ones. Chris caught the most and the biggest out of he, Shannon and I. The biggest halibut caught on our boat was by another guy from Florida and weighed 55 lbs. Out of our group, we caught 30-40 pounders that we ended up keeping. Another cool thing happened, another guy on our boat hooked into a Skate (kind of like a sting ray). It took him a while to reel it in. The guide figured it weighed 80 pounds.

We had fun and thought it was a great way to end Mom and Chris's visit.

Oh, and by the way, no one puked out on the high sees (thank goodness).

Mom and Chris's Visit

We've been enjoying Mom and Chris while they have been visiting and seeing the sites with us here in Alaska. We went to Portage Glacier, an animal preserve and other day trip destinations. Here are some pictures of the sites.

Jaycie's Birthday

After the trip to the zoo, we had Jaycie's birthday party. She opened many gifts (starting to get the hang of opening the wrapping paper) and we let her go to town on the cake. She didn't really know what to do with it, but Daddy showed her how.

She is now thoroughly enjoying the toys and clothes that were given to her. Thank you all so much for the gifts!

Day at the Anchorage Zoo

As part of Jaycie's Birthday festivities, we took a trip to the zoo. It wasn't as large or extensive as Hogle Zoo, but had some cool animals that you can't find at Hogle Zoo. Jaycie absolutley loved the wolves. There was a pack of about 6 wolves and the enclosure was huge. They were really close to the fence from us, so we got a close look. It was neat to see the pack work together. They all napped together, horsed around together and looked at the crowd together (all wolves did the same things as the others). Jaycie kicked and sqealed when we saw the wolves up close. I think she has a favorite animal now.

My favorite was the huge bull moose as well as the caribou. They also had two baby moose that were very cute. Shannon's favorite was the baby musk ox, black bears and the porcupines. I attached some pictures of these animals.

So, overall the zoo was great and Jaycie got to have a special trip to the zoo for her birthday. On the way out we bought her a wolf stuffed animal.