More random pictures of mountain life

Rock ptarmigan



Loiseleuria procumbens - Alpine azalea



Saxifraga eschscholtzii - Ciliate saxifrage












Ranunculus cooleyae - Cooley's buttercup










Gray-crowned rosy finch

Jungle crops

I know! Too many birds! So how about some food, for a change? Here are some photos I took on my trip to Timpía, along the lower Río Urubamba:

The pineapple, Ananas comosus. Yes, it's a bromeliad!:


Not so commonly eaten, but much more impressive and provides a nice shade under which to drink the masato. I present you with the breadfruit tree, Artocarpus altilis (warning, possible ssp. of Artocarpus communis):


And now, this one may not look like much, but the world economy would be in even worse straits without coffee, Coffea arabica:


And this is the main jungle food - yuca. It's also known as cassava, although it's under the name yucca that I ate it for breakfast, lunch and dinner in the forest (and I drank it everyday too, as the alcoholic beverage known as masato). It's also called Manihot esculenta:


Okay, it's not really food, but it's very useful and pernicious at the same time (i.e.: important). The coca plant, Erythroxylum coca:


Possibly more addictive, the sugar cane, Saccharum officinarum:


But without it who would eat the bitter seeds of the chocolate tree, Theobroma cacao?


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Fall fun before the snow ruins it all

Hello all. Just because I am not in an exotic place doesn't mean there isn't anything neat to write home about. I finally caught up with homework, and I got to go hiking, kayaking and hunting to places like Bear Lake (3000 ft), Deep Inlet, and a peak on Starrrigavan Ridge that I had wanted to climb (2800ft).

This first-winter golden-crowned sparrow Zonotrichia atricapilla is eating grass seeds in my house's lawn. As you can probably tell, my roommate and me aren't exactly the utlimate lawn mower warriors.


In Sitka the fall isn't glorious like it was in Anchorage, but still it can be a nice time of the year in bwtween rain squalls.


I regularly complain about Steller's sea lions Eumetopias jubatus scaring me when I go kayaking, and people don't seem to really believe me. This one didn't touch my kayak, as they have in the past, but it was definitely too close:


I cropped a photo for the first time! on Matt Goff's recommendation I have been using a free program called IrfanView to downsize my pictures, and it works great for cropping too. This fork-tailed storm-petrel Oceanodroma furcata was one of a dozen flitting about my kayak:


This tiny gentian is Gentiana douglasiana:


This is Andrew, the director of Sitka Conservation Society, on a deer-hunting trip around the back of the Starrigavan drainage. We didn't get a deer, but the hike was pretty good.


This beautiful Gentianacea is Swertia perennis:


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A few pictures

I don't know if this connection is working or not, so here are a few pictures I took of plants around Sitka. If this is successful I will try it again in a few days.

This is Aquilegia formosa, photographed at Silver Bay:


Anemone narcissiflora ssp. Alaskana, photographed on Arrowhead:


Campanula lasiocarpa, also found on Arrowhead:


And Campanula rotundifolia on one of my favorite island groups, the Eckhokms:

The summer of my content happiness

Hello everyone. My regular coffee shop connection has been refusing to upload pictures to this website, so I will simply give an update.'

It's been a busy summer and I am tired, but I have also enjoyed myself very much. This last weekend the Mongolia contingent went up to Anchorage to do paperwork and health screenings, and the mission is now official, and not classified at all: we'll be in Mongolia for about three weeks next month, helping the Mongolian military in the capstone exercise of their UN certification. Our company will consist of our platoon (US), a Mongolian platoon, and an Indian or Nepalese platoon. This should be a wonderful way to finish this interesting summer.

Some recent highlights of my Sitka Sound adventures have been: a largely fruitless abalone hunt on weather-beaten rocks south of Sitka at very low tide (although I do have some cool pictures of undersize abalone, and horrendous scratches on my kayak to show for it), a couple of good hikes on Verstovia, and pretty good birdwatching from the tour boat on board which I now work - the St Michael. I have learned a lot about botany, but still not nearly enough to really know what I am looking at. In fact, I made a pretty embarrassing mistake last week when I triumphantly announced that I had found a rare Botrychium. Matt Goff politely suggested that it was in fact the very same Cryptogramma I had photographed and posted on this blog last winter.

Time flies when you're having fun!

I thought it had only been five days since the last entry, yet I am late again! I have been really enjoying myself, though, and days are flying by much too fast for me to keep track. I finally went up a little mountain called Sugarloaf, which is about 45 minutes away by kayak, and took a picture of a few common plant species, such as this beautiful bull pine (or shore pine) Pinus contorta var. contorta:


I also photographed this dwarf dogwood Cornus canadensis:


And this mountain hemlock Tsuga mertensiana, which is one of my favorite trees:


Here is another bear photo from work:


And a seventeen-pound king salmon caught near Long Island:


I also ran the Medvejie half-marathon, and won it in 1:23'07''. It was a good run, very scenic, mostly on dirt road, and it even got exciting when the safety guy on his bicycle had to chase a brown bear off the course.

Temperatures and mood are up throughout the Juneau area

After a brief and depressing snowfall, Juneau has been blessed with warm weather, rain, and even some sun! Spring is on its way, and soon I will be learning about botany! Last Saturday I went for a hike with Mac up Perseverance trail behind downtown Juneau. In spite of deep snow, we saw a red-breasted sapsucker Sphyrapicus ruber (a migratory species here), alders in bloom, porcupine tracks everywhere, and American dippers Cinclus mexicanus singing in the creek:

I got to do an afternoon of shrimp identification this past week with an invertebrate zoology class; I learned a lot and even identified three or four shrimp myself, but I forgot to take pictures again. I saw two hoary redpolls up close this past week, and didn't have my camera with me of course! However, I took some pictures of ferns on two of my walks.

This one is a small Asplenium viride:

And this is the very common “licorice fern,” Polypodium vulgare or P. glycirrhyza:

Finally, this is a neat Cryptogramma acrostichoides (or C. Crispa var. acrostichoides) I found on our latest hike. The brown leaves in the back are fertile fronds:

And I thought that with almost all news in Alaska politics being bad news (FBI raiding the offices of our elected representatives, etc.), I’d point out that our governor is pregnant! She’s actually quite popular in Alaska (even here in Juneau where she was feared as a proponent of the capital move), and there have been rumors going around that she’ll run with McCain. All right, let’s not get carried away here; she’s got very little experience even for a state politician, and McCain is in his 70’s so his VP should be a credible statesperson.

The Chile trip is officially over :(

Well, I got back to Sitka last night, and now I am planning to move to Juneau to study. Two reasons to be a little wistful, but I am curious to see what is going to happen.

So after I left Torres del Paine, I took a six-hour bus trip to Punta Arenas (the largest city in the region), and then a thirty-some hour bus trip to Valdivia, where I just walked around, drank excellent local beers, and ate a fish that made me horribly sick for a couple of days. My next destination was the Cajon del Maipo, but by the time I got there I was just too weak to do any high-altitude hiking so I went to Santiago to relax for my last few days. In the end, the bus trip was basically just a long exercise in suffering. The only upshots are that I saved a lot of money by not flying, and that I saw the Coscoroba swan and the lesser seedsnipe during a maintenance stop in the middle of the pampa in Argentina.

Santiago is, well, a big city. I spent a lot of time walking, drinking coffee, reading, and taking advantage of cultural activities such as museums, street performers, a representation of "Twelfth Night" in Russian with subtitles in antiquated spanish (my first play with subtittles - very odd), literary cafes, etc. But I missed the simplicity of my volunteering days, people were just not very friendly, and even in the city "green belt", drinking untreated river water was just out of the question.





I then went to Valparaiso because I was feeling better and well, it's a mythical city after all, I just couldn't miss it. Valparaiso was indeed quite fascinating, with lots of interesting people and things to do. There was even a little of birding to do, with inca terns and grey gulls in the harbor. I went to see a free puppet show at Neruda's house , which was by far the best live show I have seen during this entire trip. The kids in the audience were half the fun, as they kept talking to the characters and the artists who would talk back, shift roles, and exploit zones of ill-defined identity (for lack of a better term). For example, the character of the devil exists, and doesn't exist, inhabits other puppets, and then tells the kids that the devil doesn't exist - it's just a character some puppeteers chose to represent evil. But then again, as the kids will tell him loudly - he obviously is the devil!






I also went to Viña del Mar, and to see natural stands of Ocoa palm trees.

On my last day, when I had finally recovered some strength and appetite, I went hiking in Parque Nacional La Campana near the charming town of Olmue, where I made a light and fast (2.5 hours to the top) ascent of Cerro La Campana, a rather unimpressive 1800 meter mountain (1400 meters from the base) that is mostly known for having been climbed by Darwin.

I was hoping to see a giant hummingbird on the mountain. I didn't, but I was not disappointed because I made incredible observations of moustached turca, dusky tapaculo, aplomado falcon, and many birds I had seen before such as the white-throated tree-runner which is uncommon this far north. I also saw a lot of interesting plants, such as this interesting solanacea, Schizanthus hookeri:

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Wildlife in Parque Nacional Torres Del Paine

Because we were fortunate enough to have a botanist along with us on the work crew, I got to improve my knowledge of botany a little bit. There are many interesting plant species in the park, and we were there at the perfect time to see the majority of them in bloom. This one, for example, is the amaryllidacea “Mariposa del campo” Alstroemaeria patagonica:

This one is the scrophulariacea Calceolaria biflora (same genus as the flower in the previous post, which was C. uniflora. C. tenella is common as well):

And this is the common proteacea shrub Embothrium coccineum:

I didn’t take many bird photos, because I didn’t bring my camera with a zoom lens (wise choice, as I would have spent half the time taking photos). But I just had to take pictures of the Darwin’s rhea Pterocnemia pennata. I also saw the Baird’s sandpiper, the scale-throated earthcreeper, the Patagonian sierra-finch, the mourning sierra-finch, the grass wren, several austral pigmy-owls, a white-throated tree-runner, lots of South American snipes, the striped woodpecker, and the cinnamon-vented ground-tyrant.

There were not a lot of mammals there for a national park. A month in Denali National Park, for example, would provide one with the chance to see a small zoo’s woth of species. In Torres Del Paine I saw mice, tracks of the huemul deer, puma tracks, and a lot of foxes like this Pseudalopex griseus pup:

The dominant mammal in the low parts of the park was the guanaco. I saw many, many, many guanacos. The young guanacos here are called Chulengo:

And I am leaving on the eighth of this month.

A few things before leaving

Fifteen months after I reported for duty at the Sitka armory with a six-pack of beer in one hand and a duffel bag in the other, we're almost done with our deployment. Our replacement unit is trained up and in place, and all we have left to do is ship all our stuff out of the country, clean weapons, turn in equipment, do paperwork, etc...

Today was the award ceremony, that dreaded day where everyone lines up for trinkets. As always when we have formations, the weather was awful and the ceremony needlessly long. Two people passed out from the heat. Sergeant Metcalfe took the above photo. It is of specialist Hahn receiving an Army Achievement Medal from LTC Osborn, our battalion commander. This award is usually called AAM in the Army, and rates very low. Most people got AAMs and other puny awards. I was quite angry to find that most of the awards were very poorly written. Several people found out that they were credited for nothing in particular, had their names misspelled, or were credited with insignificant achievements. For example, mine states that I won second place in my weight category at a stairmaster competition, but not that I was a team leader or that I volunteered for the mission in Southern Iraq. One of the guys in my squad (I am a squad leader right now) even has someone else's name and achievements written into his paperwork. No wonder we didn't get any good awards!

On a more positive note - I found some flowers! Almost all the vegetation has been dead for months, but the Cornulaca leucacantha have remained mostly green, and they just flowered a couple of weeks ago (hint: look for yellow spots). Of course, it's not tulips or hibiscus, but you can't be picky in the desert after several months of zero precipitation.

And finally - a laughing dove Streptopelia senegalensis. They are flying through in large numbers right now, along with a few small flocks of turtle doves Streptopelia turtur. They are very easily frightened, so although they are rather common I never did get a good picture of one. I can't blame them; I'd probably be easily frightened as well if I were a defenseless bird flying through a country full of shotgun-toting Kuwaitis.

We're taking the internet satellite dish down in a few hours, and leaving Kuwait for good in a few days. Next stop: Mississippi!

Pratincoly nothing to report

We just got through a pretty bad heat wave. Although the high and low temperatures today are still a respectable 88 and 116 degrees Fahrenheit (about 30 and 47 degrees C), it feels quite a bit cooler than last week when the wind was really hot.

I ran the weekly early morning five kilometer race twice recently, with much tougher competition than before. I finished in the low 18 minute range as usual, while a couple of runners made it in under 17:30. I was glad these guys showed up, because otherwise I never would have mustered the motivation to run fast in 90 degree weather.

Upon finishing today's run, I was rewarded with a great bird: at first, I thought it was another white-winged tern, but it got closer and I realized it was a collared pratincole Glareola pratincola! What a beatiful bird! I thought about running after it to get a longer look, but I was already tired and it was flying fast.

More hints that birds are starting to move: I saw two hoopoes, several brown warblers that I couldn't positively identify, two barn swallows, and a few high-flying unidentified laridae.

I got three Economist magazines in a week, and since it takes me about six hours to read one issue, most of my reading time was taken up by those and the daily Sitka and Military newspapers.

I haven't taken a single picture in the last ten days but I feel somehow obligated to post one so here's an old one, of the common bush Astragalus spinosus. Its thorns are actually longer than its leaves!