Wherein I complain about the snow again

This is the view out of the window of the “Dark Hole of Despair” condo right now. Isn’t it supposed to be spring? And the snow is merely the culmination of several days of bicycle troubles: flat tire, broken derailleur, flat tire again (I had patched it with flimsy pieces of junk from Walmart), and yet another flat tire, this time from a second hole.

But the last few days have been very good anyhow. Yesterday was the first day of the 2008 Juneau Folk Festival (the third year I attend it, after 2000 and two days in 2006). The Folkfest, as it is generally called, is a week-long series of fun concerts which I love, and this year the poster is by Eric Bealer:

The day before, I went to North Douglas Island with an invertebrate biology class in order to look for animals at a very low tide (and under a cold, incessant rain). It was a successful trip. There were all kinds of weird critters such as 5-foot long blood-red worms, the sea cucumber (Holothuroidea) Eupenctata pseudoquinquesemita:

And the crescent gunnel Photis laeta:

The day before that, Saturday, my landlord and friend Jad took me along on his plane on a trip down to Angoon. It was really fascinating all along the way, especially considering that I know almost nothing about Admiralty Island. This is a photo of Jad getting back on the plane at the float in Angoon.

And before that not so much happened, except that I got to briefly meet Fran Ulmer, our former Lieutenant governor, and an unsuccessful candidate for governor (alas, she lost against the power-hungry crook Frank Murkowski, who as he took over the governorship appointed his own daughter to his senate seat).

Bicycling at last!

I am trying to get better at making a weekly post on this site. Thankfully, it’s been a good weekend with lots of neat wildlife pictures.

Since I got back from Sitka we’ve been blessed with almost snow-free weather. Many of the smaller lakes are starting to thaw out, the sidewalks are no longer encased in ice, and I can ride my bike! So I have been bicycling everywhere (except on Egan Drive, where I got stopped by the police because apparently it’s off-limits to second-class citizens such as pedestrians and cyclists).

I even got to do some good birdwatching, and found the following animals:

A huge flock of rusty blackbirds Euphagus carolinus:

Some song sparrows Melospiza melodia:

A female wood duck Aix sponsa:




Two dunlins Calidris alpina:




And a river otter Lutra canadensis:

I also saw the northern lights, heard singing varied thrushes, saw American robins, various diving and dabbling ducks, all thanks to being free to come and go in the outdoors on my bicycle.

I also got to meet some neat people around the university, and talk to Diane Benson, another challenger to Don Young. After having looked over a little bit more information, I don’t endorse everything she advocates. Also, her campaign platform seems really lightweight for a national office. However, if she gets the nomination I’d still vote for her before letting Don Young go on in office. Of course, I’d vote for Mickey Mouse before letting Don Young keep his office.

Spring Break in Sitka

For many university students in North America, Spring Break is a time to go to the beach somewhere warm, get drunk, and act in irresponsible ways (see photo to left of text). Even though airfares were ridiculously expensive, several UAS students I know undertook a pilgrimage to warmer climes (Las Vegas, Cancún, etc.) and came back just a shade darker and (I presume) significantly poorer. One of them actually told me this:

“Man, the booze was so cheap!”

Well, I didn’t want to rain on his parade, but I don’t have to be a math major to figure out the following equation: $1000 plane ticket + $400 hotel - $257.32 in beer money saved = a ridiculously expensive week of drinking.

I have been missing Sitka, so I spent my Spring Break there. It was really nice to get out of Juneau, and I really loved riding the ferry out there and back. We now have a very fast ferry, the M/V Fairweather, which makes the trip between Sitka and Juneau about twice a week in just 4.5 hours instead of 12, which is almost better than flying these days. And I got to see all kinds of wildlife on the way, such as humpback whales, a sea otter, a small pod of killer whales, pigeon guillemots, 2 brown scoters, lots of surf scoters, three black scoters, a few oldsquaws, five black oystercatchers, many common birds, and cool landscapes.

My main activity there was to do volunteer work at the Sheldon Jackson hatchery, a place that raises salmon and has been going through really tough times financially. The SJ hatchery is a non-profit organization which was created to train people in Alaska for jobs in the hatchery business. There are many hatcheries in this area, including one in Silver Bay at the end of the road in Sitka. Their purpose is to raise salmon until they get to a size where mortality is fairly low, so as to ensure greater returns to the streams. In the photo below, I am putting a 1.1 millimeter steel wire tag into the nose of a king salmon which is about the size of a finger. This wire tag is minuscule, and yet it has a long code printed on it which a biologist would read after he has extracted it from the adult fish. Before tagging the salmon, we cut off its adipose fin (the one on the fish’s back behind the dorsal fin) so that tagged fish are easy to spot amidst the catch. There were several of us volunteers present, and we tagged thousands of fishes while I was there.

I wanted to find a piece of property that I could buy, but housing prices are still really high in Sitka, so I decided to wait a little longer. Every piece of property under $200,000 has a problem. Either it is raw land in locations that are difficult to access, or a mobile home (and then I’d have to rent a place to put it on), or something that cannot be bought with a traditional loan because it doesn’t meet building codes (such as a World War II bunker for $150,000). Hopefully prices come down a little, or something will come up that is more reasonably priced.

I had been planning to do a lot of hiking, but in the end I spent very little time on the trails. This is too bad, since the weather was pleasant overall, and even when it snowed and rained it wasn’t too bad, as in this hike in the muskeg by the Starrigavan Estuary:

.

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.

Crossbills and crooks

School has been very interesting, with diverse topics in every class. I am currently studying Heidegger, mangrove swamps, the Great Depression, military dictatorships in Argentina and Uruguay, and other things I never knew anything about.

This has been another week of staying indoors, but it is getting warmer again – the last snowfall is gradually melting away again, and next week, Insh’Allah, I should be able to bicycle. A rather bird-poor week, obviously, although a flock of white-winged crossbills Loxia leucoptera did hang out in front of the “dark hole of despair” condo:

This year is full of potential for voters to influence the future. Alaska representative Don Young (R) is being investigated for fraud, and has spent nearly a million dollars of his campaign funds on lawyers to fight off corruption charges. Don Young ranks especially high on my list of despicable people (he told me in a Sitka public meeting that the Alaska rainforest grows back in less than 100 years, and that less than 1% of the Tongass had been logged!), so if you are registered to vote in Alaska, you should check this guy out before letting Don Young continue his 35-year crusade to destroy the environment in Alaska! According to the AP, when Don Young was asked about his spending of campaign money on legal fees, he said this:

“Everybody wants change, what is change?”

Notes from the dark hole of despair

It is now raining, which is slowly turning the city into a patchwork of slush, ice and bare ground. Everyday there is a little bit more bare ground, but still not enough road is clear to go bicycling without studded tires (of course, as Tom justly pointed out, I am just weak; this crazy woman has no problem with a little ice and snow).

I have largely been an indoor creature lately, studying, vegetating in Jad’s condo, going to downtown bars (quite an adventuresome thing to do, at times), etc. I did restart running (I had been injured since October), but that is also indoors at this time and rather slow. With some luck, I might be able to go to the National Guard marathon trials in May. I even took up indoor birdwatching, looking at passing eagles, siskins, redpolls, chestnut-backed chickadees, Steller’s jays, magpies, and even a heron, through windows at the condo and the university. I took this picture of a Steller’s jay from the condo:

In the same mood of winter depression, we are now calling Jad’s condo “the dark hole of despair”. It really isn’t so bad, but I like it because I had been reading a lot of Kierkegaard when Ian came up with the name.

A few days ago, I did briefly go outside. Ian and I went out to the range to shoot a flak jacket (it stopped a .40 cal round – not bad), and start a fire by rubbing stick together. We had seen a guy do it on television (I know…) and it looked rather feasible, so we went out there and tried. It was simply impossible to find anything dry. Even the relatively dry wood we extracted from the rotting core of living trees (through opening between the roots) turned out to be too wet. Also, the bow just didn’t seem to work; it kept flipping the stick into Ian’s face or slipping and achieving nothing. We gave up.

A good thing that I did was vote in the primary elections for the first time. Primaries are complicated, and usually Alaska only has a symbolic role to play, but this year every state counts. In the American system, registering for a party is free and non-committing, and registered voters basically get to vote twice: one for nomination and once for president. Because we already know with 90% certainty that all Alaska votes will result in one Republican vote in the presidential elections, the primary votes are more important than the presidential votes – especially for Juneau democrats, because of the way that delegate numbers are assigned. So I registered, and went to vote at the primaries. The primaries were a crazy affair, with 1200 registered democrats showing up in spite of a cold, windy day with two feet of snow on the ground. Obama, the candidate I had turned up to vote for, got almost three-quarters of the democratic vote in Juneau (same as the state overall of 74%). That means there were about 900 of us there to vote for him. Polls for the primaries are an old-fashioned, simple, and emotional affair compared to the presidential elections.

Democracy at its best…

Enough snow!

Many people are enchanted by snow – I honestly would rather it were summer already. I cannot wait to bicycle to the university, walk around in the mountains with plenty of daylight and no ice or avalanches, and step outside without first wrapping multiple layers of fleece over every part of my body. Many days were bitterly cold, and hiking was painful and short, such as a trip out on Mendenhall Lake to check out the icebergs up close:

I thought my nose was going to freeze off on that one hour mini-adventure.

I then went back up the side of Mount Juneau to look for the goats, with Ian and Mac. It was a fun hike even though I was not wearing crampons and I kept sliding. I just tried to stay off the ridge where it was most icy and dangerous. The photo below is from the bottom of the trail that we started from. Ian and Mac are standing in front of an old gold mine tunnel.

I went back to Mendenhall flats, and once again I was absolutely freezing. This time I didn’t see any unusual birds at all, so I just walked around in the snow with Ian.

Most of my time is taken up by school, though, and some of my classes are very interesting. In decreasing order of interest they are: introduction to oceanography, history of the US II, Spanish conversation, literature and the sense of place, poetry studies. Of course, it isn’t so much the topic that makes a class more interesting than another, as the instructor and material.

And Jad – the pilot who owns the place that Ian and I are sleeping on - just got back this morning. For Ian it is bad news because now he has to sleep on the couch. As for me, I hardly know anyone in Juneau so I am happy to have another familiar face around. So far I only know a handful of Army buddies, and Roman, another Sitka “expatriate.”

As far as long-term plans are concerned, I have some vague ideas which are subject to change of course. I am planning to go to Sitka over spring break (late March) and look at perhaps finding a chunk of land that I could buy. Of course, everything there is VERY expensive, so I may or may not be successful in that particular endeavor.