Sunday Bike Ride

Sunday after dropping off our houseguests at the train, DZ and I rode Campbell Creek trail out to the end near Dimond and Victor, then found our way to Kincaid and rode the Coastal Trail to Westchester Lagoon and back home via Chester Creek. I'm hoping to put together a guide to how to get from one trail to the other where there are still gaps. Here we checked where this long bridge at Taku Lake went (to Foxridge/76th and C.)





Here's a peaceful little spot right off of Minnesota and Dimond. You can see Minnesota in the background. One of the things I love about Anchorage's bike trails is that right in the middle of the city and busy intersections, you are in a quiet oasis lined with trees as though you were way out in the wilderness.


After the Campbell Creek trail ends around Dimond and Victor, we wandered through neighborhoods until we got to Jewel Lake Road and Strawberry. It's been interesting to see when DZ pulls out his camera - generally to get pictures of cars like this one. It turns out I got part of it accidentally while documenting the street. His picture when the car turned left didn't come out.





Finally we are getting back to dedicated bike trail. (When you double click to enlarge these, the pictures are much sharper.)


What should you do when you see people this close to moose and starting to get even closer? Last summer I tried to tell my visiting British friend that he was too close (and he was twice as far away as these people) when the moose charged at him and the others next to him. They ran and the moose stopped. When these folks began to walk toward the moose from where they are in the picture, I shouted to stay back, this was a wild animal with a baby. They did back up but when they finally walked on they muttered something to me. One might say it was their choice and the natural consequences would be more effective than anything I might say. But I remember the man who got killed by a moose at UAA after people had harassed it all day. These people might not have been hurt, but there would have been an irritated moose on the trail with lots of Sunday bike and pedestrian traffic going by. Someone else might have been the victim of their foolishness. On the other hand, we don't hear many stories about people getting hurt by moose so maybe I was out of place to interfere. I have to admit this moose looked extremely mellow.





Not far later we saw this mother with two calves. (#2 is still in the bushes here.)





DZ hadn't eaten much and was extremely happy to be able to get a hotdog from this vendor at the parking lot with the view of downtown near Earthquake Park.

I'd heard about some new outlet for fish at Westchester Lagoon, but hadn't seen it.

This is from a Federal Site where the links don't work right on my Macbook using Firefox, but I tried what I did at the ABC site to find this:

Chester Creek is one of several small salmon-producing streams in the Anchorage area. Chester Creek and its outfall (Westchester Lagoon) are heavily urbanized. Westchester Lagoon is maintained with an obsolete water control structure that is a barrier to fish passage. A new water control structure is under design and scheduled for construction. Anchorage Fish and Wildlife Field Office staff coordinated assessment of coho salmon passage into Westchester Lagoon (Chester Creek, Anchorage) with Alaska Pacific University. College students installed and operated video equipment to count coho salmon escapement through the old outlet structure for Westchester Lagoon. A new outlet structure to provide better fish passage is under construction and passage through the old structure will serve as baseline for evaluation of the new structure.

DZ's bottom was getting sore, so we skipped the loop around Goose Lake and came home through the neighborhoods near Lake Otis.

Biking Good and Bads

First the bad. Dimond Blvd. between Old Seward and King Street. The shared trail along the street was thick with dust, sand, gravel and whatever else they used on the snow this winter. This makes riding - particularly if you have to make a sharp swerve or sudden stop - hazardous.





But there was an exception on this strip - all along where the Red Robin was. Someone from the Red Robin came out as I was taking the picture so I thanked him and confirmed that they did clean the sidewalk/trail. He said yes they did. Then added that he rides a bike. A little reminder that we see what we know and that people who bike see the parts of the world differently than people who don't. Again, thanks Red Robin for cleaning the path.


And now the good. I rode over to the Alaska Mac Store near the Dimond Mall (it moved from Old Seward and Tudor) for a Garage Band class via Lake Otis because I was cutting the time a little close. It took about 25 minutes from right near UAA. The trail along Lake Otis was nicely cleared of grit and sand, though on Lore Street and other streets much of the sand/gravel has just been pushed into what ought to be the bike lane. Also, to be clear, there are four Apple stores I know of in Anchorage. There's also the Mac Haus across the street from REI on Northern Lights, the Tech Zone upstairs at the UAA bookstore (their website is particularly lame), and the Apple Shop at Best Buy (their website is marginally better than UAA's, but it's not local) on Dimond.

After the class, I took the Campbell Creek trail home. I got on the trail from King Street at Taku Lake.




The feasibility of biking places is really in people's heads. If you're like most people, you just assume it's not possible. If you have two kids and a dog and need to stop at Costco it probably isn't, but if you're by yourself and need to go five miles or less each way and don't need to carry more than you can fit in a backpack (or bike basket) it is feasible. OK, if you haven't ridden a bike in ten years, maybe you should take a weekend leisurely ride to get your body accustomed first. But in Chiang Mai, we didn't have a car and it was bike or walk for most things. We even got good riding in Chiang Mai traffic. There are almost no bike paths and the sidewalks are hard enough to walk on let alone ride on. And back in Anchorage we've moved into assuming we're going by bike unless we have a good reason why that won't work.

In Anchorage, if your trip is in the right direction, you can do part of your ride in the woods. Mentally, riding along Campbell Creek, listening to the birds and the water, is much better than driving on any street in town. It's like a hidden wonderland, no cars allowed.

And for these short distances - even on the way back with lots of stopping to take pictures it was only about 35 minutes - it's not that much slower than driving. And definitely faster than waiting for the bus.

1 is near the Red Robin on Dimond.
2 is where I got on the trail at Taku Lake
3 is the Seward Highway. Here you get on a dirt trail and have to walk - even carry - the bike to get under the four bridges (a frontage road on each side and one bridge for north and one for southbound traffic) (This is scheduled for a real trail, but I don't know when.)
4 is Lake Otis where I left the trail and headed home. (The map is a creek map, not a bike trail map. 3-4 you don't go along the creek, but at 4 you get back to the creek.)

It then goes on a loops around over Tutor at Bragaw and connects to the Chester Creek trail and downtown. I'm hoping to post a guide for how to find the trail at the missing parts to do the whole loop including the Coastal Trail.

Ski Pics Fun With Photoshop

I went cross country skiing today after lunch. What a treat to go off into the woods and just glide along through the exquisite snowy wonderland. There were a few other skiers out, like these two with their dog. I even saw a guy on the smaller trail on his mountain bike. The trail was firm enough that he was just leaving a slight track, so that's ok.

But most of the time it was just me and trees and the snow and here, the water.



And everyone looked so healthy with bright rosy cheeks. At first my finger tips got cold, but eventually my hands were nice and warm.



And toward the end, I got onto the bridge near the parking lot and looked down at the mostly frozen Campbell Creek.



The bridge does seem like a bit of overkill just to allow skiers, hikers, and bikers to cross the creek.


This also seems like a good opportunity to show what kinds of manipulation someone can do with Photoshop. The Computer Art and Design class (Art 257) I took at UAA this past semester had us using Photoshop a lot. One form of manipulation is changing the content of the picture - cutting out people you don't want in, adding others in, cleaning up the junk, etc. Obama's First Day in the Oval Office that I posted early is an example of extreme doctoring, though I left the style of most of the added pictures as they were so it would be clear that different people from different times were added into one picture. Though I did colorize Frederick Douglass and Jackie Robinson, and played with the color of some of the others. Journalistically, this is - or was - a big no-no.


Original undoctored picture

But what about the kind of manipulation I do below? I'm just using the built in filters in Photoshop and applying them to the same image. Well, it isn't quite that simple because for most of the filters you can move levers that make the effects more or less distinct. Is it ethical to doctor pictures this way? Make the sky more blue? The contrast better? I suspect that war is already lost. I even do it here - but those tend to be more pictures that don't have a political impact rather than 'news' pictures, and the differences is usually so minor it doesn't seem worth it to add a disclosure. But everything is political in that it affects how we see reality and thus how we act on what we see. So if my pictures prettify my subjects that affects how viewers perceive those subjects. And some of these obviously are not natural photos. So, take a look. Here's the original big, and then the variations of the same picture using different Photoshop filters.










Watercolor filter
















Posteredges filter

















Plasticwrap filter















Cutout filter









Playing with the Hue, Saturation, and Light




























Solarize filter

Bike Trail Confusion

As I was near the end of my third mile today, near Lake Otis and Chester Creek, probably the corridor used by the bear hit on Gambell yesterday morning, (Wow, as I searched for the link to that article, I found out that everybody is carrying that story. It was an AP story even in the Anchorage Daily News), I saw a couple with bikes, stopped and looking at a map.

Well, they wanted to do the Loop - Chester Creek to Campbell Creek to Coastal Trail back to downtown. It's a great ride, but there are these gaping holes in it as well as unmarked turns. The visitor trying to patch together these three great trails really faces a challenge. They even said they tried it from the other way, but eventually gave up.

And I feel bad. I tried to explain to them how to





1) make sure they turned right so they could cross the Northern Lights bridge,









2) then turn the right way to get around Goose Lake, (the sign is all backward)













3) past the construction at UAA




and find the 4) connection after the Tudor Bridge, then 5) find the Campbell trail from there, and 6) refind it after it stops at Lake Otis, then












7) get under the Seward Highway (which I have posted here),










then 8) turn the right way on the dirt trail to get to Arctic Road Runner where they'd be home free.



Except, after they left, I realized that, of course, they weren't home free, because that trail doesn't have an obvious connection to the Coastal Trail and they would be lost at the same break they were lost at coming the other way.

Maybe someone will tell them how to get to Kincaid from there. They have till 9 tonight to catch their plane. Sorry, I left out the end. But by Arctic Road Runner I already figured they'd have to be pretty smart and pretty lucky just to get there.

We need:

1. A bike trail map that gets people through the gaps
2. Signs on the trail to help people do the Loop
3. To have the gaps filled in

It's a great ride, but finding it is a much bigger challenge than riding it.


I'll try to post some instructions with pictures when we get back from our trip.

Bears, Moose, People Part 2- The Pieces

[All the wild bear pictures and the runner in the woods picture were taken by my friend Doug while he was visiting this summer.]


In the Bears, Moose, People Part 1, I discussed the narratives people have in their heads about urban wildlife. In Part 2 I want to discuss the pieces, basically those things that can change or be changed to decrease the likelihood of bad encounters between people and bears.

I see three basic factors:

1. People
2. Bears
3. Land
   

1. People

People can change their behaviors:

• Stop attracting bears into urban areas
• no bird feeders in the buffer zone - residential area on the edge of parkland
• bear proof garbage cans in the buffer zone (shared country)
  
• no raising animals - chickens, goats, rabbits - in the buffer zone
• Limited use of park areas where bears are present
• stop activity that is most likely to provoke confrontations with bears, such as
• activity that increases likelihood of sudden encounters - ie.
  
• moving quickly through forested areas such as biking, running
  
• quiet movement through forested areas
• going into areas of bear habitat - spawning salmon runs
  

2. Bears
We can't change the general behavior of bears.

However,

• we can understand bear behavior and then using that understanding, change our own behavior in ways that will decrease specific bear behaviors. This works for bear behaviors that are affected by human behaviors, like coming into residential neighborhoods because of garbage, dog food, and bird seed.
• protecting particular areas, if deemed necessary, with bear proof barriers. For the most part this is impractical because of the large amount of land in question. This is, however, the logic behind bear proof garbage cans. If there are specific areas where people congregate, such as the Campbell Science Center, where bears could become a problem, there could be raised decks, boardwalks, etc. that would better separate humans and bears.
  
• remove bears that become problems - relocation or, if necessary, killing problem bears.

3. Land
In abstract terms, we can identify three land areas:

• Bear country - this is the natural area of bears, people enter this area occasionally at their own risk
  
• Shared country (border zone) - this is area, such as parks on the edge of urban areas, where both people and bears go regularly
  
• People country - this is urban area, particularly residential, that is primarily the natural area of people, where bears only occasionally enter

The problem here is that different people would put the boundaries at different places on the map. For some, bear country would be at least 50 miles from any road, and shared country would be 25 or more miles from any road. People country would extend as far as anyone could reasonably hike or bike from a trailhead from a road. Others would consider shared country parks on the urban edge.



How people react to the options listed above will depend on the narratives they have about people, bears, and the relationship between people and bears. Let's look at this. (And as I write this, I realize I'm modifying a bit the narratives I outlined in Part 1, or even offering new narratives. Please indulge me on this.)

Narratives about Bears range from:

• Treadwell narratives - bears are really sweet and gentle and if you understand them we can all live in harmony.

to

• Bears are vicious animals and the wild bears should not be anywhere near people

I think the truth probably lies somewhere in between. Bears are not ruthless, vicious creatures, but the are big, powerful, have sharp teeth and claws and in some circumstances can be dangerous to human beings. Those basic dangerous situations have been identified by biologists as:

• protecting their young
• protecting their food
• when startled or otherwise provoked or threatened

Biologists also tell us that bears have different ursanalities ("personalities" doesn't seem quite the right word) and, like some people, some bears don't follow the general rules of how bears behave.

All the recent bear encounters appear to fit these categories. Bears coming into urban areas seem to be looking for food that people have left out, or in the form of moose or fish. These bears have not attacked people, and those who have not shown fear of humans, have been shot by state biologists or police.

Narratives about People

These are more difficult. But let me give it a shot:

• Freedom extremists - These people seem to still be in that childhood stage where they don't think about how their actions affect others. They want to do what they want to do and others be damned. If I want to go riding in the park, well, I should be able to do that without fear of bears. Therefore, get the bears out.
  
• Extreme anti-risk Parents - Anything that might cause the slightest risk to their children should be banned or removed. (What people consider to be a risk is subjective.)
  
• Dare-devils - They aren't so interested in getting rid of the bears, but want to be able to take whatever risks they want to take. "If I want to take that risk, what's it to you? I'm not asking you to do it." They may not realize that their behavior may jeopardize the bear by provoking an attack that will cause public reaction to remove or kill the bear. Or that their feeding a bear will cause that bear to approach other people for food.
  
• The ignorant - They just aren't aware, don't read the rules, act surprised and even indignant if something bad happens. "How was I supposed to know?"
• Basic Rule Followers - these people follow the rules, particularly the ones that make sense to them. They'll buy bear proof garbage cans and read and follow the bear-safety pamphlets.
• Coexistence activists - They moved to Anchorage because of the natural wilderness and are active in protecting the wilderness and animals and promoting safe interaction.
• Bears are our friends utopians - They embrace the coexistence ideal and gloss over the fact that bears can kill. "Why can't well all just live as one happy family?"
• Bear Tyrants - They insist that the loss of any animal life is a crime and that anyone hurt by a bear was at fault.

OK, I'm offering a few extreme examples here and I'm sure I've left out a lot of possible ways people think about this topic, but you get the idea. We don't agree. And we aren't consistent. There may be times when we fit one narrative and other times when we don't.

Whatever rules or guidelines or laws we have about what people should or should not do, there will be people who don't follow the rules. There are also people who will follow the rules, yet still find themselves in dicey situations. Life contains risk. Dogs cause more human deaths in Alaska than do bears. Finding exact stats on this is not easy, but so far this year I'm aware of two children killed by dogs (in Fort Yukon and in Anchorage). This 1981 report that says:

Between 1955 and 1980, 14 human deaths from dog attacks were documented in the State of Alaska. In addition, discussions with private physicians, private veterinarians, public health nurses, and sanitarians strongly suggest that at least twice this number of human deaths from dog bites occurred during this 25-year period of time. Of the 14 documented cases, all occurred in children less than 10 years of age.

This 2008 report says

Alaska Report at a Glance:

• Deaths (1991-2002): 9
• Median Age: 54 months
• Age Range: 9 to 64 months
• Circumstances: Three cases of free-roaming dogs, three of chained dogs, one victim wandered into dog lot, one attacked indoors by pet, one unknown

Wikipedia's list of bear deaths in the United States lists 7 human deaths from bears in Alaska in the 1991 - 2002 period. Most of these deaths were in what I have called bear country, though the two hikers at McHugh Creek, within the Municipality limits, were in what could be called shared country. Another death at a cabin near Glenallen might also be called shared country.

I'll try to get up Part III - Conclusions up before too long.

[If anyone can tell me how to fix the gaps around those picture, please do. I know that there is blank picture space blocking the wrap, but that's never happened before with pictures from iphoto.]

Long Life Noodles

Doug biked along for my run this morning and we found a moose with two calves on the Campbell Creek bike trail between the Alaskan Native Medical Center and Lake Otis. We also found some spawning salmon in the creek. We did a little part of the garden tour that had six houses on one street on the hillside then made it to X & WY's for dinner. There were several other folks with China experience and as good Chinese food as you're going get in Anchorage.










And long life noodles for Alex and my belated birthdays. Here's Alex's dad making the noodles. He prepared most of the food. He learned to cook during during the Cultural Revolution when he was sent to Inner Mongolia and was assigned to cook.


Tomorrow morning we head out for Denali. Back on Thursday night, so I expect the blog to be pretty quiet. We had a little sunshine today and are hoping to see a certain mountain tomorrow as we drive north.

Campbell Creek Bike Trail Under Seward Highway

The Anchorage Daily News has an editorial today about completing the Campbell-Chester Creek Trail loop around UAA. That part just needs better signage for people who don't know it. The real key is completing the large loop of the Campbell Creek to Coastal Trail to Chester Creek. And a major problem is Seward Highway and Campbell Creek.

Yesterday I had to go to CompUSA on Dimond from the University. Should I drive or bike? It was a beautiful day, but the bike trail doesn't quite go the way I wanted to go. The big gap in the bike trail is under Seward Highway. The trail to the highway is great and after, but there's this gap. Lanie Fleischer - who was one (and she emphasizes that there were many others) of the early bike trail advocates and whose name is on the trail at Goose Lake - told me once long ago that she talked to the engineers building the Seward Highway. She wanted them to make sure it would be easy to one day build a bike trail under the highway along Campbell Creek. She said they sneered and purposely built it low. Lanie has no reason to make up such a story.

In any case, yesterday I decided to bike it. Here's the obstacle.

I rode south on Lake Otis to 47th, (#1 on the map) I think, where I picked up the bike trail headed west through the Waldron area, past the soccer fields and the small lake. It winds through a small park to Campbell Creek and then ends.
There is a dirt path through the woods, but I took the quiet neighborhood street to the Seward Highway. (#2) The pictures below are getting under the Seward Highway - the box on the map by #2.











This is where the little dirt path begins to go down and under the first of the four bridges (one each for north and south of Seward Highway, and a frontage road bridge on each side).















Down under the bridges.









While traffic whizzes by above, down under the bridges it's a totally different world.





And after the last bridge, now on the west side of the Seward Highway, you take another small dirt path and the new bike trail begins again with this wooden bridge.
.






















Note on this post. The reason I went to Dimond was to buy iLife08 which includes iMovie08 - a totally new way of putting together movies from iMovie06. I did this movie in the new software just by going to help when I had a problem. It is incredibly easy and intuitive. And I saw the other day that there is a new upload video button on blogger, so I wanted to try that out too. It would mean not having to post first on Viddler. But it is taking forever to upload. Let's see what it looks like when it's done.
Well, there's the answer. [When I'm making the post, there's a video screen saying "Uploading Video" but I also got a message saying it can't upload it.] It appears that I can't upload it in Viddler, it's too long for YouTube and it didn't upload here. A quick Google shows that a lot of people are having trouble with iMovie. So I'll just post this for now and see what I can do. [And it doesn't come up. I'm guessing it's too big. But the file format doesn't work for Viddler and it's clearly too big for YouTube.]