Fall Fell

After the Rain

It's been raining the last few days with a bit of wind. Most of the autumn leaves are now piling up in wet drifts on the ground. When the sun peaked out this afternoon I thought I would get a shot of the leaves remaining attached to the trees and the termination dust on the Talkeetna Mountains.

September 16, 2009

One Year

Everyone said, "wait a year, before even thinking about the future." I guess they were right because today it's a year later I still have no goal, plan or vision for the future without Kate. Maybe sometime during the next year ...

The healing process means that after one year I think less about the weeks of bad times when she was sick and find myself thinking more about and enjoying the memories of the years of good times. Like when she and I attended Marti Gras in the cold, windy rain in Galveston, Texas. It was just one day while we were waiting to board the Carnival Cruise ship to attend Matt and Deanna's wedding. The Marti Gras parade was pretty good and people on every float threw beads at us. I gave her almost all that I caught to add to her haul. Kate was smiling and laughing like a kid collecting all her beads. When we got home she put them all in a wooden "pirate's"chest for the visiting nieces to play with.

A Voice From The Past

Talk Radio
In April of 1987 my father, Gordon R. Nelson, had a telephone interview about his cookbooks with talk radio host, Tom Carrol, of WENE, apparently in Endicott, NY. The interview was suggested by one of Dad's fans in the area. Sometime afterward a tape of that interview was send to my parents home. My mother and I listened to it for the first time today. I captured it digitally and post it here for the rest of the family to listen to.
(Click Here to Listen)
To copy the file to your computer, click on the Click Here to Copy link, then right click on the Interview.Mp3 file and do a "Save Link As"
(Click Here to Copy)

Team Building

Fishing Trip

As a team building exercise, 7 of my coworkers and I went salt water fishing out of Seward on Tuesday. We caught a lot of small Halibut, large Silver Salmon and 1 Ling Cod. We also limited out on Black Bass. The seas were relatively calm, no one got seasick, and the weather was mostly cloudy with occasional sunshine. A good trip, and a nice break from the drudgery of office work.

It Makes Sense To Me

A narcisistic sociopath who intends to do whatever he wants to do without regard to the wishes and desires of society at large. Socialism is a failed system everywhere it has been tried and America is not yet Socialist. But it will be if he gets his way.

iPhone Malamute

Close up.

Summer Vacation

"Reds"

Tomorrow I have to return to work for the rest of July and the month of August. My 2 week summer vacation is coming to a close. The first 5 days I spent doing projects around TrippingOverMoose Ranch. From the 15th through the 22 I drove the motor home to Sterling and fished for Reds in the Kenai River.
(note: For anyone who reads this and is not familiar with Alaska, "Reds" are Sockeye or Red Salmon.)
Fishing and timing were good and I probably put enough fish in the freezer to see me through the winter. But since my daughter and her family are staying with me I'll most likely need more. We'll hit the Silver Salmon run hard when it starts.

September is hunting season, 2 weeks in the back country chasing moose.

Family Reunion

Photos.

http://picasaweb.google.com/Alaska.Patriarch/FamilyReunion#

Cough, Hack Wheeze!

Don't Let the Smoke get in your...

It's been smokey here in Southcentral Alaska the last week or so. A stationary high pressure system is trapping all the smoke from 61 active forest fires. The biggest fire is 79,000 acres near Nenana, north towards Fairbanks. This afternoon the visability dropped as the smoke got thicker. This morning I could make out the hazy outlines of the eastern edge of the city from my pearch on the 14th floor near the western edge of Anchorage. I was watching pilots doing touch and goes at Merrill Field at lunch time. Now I can see about a mile into the smoke. Merrill field is not visible and about an hour ago hour ventilation system stopped being able to filter the smoke. It smells like a campfire in my office.

UPDATE:

In addition to smoke being transported into the Anchorage Bowl and Prince William Sound from fires in the Copper River Basin, the National Weather Service issued the following Information Statement early this afternoon;


PUBLIC INFORMATION STATEMENT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE ANCHORAGE AK
138 PM AKDT WED JUL 8 2009

...WIDESPREAD HAZE AND SMOKE ARE OCCURRING ACROSS SOUTH CENTRAL ALASKA TODAY...
A FIRE ON THE KENAI PENINSULA HAS INCREASED IN INTENSITY OVERNIGHT AND PERSISTENT
SOUTHERLY WINDS HAVE TRANSPORTED THE SMOKE NORTH. SOUTHERLY WINDS AT AND ABOVE
THE SURFACE WILL CONTINUE TO MOVE SMOKE NORTHWARD THROUGHOUT THE DAY. RESTRICTED
VISIBILITIES AS A RESULT OF THE SMOKE AND HAZE ARE EXPECTED TO FLUCTUATE OVER THE
NEXT SEVERAL DAYS.

Insurance

More or less as I expected.

The adjuster from the nice middle-school teacher's insurance company came up with the same approximate value for my car as I did, $2100. So he totaled it and wrote me a check for that amount minus $120 salvage fee. I keep the old Subaru and it's up to me to get it fixed with the $2000. Fortunately, my son-in-law, the body man, says he can and will do it for the cost of parts, about half the $2000.

Chitina Dipnetting

The Trail From Hell

On June 26, my middle sister's birthday, (happy birthday,) my brother, my nephews and I drove to the Copper River at Chitina. The old road downstream from Chitina to the salmon dipnetting area follows an old railroad bed perched precariously on the edge of cliff. Above the road bed rises a mountain of loose shale covered with timber and top soil. Landslides and mudslides during wet wheather are common. Below the road bed is a 50 to 250 foot steep drop off into the Copper River. The lower part varies from shale slide areas, shale slide areas covered with loose soil and trees to vertical cliffs of shale. The first 10 miles of road to OBrian Creek has been maintained and actually improved slightly in the last few years. There is no problem driving a 4X4 pickup to that point. However after multiple large mud slides a few years ago the road past OBrian creek is officially closed. Climbing on our Honda 4-wheelers we continued past the large orange signs that warned you of possible death and trekked the 8 miles back to Haley creek. That meant traversing several slide areas on sketchy 4-wheeler trails weaving between Volkswagon sized rocks that are just waiting for the next rain to destabilize the mud enough so they can continue thier slide into the Copper River below. We caught 6 fish in 10 hours. (When I say "we" I'm including all 4 of us although actually the nephews caught the fish.)

It was a fun trip anyway.

First 2009 Salmon Fishing Trip

The Russian River.

Brother Glen and I played hooky from work on Thursday and drove to the Russian River to join the stampede for our part of the record setting Red Salmon run. It being Thursday morning when we arrived the fishermen lining the bank were 10 to 15 feet apart. For Russian River combat fishing that not too crowded. The wait in line to get into the parking lot at the ferry was only 40 minutes. Considering that the Alaska Fish and Feathers Department had doubled the daily bag limit to 6 fish, we actually stayed and joined our fellow fisher folk. This is unusual because as a general rule we hate combat fishing. We fished the Russian in our youth when the population of Southcentral Alaska was a quarter of what it is today. On more than one occasion in the last decade and as recently as 2 years ago we have made the drive, taken a look at the crowds and driven home without wetting a line. After our ride across the river on the ferry we found room and began trashing the water. All around us people were constantly hooking fish. Maybe 1 in 12 of the hook ups were legal, that is hooked in the mouth not snagged in the tail, back, or belly and could be harvested instead of being released. We each landed a legal fish in the first hour. For the next 5 hours or so the ferry brought another 25 people to join us about every 10 minutes. As the new people arrived the space between fishermen slowly shrank from 12 feet to 3. I gave up when the space between people got to 6 feet. I had at least 10 tangles with someone else's line. People were starting to get hooked by flying hooks and whacked with flying sinkers. I spent the rest of the afternoon watching. My brother lasted several hours longer than I but landed no more legally hooked fish. In the early afternoon an adult Brown Bear came out of the woods across the river and walked to the rivers edge creating an otherwise empty river bank as people pulled back giving him all the room he wanted. He seem unconcerned by the hundreds of people sharing the river bank with him. After a few moment he trotted back into the woods. At which time I remembered I had packed my camera in the back pack.

P.S. I forgot to take pictures not only of the Brown Bear but of combat fishing itself . If you've never seen it check out these links for pictures...

http://www.wildnatureimages.com/Combat_Fishing_Photos.htm

http://www.fs.fed.us/r10/ro/sd_notes/winter_07/russian_rv/bears_russian.shtml

http://www.sf.adfg.state.ak.us/Management/areas.cfm/FA/kenai.russian