Rough Seas Ahead

It seems we have accumulated quite a backblog, having recently been so busy that we haven't found time write about the many things we have to write about.

For the last week, my sister Rachel and her husband Jeff have been visiting us from Indiana. I think this isn't a typical vacation for them (most of their vacations have involved the Gulf of Mexico), so I'm especially glad they came up for a taste of something different. And, they pushed us to try a few new things.

They were interested in trying some good Alaskan seafood, and weren't impressed by the frozen king crab clusters we'd served other guests (although they are delicious). But the first live dungeoness crabs were in, so we bought four and endeavoured to try to cook these beasts--two at a time--in our spaghetti pot. The first three went in OK, but the fourth one managed to wrap its legs around my wrist as it was being lowered into the steaming water. (Did I mention crabs aren't banded like lobsters? Yeah, the crusher could crush if, if given the opportunity.) I did manage to flick him off (ironically, into the melting butter), but I did take a minute to count my fingers, lest I be working in base 9 for the rest of my life.

The five of us went down to Seward last weekend, where we were going to switch off days taking a glacier cruise and watching Soren, Rachel and Jeff cruising Saturday, and Kirsten and me Sunday. My parents had earlier done one of these six-hour cruises, on perhaps the nicest day of the summer, and saw lots of orcas, birds, endangered Steller sea lions and seals on the way out of the mountain-surrounded Resurrection Bay and around a penninsula to the adjacent fjord to see a large tidewater glacier. With this experience, Rachel and Jeff set off on an overcast Saturday, and returned excited from seeing orcas leaping out of the ocean and breeching humpbacks, though cold from the drizzle falling in the wind blowing off the glacier.

Sunday morning, Kirsten and I turned Soren over to Rachel and Jeff and set off for our cruise. When we got there, we were told there was a weather advisory and we had three options:

1. Take a full refund now.
2. Rebook for another day.
3. Go on the boat and give it a try. If too many people got seasick, they'd turn around and turn it into a cruise of Resurrection Bay. If this happened, they'd give us a $40 refund (making the cost of the trip $89).

Since this was really our shot, we went for it. (Consider what it says about people's risk preferences that they (we) still pay a premium for the chance to see the glacier, even when it doesn't happen AND it doesn't happen because a significant number of people get seasick...they offer a Resurrection Bay tour for $69, so really they're just charging $20 for the opportunity to get seasick.)

Well, we had a cold, wet tour. But we got to the mouth of the bay, hit strong crosswinds and 12 foot seas, many people ran for the stern, and we turned around. Most people on the cruise would tell you they saw three sea otters. Kirsten and I saw a fair number of birds you can't usually see from shore. No whales or glacier for us.

Behold the Ice Worm

Ice worms are real! It's true!
They thrive at a cool thirty-two.
But at twenty they freeze
And at forty degrees
They turn to a puddle of goo.



We got to see real, live ice worms on a boat trip near Portage Glacier. They're teeny little things that live exclusively in ice and eat algae, and if they're exposed to temperatures above 40 degrees Fahrenheit, their natural antifreeze gets messed up and they explode. Sensitive little buggers, eh?

Enough about Denali...

... let's talk about Mt. McKinley.

No true Alaskan calls it Mt. McKinley -- out here, it's Denali ("The High One" in the Athabascan language). So why is it named after McKinley, anyway? Did he climb it? Drive a golf ball off the summit? Have his remains interred at its foot?

No, McKinley never even visited Alaska. It was named after him to piss some people off.

A prospector named William Dickey, a Republican, was exploring the area in 1896 with some Democratic traveling companions. A big issue at the time was the proposed abolition of the gold monetary standard (Republicans were pro-gold-standard, Democrats against), and Dickey apparently liked to discuss it at length with his Democratic pals. Poor Billy must have felt awfully lonely out there, the only true supporter of beautiful, beautiful gold, constantly forced to listen to a bunch of haters. I mean, they all obviously loved gold, since they were out in the middle of nowhere looking for it, but my man Dickey was the only one there who really understood gold and wanted to rub it all over his face and have his currency based on its worth and stuff.

So how to get back at the haters? Well, during his travels, Dickey "discovered" Denali, and upon his return to civilization, he published his "discovery" with the announcement that he'd decided to name it Mt. McKinley. After the Republican, gold-standard-lovin' presidential candidate of the day. Because he wanted to annoy the people he'd been traveling with. I guess that's one way to win an argument.

Plenty of people who have an opinion on the matter believe that the mountain's official name should be Denali -- so why don't we just change it?

Bureaucracy, of course!

If you want to change the name of a national park/monument/whatever, you have to take it up with the U.S. Geographic Names Board. But the Names Board won't consider a name change if the issue is already being considered in Congress. It turns out that a certain Ralph Regula, a representative from Ohio who happens to have McKinley's former seat in the House, is really attached to the current name; he introduces a bill every year that declares the mountain's official name to be Mt. McKinley. And so the mountain will be called Denali over Ralph Regula's dead body.

Long Time No See

I went outside at about 11:30 last night to see if I could spot any Perseid meteor shower action (I couldn't).

While I was out there, I realized it was the first time I'd seen stars since June 1.

Denali with a Long Lens II

This time with an actual picture of Denali.



And our two best wildlife shots -- a caribou and a willow ptarmigan.





(A heavily-pared-down set of our Denali trip pictures is here, and as always, our full photoset is here)

We saw a ton of wildlife -- it was amazing. We saw moose, caribou, Dall sheep, ptarmigans, snowshoe hares, twelve grizzly bears (some very close), a golden eagle, and a gyrfalcon. All from the bus (they do stop the busses for wildlife viewing, so it's not a drive-by or anything).

Of course, you can't please everyone. On the bus ride back, I could hear a woman b*tching to her husband about how dirty everything was, and how long the bus ride was, and how they could have seen more animals if they'd gone to the zoo. Yeah, Janey Complainy, and then you'd be at THE ZOO. But I guess you can at least get a Slurpee at the zoo, so that makes it way better than big ol' dirty Denali National Park.

Denali with a Long Lens

Chris and I got to go to Denali National Park a couple weeks ago, and I'm so glad we did -- it's one of those things we felt like we really had to do while we were here.

There's only one road into the park, and it's closed to private vehicles past mile 15. The rest of the road is accessible only by shuttle bus, so you just pay your $30, get on the bus, and see the sights. The drivers stop for wildlife-watching and photo opportunities, so you can pretty much stay on the bus the whole time and get a decent Denali experience on the 8- to 13-hour round trip (depending on how far you want to into the park, of course).

Or you can do what Chris and I did, and get off the bus to hike. The thing is, there aren't any trails in the park's interior (just near the entrance), so if you take off for a hike, you're pretty much just wandering off into the hills. It's a really odd experience, having to decide which way to go. We had some general route advice from our bus driver (pretty much, "Walk around the back of that mountain until you come to the road again"), but the specifics were up to us.

Find the right route was easy at first, because we'd gotten off at a fairly popular spot (although we were the only ones who got off our bus) and a path of sorts had been trampled in. Once we got to the point where we couldn't see the road any more, though, it was up to us to figure out how to proceed. It was an interesting process, which required a surprising amount of thought.

Should we go down the stream bed, or up to the ridgeline? It's not the easiest climb, but there might be bears in the willows by the stream. Do we plow straight up the hill to the top, or go the long way and ease around the side? How did those other people get way up there? Etc.

The views were amazing, but unfortunately, I'd only brought our long lens (it's better for taking pictures of wildlife), so I couldn't capture the sweeping panoramas as well as I wanted to. I had to get about 30 yards away to get this shot of Chris.



There were a few points when I thought we would have to turn around and go back the way we came -- the descent was pretty steep in places, and there was no obvious hiking route -- but we forged ahead, whistling pretty tunes as we went to let the bears know that lunch was on its way (we didn't actually see any bears while we were hiking, thankfully). It was threatening to rain as we got to the toughest part of the descent, and I was getting kind of freaked out thinking about how it would feel to slide on wet brush all the way down to the creek bed, and whether I could make it back to the bus with a broken head. But it didn't rain, and I didn't break my head, and it turned out to be a very enjoyable experience.

I feel like I'm not telling the story right. It's just hard to describe how huge the landscape felt all of a sudden, when we got off the bus and just... started walking. We could have walked wherever we wanted to. Hey, there's a mountain over there that looks nice -- let's go there. I mean, our little jaunt was really nothing compared to the crazy multi-day backcountry hikes that some people undertake (I wasn't really feeling up to that), but it was still very different from any hike I've done before. And we ended up feeling like we had way more cred than the 90% of visitors who never even get off the bus.

We are the Worst Parents in the World

Soren turned 1 on June 2nd, which happened to be the day we flew from Rhode Island to Anchorage. So there wasn't really time for a party or anything, although we did tell pretty much everyone we saw that it was his birthday. That counts, right? Probably not. We didn't have a party for our sweet, wonderful baby boy on the very first anniversary of his birth! Cf. this post's title.

Luckily, we were guided in the right direction by Grammy and Grampy (AKA Margie and Paul) Anderson, and we finally had a party for Soren last week. I like to think that we were just waiting until we had a quorum for a bona fide birthday party. Or maybe it's just that parents are stodgy fun-stiflers and grandparents are a non-stop Mardi Gras. But with less drinking. And I'm not just saying that to protect Grammy's and Grampy's reputations.



So, anyway, we picked out some fun presents, and a yummy chocolate cake, and lit one of those little candles in the shape of a 1, and we were all set for a cake-smearing, bath-necessitating good time!



I cut a piece big enough to make a photogenic mess, and presented it to the birthday boy.



He promptly picked it up and presented it to the floor.



I tried again, but he wasn't having it. If cake's so GREAT, Mom, why don't YOU eat it?????



So I did. Hey, more for me!

Rest assured that we're having him checked out by several famous specialists, and we hope to discover a cure for whatever horrible syndrome is causing him to NOT WANT CHOCOLATE CAKE. This is a serious problem.