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Hamming It Up

HammingItUp

A trip to Wrangell-St. Elias usually serves up Dall Sheep and bears and birds at the very least.  Occasionally we will see a moose and some swans and catch some fish too.  Well this trip yielded exactly one crazy squirrel.  This guy was all over the campsite and extremely busy gathering stuff for the winter and generally terrorizing our dog.  (Just one of our dogs Rojo.  Hairy is waaaaay to laid back to care about a squirrel unless it jumped in his mouth.)  He also just could not resist coming in and checking out the goods to see if we had anything on his winter stash list.  So we shot him.

(with the camera of course.)

Reed Lakes Trail

ReedlakesTrail

I headed up the Reed Lakes Trail for some scouting and a good training hike and got into some great scenery.  The sun was just popping up behind these peaks in the Talkeetna’s and the slow, low clouds were rolling off the hill sides.  Great morning hike to the lower lake and then the usual slide out.  If you have hiked in Alaska you know what I mean, if not, well let’s just say there is nothing quite like steep, muddy, slickery Alaskan hillsides.  Virtually impossible for me to keep the shiny side up but worth it every time nonetheless.

Too Much Skookum

TooMuchSkookum

This is what it looks like when you have had too much Skookum.  We went up and hiked the Skookum Volcano Trail in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.  The trail starts out from Nabesna Road and goes about 2.5 miles up a creek bed to the pass.  I hiked this trail last year scouting for some photos and I knew there were Dall sheep up there.  Some recon the evening before showed several sheep visible so we decided to head up and the plan was to camp out and photograph landscapes and Dall Sheep.  Well, that didn’t work out so good.  We decided to take our dogs with us (as usual) and our oldest, Hairy, had a really hard time.  This years flooding really brought out the boulders and when it was wet it was slicker than anything I have ever been on.  After about 2 hours lifting Hairy over boulders he finally found a sand patch and laid down.  He had had enough.  It was a beautiful day so we chilled and ate lunch and let Hairy take a nap.  Then it was down the trail to do it all over again.  He wasn’t too happy about that either and parked himself a couple of times in some soft cool sand.  We managed to keep him moving and finally made it out, he finally got what he wanted too….

Silvers & Reds

Red2a

Cottonwood Creek runs by my house here in Alaska and it has all three Salmon runs on it.  Well at this time of year the Red Salmon and the Silver Salmon are moving upstream onto their spawning grounds.  On their trip up from the Cook Inlet, after dodging the fishing nets, and after dodging the sport anglers, and after dodging the eagles and bears, they have to run this little stretch of water.  It’s pretty shallow here so the bigger ones are popping up and out and over things.

Red1a

This Red is scooting his way around this rock and then into another pool.  From there it is another little step to another pool….and over and over again we go.  They do a lot of work to get where they are going.  Here’s to hoping this guy makes it all the way and carries on his good name.

Caribou Are In

Caribou_1a

The Caribou are sporting semi- big ol velvety antlers and are moving across the arctic tundra to wherever it is they go.  They go all over so it is hard to say. They tend to move at a pretty quick pace too, the bugs keep them jumping and hopping and twitching almost constantly.  Caribou will even go out on whatever sea ice they can get to in an attempt to get away from the pesky bugs that chase them.  I won’t go into it here but they get chased by some nasty ones.  This particular guy looks like he is mostly done with the molt, his coat is nice and evened out.  The summer doesn’t last too long up here so it will be growing out here in short order.  Note that the females have antlers too but they are much smaller in overall size and diameter.  The antlers on this fella actually have a ways to go before being fully grown out, I would guess this is about 75%.

The Caribou are sporting semi- big ol velvety antlers and are moving across the arctic tundra to where it is they go. They go all over so it is hard to say. They tend to move at a pretty quick pace too, the bugs keep them jumping and hopping and twitching almost constantly. They will go out on whatever sea ice they can get to in an attempt to get away from them. This one looks like he is mostly done with the molt. The summer doesn’t last too long so it will be growing out here in short order. The females have antlers too but they are much smaller in overall size and diameter. The antlers on this fella actually have a ways to go before being fully grown out, I would guess this is about 75%.



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