Ride To Bird Creek

Sometimes it's easy to get stuck in town, especially when you try to use the bike instead of the car. But this evening we decided to take a 'short trip to Alaska,' so we drove out of Anchorage down to Bird Creek. And here is where the rain had been hiding. But soon there was a faint rainbow over the mudflats.







It had been threatening to rain all day, but the sun managed to find the holes in the clouds most of the time. But down here it let loose. There's a hint of a rainbow in this picture of Turnagain Arm.




Here's a picture of the mudflats.




To make more sense out of the previous picture, here it is with the mountains to give it some context.



Mudflats at the mouth of birdcreek, with a run of salmon coming in.









There's a street off the Seward Highway at Bird Creek with this street sign. Problem is, the jay

is named after the German naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller who discovered them in 1741 (Evans 1986).(wikipedia
(from Wikipedia)

On the one hand you could say just leave it. But it has nothing to do with the stars, it's about Georg Wilhelm Steller. If you leave it, people will see it and think it should be spelled this way.







It smelled pretty bad here as there was a fair amount of rotting salmon waiting for the gulls to clean them up.







Now we're on the boardwalk at Potter Marsh.

We saw the swans as we drove along the Marsh. The belted kingfisher (sorry, but real birders will recognize it from this shot) was there briefly. The bald eagle's been there all summer at a next. I took this through someone's spotting scope.

It really wasn't this dark, but my choice was to make the foreground dark or wipe out the sky.