Alaska: Day 11

Last night, I gave a teaser for today's post: I got to pet a dinosaur! A baby dinosaur!

This is a fossilized dinosaur footprint. It was just being brought into the lab while we were visiting Denali. Because we have great friends, the paleontologist (NOT archaeologist) carrying it stopped to give us a look. It was a three-toed beastie, quite young based on the size. And the coolest thing? You could see skin impressions -- the actual texture of the beastie-skin:

See those ripples in the rock? That's the skin. I got to touch it. Pet it. Like you'd pet a baby dinosaur. Pretty darn cool, right?!

Alaska: Day 10 of NaBloPoMo

It seems like this single-topic NaBloPoMo might be cheating, but life is BUSY this November. I started a new job on Friday, but I'm still dragging from an early-season Crescent City cold, so it's been tough. We're recruiting for my old position, I'm learning my new position...also recruiting for a new VISTA. I have jobs to fill! 

So I'll take my cheat and stick to my topic.

We stopped for part of a day and one very fun night outside/in/near Denali National Park to visit with Jim and Jess, friends from Michael's ELEDP days. Jim made CHIEF while we were there, which was very exciting. Also exciting? Denali's fairly new main visitor center and the nearby Murie education center. 

There was so much art in both places and it was all art to a purpose, there to teach something cool about the park. In this photo, for example, is just one corner of a massive quilt made by a local quilter's guild. It is a map of Denali National Park depicting its different ecosystems. The boarder featured scenes from a variety of those ecosystems and you can see that even the background was treated thoughtfully, with animal tracks quilted onto the white. It was very, very cool and there were a couple other quilts from the same guild in the visitor center as well. (I was only going to do one picture, but it deserves more, so enjoy!)

(Teaser for tomorrow: I got to pet a BABY DINOSAUR at Denali!!)

Alaska: Day 8 Friends Past and Present

Next stop was Seward! I had never been to Seward before and good friends of ours from Katmai are now at Kenai Fjords National Park, so we were excited to get there. We headed straight for the Alaska Sea Life Center for some closeups with the sea creatures. 

I love myself a good octopus and this one was showing off! Darcy got a cameo with it, too. 

The highlight, though, was meeting up with our good friends Sharon and Bryce and their daughter, who was born just two months after Darcy and slept in the same bassinet we'd bought used in Anchorage and passed along when we headed home to King Salmon. They were each other's first playmates, as seen in the very last photo. 

 It was very sweet to see how well they got along now that they were reunited after almost eight years. There will be more evidence of that tomorrow.

Alaska: Day 6

It is, of course, really Day 6 of NaBloPoMo, not of our trip to Alaska. So far, all of the photos are of just the first two days. Time moves slowly in Alaska. 

I can't really show pictures of Katmai without showing pictures of at least one bear, so here's your bear. The salmon runs are all dying out and spawned-out salmon are just hanging around in the water waiting to die. They are easy pickings for the fat, happy September bears. If you want to see what I mean by fat, happy September bears, check out Katmai National Park's Facebook "Fat Bear Week". So fat. So happy.

But let's move on, shall we?

Flying back from Brooks Camp, we got a great view of King Salmon before landing on the Naknek River. I couldn't quite get the "supermarket" in the frame, but otherwise, this is pretty much all of downtown King Salmon. We lived in the large building in the top center of the picture, just to the left of the weather dome. Convenient to the airport and downtown!

Alaska: Day 3

(There may be some time travel involved in the next two posts. I am transitioning from one job to another AND I'm sick, so I'm allowing myself the gift of procrastination of pre-dating posts.)

Katmai Lodge is a true icon of old-fashioned park lodges. There's a big 360-degree fire place with ancient arm chairs around it. Old-school benches and tables in the dining room. And a permanent hot drink corner.

Darcy missed school for this trip, so we signed her up for independent study to avoid having her listed as absent for 10 days right at the beginning of the school year. She was ready to take a break from the rain and we were bear-jammed on the lodge side of the river anyway. Here she is doing her math homework with the Katmai poster behind her and a cup of cocoa in hand. About 15 minutes later, we rushed out to watch a mama and two cubs walking down the beach.

The Great Thing About Not Posting Much

The great thing about not posting much at all this whole year is that now, when I most need blog topics, there are so many things I didn't post about! And I can post about them now!

So, for example, this was a stellar year for lupine blooms in the Bald Hills. The Bald Hills are gorgeous open mountain sides in the southernish part of Redwood National and State Parks. Some springs, they are dotted by lupines. This year, they were carpeted in them:

 That bit of red is me, for scale. So dense. So lovely. (The flowers, not me.)

 Our little imp almost blends in.

If I Was Single In Another Era...

There are many jobs in our modern era that are much easier to imagine having if you were childless and preferably single, so you didn't have to worry about the amount of time you were spending at your job.

I think in previous eras, there might have been even more of those sorts of jobs and if I were choosing one of them, I would choose working on this mobile post office. This is one of the cars we got to tour at the Steamtown National Historic Site in Scranton. It's a car that was leased to (or by? I don't remember the exact relationship) the railroad, but it's a fully self-contained post office. It is amazing, but I get the feeling that the postal workers pretty much lived their whole lives on the train. Not good for maintaining relationships.

What do you say, Auntie Best? In the days before airplanes would have let you teach yoga around the world, would you have joined me on this post office car?

Arches!

We crossed another time zone today. We have been out of our house for eight nights. Driving 350-400 miles a day since then. We're tired. And so, I am especially grateful for the amazing natural beauty of Arches National Park, which needs no captioning:

In Which My Husband Has A Wish

It's getting near the end of NaBloPoMo and I have no pictures because of the stolen computers, etc. My pickings are slim. Last year, I could just post random cute pictures of Darcy and pretty much get away with that. The lack of access to our photos is really interfering with my blog.


Luckily, my husband has a wish, and that is clearly material for the blog.


(Of course, really, my husband has many wishes. He wishes he could have an iPhone. And an iPad. He wishes people would buy all the CDs and books he has listed on Amazon. He wishes the wind hadn't blown down a gazillion leaves and redwood needles last night after he spent time raking on Sunday morning.)


The relevant wish is that he has a goal for the Redwood National and State Parks Facebook page. He created and maintains the page as part of his job. His goal is to get 1,000 "likes" before the end of the year and he now has 971. If you have a Facebook account and you don't yet like the Redwood National and State Parks page, would you please follow the link above and like it? And if you wanted to repost or let your friends and their friends know about his wish, that would be awesome!


If you need some heart-string-tugging to make you do this: we decided last night that we need to skip presents to each other this year because of the money we'll spend replacing the stuff we had stolen in the break-in. The total loss is not enough over our deductible to make it worth having the insurance claim on the books. By liking this page, you will help me give him a gift that is free of financial burden. How great will that feel? I'm banking on pretty darn great!

Park Friends

We're all just back from a wonderful dinner with friends. The talk was all national parks and Alaska with the current Chief of Interpretation at Katmai National Park and the just-about-to-start Chief of Interpretation at Pinnacles National Monument. They hadn't seen Darcy in a couple years, so her chatter amused us in between stories of dream parks and former coworkers. It was a great evening.


Pinnacles is not exactly the most-well-known park out there. We passed a sign for the western entrance about a year ago on our way to Simi Valley for Christmas. I looked it up and was entranced. The name-sake pinnacles are part of an ancient volcano that formed on one of the many, many faults in California. Over time (lots of time), half of the volcano stayed where it was born and the other half traveled north with the fault line about 600 miles to its current location in central California (if I'm remembering correctly from my research a year ago). That is pretty darn cool if you ask me!


I know that an awful lot of my blog readers are already big fans (or employees) of the national parks, but seriously, if you're not already, you should start reading. Our national parks protect some of the most incredibly beautiful and truly awesome places. They are everyone's backyard and should be on everyone's bucket lists.

The Roads Less Taken

I don't know about you, but I really hate driving the same exact route both coming and going to a destination, even a local destination, like from home to work and back each day. For someone with this particular pet peeve, I live in a brutal place. Only two paved roads go in and out of our county, one north-south along the coast and the other, north-east away from the Ocean into Oregon. For most other towns we go to, there IS only one route to choose from. 


The one exception is when I head south to Arcata or Eureka. Southbound, there's a great scenic by-pass that winds through old-growth redwoods AND saves gas because it's significantly flatter than the highway. I take that most of the time, even sometimes in both directions. But recently, it's been unavailable because of this:

There was a massive tree-fall across the by-pass several weeks ago. This picture comes from the Redwood National and State Parks Facebook page. I've been reduced to stealing photos because of the whole business of the computers in the hands of thieves and the hard drive in the hands of the sheriff. It's annoying.


I have to admit that I'm ok with the trees having fallen -- even though a couple of them were massive old beauties -- because it's a natural process that occurs to trees. It's not as if someone cut them down. But I was definitely not ok with having my alternative driving route taken away for weeks. It's almost ready for action now, after massive efforts to remove the enormous amount of biomass these trees hold. You can watch them on this YouTube video, also courtesy of the amazing media specialist Park Ranger at Redwood National and State Parks.


And you? What are some of your favorite drives?

It's Not All About Michael

Tonight, we went out to dinner because my husband is wonderful and I was really, really tired. Darcy fell asleep in the car on the drive home and so we were free to enjoy our evening starting at 7:35! Unheard of. And this story makes today's post NOT all about Michael, as he requested when I asked him to provide me some links for the rest of the post.

Which is all about Michael and some of the amazing things he does in his job. 

Michael looks great in a park service uniform. Those of you who haven't seen him wearing the badge are missing out, but you can get a small taste of it in this post and this one (which also gives you a sense of the wonders of a desert flower display). Michael is an interpretive park ranger, so he's the kind of ranger who teaches you something and touches your heart in a program around the campfire, not the kind of ranger who pulls you over for speeding in the park. Just want to make that clear.

(And apologies to our friends who are or love law enforcement rangers: I'm not trying to say that one kind of ranger is better than the other or anything like that. Just clarifying.)

However, he has a particular specialty these days, as the park media specialist. So he tweets and Facebooks for the park, makes the park newspaper great, creates site bulletins, picnic table signs about feeding animals, and almost any other thing that could count as media. I'm pretty proud of the work he does and I thought I'd share some of it during NaBloPoMo.

First, if you want to know what's going on in Redwood National and State Parks on a day-to-day basis, you can follow him on Twitter or "like" the official Facebook page. The parks also have a YouTube channel where the "Redwood Ranger Minute" series (produced by Michael) is housed (they're video podcasts and can also be found on iTunes). He also maintains much of the park website and is working on an update now. As you can imagine, taking care of the social media for five combined parks every day can be tiring. But Michael still does more!

Recently, the interpretive staff at Redwood have been taking turns writing the "Hey Ranger" column in our local paper, the Del Norte Triplicate (formerly known as the Daily Triplicate, but now it's down to three days a week, so not very daily). Michael wrote this one and helps edit and organize the others. 

He's a busy and productive man-in-uniform, despite what many Republican members of Congress want you to think about government employees. I haven't even mentioned the roadside signs, posters, event flyers, and who knows what else gets designed and produced on the giant pair of computer monitors in Michael's office. He's a all-around good guy and I just thought I'd share some of the stuff he does and doesn't talk about much. I hope you enjoy the vicarious tour of Redwood National and State Parks while admiring my man.

Long-Awaited: August Vacation Part 2

I noticed recently that I did a part 1 blog about our wonderful vacation with my sister and niece, but never went farther than their first full day in Crescent City! There was much more to our vacation. We had four or five days here so they could see where we live and enjoy the redwoods and the beach, but our solution to getting to take time off to visit with them AND have a vacation away was for them to join us for the first part of our vacation in Bend, Oregon. 

We rented a great house on the outskirts of Bend, but not too far away from downtown and fun stuff to do. Ev and I traveled to Bend via Eugene for reasons that turned out to be not valid, but had a great visit with a friend of hers who lives just south of Eugene. Michael took the girls more or less directly to Bend. Here are pictures of their journey:

Darcy and Liana review their Junior Ranger books at the Hiouchi Visitors Center on their way out of town.

 

Showing off their brand-new Junior Ranger badges!

They stopped at beautiful Crater Lake on the way and happened to run into our former neighbor from Mojave, Anne. They got a second Junior Ranger badge each -- in one day!

Crater Lake still had plenty of snow nearby, despite the calendar claiming it was mid-August. They stopped for some snow play, of course.

 

Michael's trip was made much more pleasant by the addition of the portable DVD player that made its way from North Carolina. More than five hours in a car is a lot for two Junior Rangers!

Hey! I just realized that this post actually goes with our blog title -- two National Parks in one day!

Hold On To Your Hats!

The deluge will soon begin. I have (perhaps foolishly) signed up for NaBloPoMo, otherwise known as National Blog Posting Month. It started as a tie-in to NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). I was briefly considering participating in NaNoWriMo, but decided that November was busy enough without contemplating writing 50,000 words of fiction! And since I learned last night that I'm headed to Washington for the second half of this week, I'm glad I made that decision.

I figured I could handle NaBlogPoMo a little easier than the novel, so you can look forward to new blog posts EVERY DAY in November. I'll do a little catching up of our lives in the beautiful redwoods.

We spent part of today in the redwoods, as it happens. I'll save some details for November (see how I'm already thinking ahead?), but the park opened its first new trail in a decade this morning with a dedication ceremony near the plaque commemoring Lady Bird Johnson's dedication of Redwood National Park and a ribbon cutting at the trail head. We didn't join the inaugural hike because Michael was a shuttle driver, taking folks back to their cars if they weren't hiking either.

Wish me luck and check back every day in November for exciting new blog posts!

Tall Trees Trail And False Klamath Cove

We live in an amazing part of the world. Sometimes we pine for more services that don't require an hour and a half drive, but then we have days like this. A couple weeks ago, we had a beautiful day and we drove down to Orick to get a permit to hike the Tall Trees Trail. It is a crazy-steep trail that leads, as the name suggests, to a grove of particularly tall redwoods, including the tree that was measured by National Geographic for the article that eventually led to Redwoods National Park. The hike led down to the Redwood Creek drainage and the trees at the bottom were, indeed, very, very tall!!

We had a great day. We put our feet in the creek, saw frogs and dragonfly nymphs, hiked a gorgeous trail and stopped at the beach on the way home to satisfy Darcy's ocean fetish.

We also became famous! Once you get down to the actual Tall Trees Grove, the trail makes a mile-long loop. As we were getting back to the start of the loop, I happened to look down and saw an eggshell. It was from a marbled murrelet -- an endangered bird that nests only in the tallest redwoods.

We were very excited to see it and spent quite a bit of time admiring it and debating whether (as I prefer to believe) it was cleaned out of the nest after the baby had hatched or if it was an unfortunate example of predation by a raven or other murrelet-eater. But once Michael started mentioning it to other park staff, the excitement grew exponentially. All the marbled murrelet experts have been chiming in opinions about hatchling vs. predation and one of them thinks he's identified the branch the nest's on in this tree:

It was a very special experience and one that we've been assured is probably a once in a lifetime occurrence. Apparently, it's almost never happened before. Luckily, the rest of the hike can be recreated whenever we want, although never quite the same.

This view, for instance, isn't going anywhere any time soon unless there's a very serious storm. We spent quite a lot of time on this gravel bar, playing with rocks and water and eating lunch. That's Michael with Darcy in the backpack in the foreground. It's hard to get a photo that does justice to the massive size of the redwoods. This one comes close, but it's still a little short of the mark.

Once we returned to the trail after our gravel bank rest, we went through a section that captivated me. Throughout this area, there are trees that are completely covered with moss, lichens, ferns, and various other hangers-on. There's a short section of 101 near Klamath that is a tunnel of these green trees. I love them. I can't believe they can live with all the extra vegetation covering their trunks and branches, but apparently, they do. The trail guide claims that all the vegetation is made up of true epiphytes that don't take nutrients from the tree itself at all. I guess I should believe it, because the trees are leafing out these days! They are really magical.

When we were leaving the gravel bar, Darcy didn't want to leave the water. And we convinced her to leave by promising that we could stop at a beach on the way home. We stopped at False Klamath Cove, which is a beautiful stretch of beach across the "highway" from the now-closed youth hostel. For those of you who think that 101 is a six to eight lane monster, this is our version of 101: hugging the thin strip of flat space between the rocky edge of the beach and that steep hill.

We always think that we'll be able to keep Darcy from going in past her ankles. Or we think it will be too cold for her. Or something. She started this beach adventure fully dressed with her pants rolled up to her knees. By this picture, the pants were already soaked and the shirt was getting there, too.

Michael was her shadow for most of this beach visit, making sure that she didn't just walk straight in, which is what she seems to want to do. He got maybe just a little bit wet.

Or maybe a lot! Darcy's down to just panties at this point. She ended up "wearing" my shirt for the ride home because there was nothing dry of hers. She had fun, though, and once again, we had to take her up to the car screaming that she wanted to stay. Somehow, the fact that she's so cold her lips are turning blue and she has lobster-red legs doesn't make her want to get out of the water AT ALL.

All in all, it was a good day.

Practicing For Crescent City (And Other News)

We had an overcast, cool, off-and-on damp day the other day. We never managed to get real precipitation for more than a minute or two at a time, but it felt like a practice day for our new life in Crescent City. Darcy passed the test with flying colors; it was everything I could do to get her to come inside once her hair was verging on wet rat.

Her sleeveless dress might not be appropriate in the northern rain, but she's got the right attitude! She started out with just the hat and moved on to the umbrella when she wanted to play peek-a-boo. It wasn't at all to keep the rain off her, just for the play.

As you can see behind her, our summer rains have left a green wash behind. The video for Mojave says that the water from summer storms runs off quickly and "does little for the fabric of life" in the desert, but you couldn't prove that around our house. There are several kinds flowering plants that are in a second full burst of bloom. A lot of the green on the ground is just grass from the hay seeds in our resident cows' poop, I will admit that. But there are a lot of natives having a second hurrah these days.

In other news, Michael will officially work for Redwood National Park as of October 11th, so our move should start the 12th or 13th and take three to five days, most likely. The movers will be done in a day, if our experience in King Salmon is any measure. Then we'll drive north. And drive north. And then drive north some more. We'll keep everyone posted.

On the book front, I've just finished Rebecca today. Somehow, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Rebecca have always been linked, loosely, in my head, and I still think that's not unrealistic. Rebecca had a modernized element of suspense, with the sinister housekeeper playing a more active role than the insane wife in Jane Eyre. I felt this book ended rather abruptly, but I need to go back and re-read the prologue to see if that sheds a bit more light on what happened next. I like it in a fairly vague way. Not something I'll feel compelled to read again, and I read a lot of books multiple times.

Next up is Middlemarch by George Eliot.

(For those of you paying attention, Dickens should be coming up next, but I've requested it through the Bookmobile, so when I was at the library in Las Vegas yesterday, I skipped ahead.)

And The Next Park We'll Be Around Is...

... Redwood National Park! Yesterday morning, Michael accepted a job at Redwood as a park ranger/visual media specialist. It was a hard decision because there was another job possibility we were weighing and both options are truly wonderful places.

We'll move to Crescent City, CA, sometime in October; the parks haven't negotiated Michael's start date yet. We are excited by all the new opportunities living in a town will bring. There's a multi-screen theater! There are TIDE POOLS! (When I was Darcy's age, we lived just a block or two from the beach in Wollongong, Australia, and there were tide pools we loved to play in and near, so I'm thrilled that I'll be able to share that amazing experience with Darcy.) There are playgrounds! There are supermarkets! Neighbors! A post office! Harbor seals piled up on the piers! And, of course, really, really tall trees.

With any luck at all, we'll be living in a rental duplex that is already home to some park service employees and has its own indoor pool and playground equipment. It's on the opposite side of town as Michael's office, but it's not a huge town. It won't mean a super-long commute. Michael's office is in an old house overlooking the ocean. One of his soon-to-be coworkers said that she can sometimes watch Roosevelt elk and whales from her office window!

Mojave Preserve Updates

Part of Michael's job is to create/edit/write for/design the park newspaper twice a year. His third issue came out earlier this spring and it is a bit of a Glore-fest. I (was) volunteered to write an article about the wildflower season that made the first page. I also contributed one of the photos. Michael was the featured ranger for their series about the rangers' favorite places (and got me to take the accompanying picture of him). And, of course, Michael's hand was behind many other features in the paper as well. You can read all about it here.

Many of you may have already watched Michael's interview on YouTube. He got tired of waiting for me to post a link here, so sent out a mass email. But if you've missed my fast-talking husband's YouTube debut, you can check it out here.

More vacation photos will be forthcoming.

Darcy Loves Orville

Darcy returned from vacation with a new obsession. Orville. Wright, not Reddenbacher. As in one of the fathers of human flight. Airplanes are no longer just airplanes. They are Orville rides. She thinks every one is owned and piloted by Orville. Apparently, at the same time.

On Wednesday, we went to the Wright Brothers National Memorial in Kitty Hawk. Darcy likes airplanes, so we thought there was a good chance she'd be entertained there. We didn't know the half of it. She sat through about half of a program about the engineering problems the Wrights overcame to create the first successful airplane and then she had a good time looking at all the airplane-related things in the visitor center bookstore. I bought her a board book called The Story of the Wright Brothers. Who knew that one could regret buying a book? (At least a little.)


Following the program, we asked a staff member what the other buildings at the Memorial contained, trying to decide whether we should just leave. For small children, he suggested a metal sculpture/model of the 1903 Flyer installed for the Centennial celebrations. So we drove around the monument hill and drove to the installation seen above. It has statues of all the people involved with that flight. The photographer whose perspective we borrowed had never taken a photograph before. Orville set it up before getting in the Flyer. Orville is flying the plane and Wilbur is the figure running by the wing. This is the famous "First Flight" shot seen everywhere. The 12 seconds that changed the world, so to speak. And again, who would have thought one might live to regret taking a small girl to climb on a reproduction of an airplane? (At least a little.)

Darcy and Liana had a ball climbing on the plane. Or, more accurately, Liana had a ball climbing on the plane and Darcy had a ball sitting on the plane, first at the end of one wing and then next to Orville. Walking on the wing surface didn't interest her. Liana was fond of fixing the engine and here, she explains the various parts to Darcy. Darcy, who has eyes only for Orville. Watch out, Adam! You have a rival for our girl's affections now!

Darcy sat with her arm resting on Orville for a long time, repeating his name and patting his shoulder. Here, she is suggesting the next flight path they should take.

Notice the clenched fist as Darcy waits breathlessly to see if the first flight is successful. She is Orville's best new friend and admirer, and he is very much alive and well in her imagination. She lay awake instead of napping that day and, through the monitor, we could hear her asking, over and over, "Did you have fun with Orville?"

I read the "Orville book" a half dozen times that afternoon, and a few more that night. In the five days since, I think I've read it at least 40 times already. Michael hasn't escaped, either, so she's heard it dozens and dozens of times, apparently without tiring of it one bit. It's possible we've created a monster, but I do love that she says things about Orville and Wilbur as kids and then as grown-ups that show she understands they were kids just like her and, therefore, she can grow up to be like them. While she can't be the first person to fly, she can follow her dreams as the Wright brothers did. It may feed the flames more than needed, but we'll be looking for more picture books about the Wright brothers next time we go to the library. A girl's got to dream...