Denali Day At Denali

 There was sun and blue sky mostly this morning and when we got to the first point on the park road with a view of Denali, there it was.  There were a few clouds near the top, but on closer look they were behind the mountain.

But even before we got to that point, we saw a porcupine.  I remember seeing one live porcupine in the wild in Alaska a long time ago, so this was a big deal. 

And then that first glimpse of Denali.  It's in the middle and looks like a cloud in the first picture.

But then, that's what the telephoto lens is for.  

I've got about 15 or 20 pictures of Denali today. I'll limit myself to these three.  It just dominates the view and may explain why we didn't see too many animals today.  We also didn't drive in that far because we knew we also had to go home today.  So we didn't go past the point where you could see the mountain.  

At one view point, I just climbed up the tundra above the road and kept looking back down at the expanding landscape and the mountain.  

Denali is still very much in early spring.  There are few (I don't remember seeing any) new green leaves.  And driving home, past the Denali viewpoint at mile 135, the trees seemed to go from just budding to full on new green.  But on my tundra hike I did see a few of these.  Don't know what they are.  

We came upon this ptarmigan while we had some classical Indian music on.  It seemed to pay close attention to the sitar and flute.  

This is a white crowned sparrow we encountered as we did the Savage River trail again, this time with sun shining on us.  

We saw a moose and a caribou outside the park on the way home.  A man was taking a picture next to his car along the highway.  I thought of the mountains to the east.  When suddenly a caribou dashes into the road in front of me and doesn't a 180 when he sees my car rushing toward it.  I guess that kind of quick change of direction is good wolf dodging genes.  Was the man waiting to take a picture of a caribou being hit by a car?  

This sad picture was near the road to Willow.  Remnants of a fire now that many years ago.  

The Riley Creek campgrounds now distinguishes between the under 30 foot and over 30 foot spaces.  Our VW camper doesn't take up much room, but for the most part the bigger spaces have more privacy.  So the space we normally have had we couldn't use.  We'd reserved online as in the past, but this year there was no place to do it live.  The Mercantile - the shop at Riley where you normally got your receipt - was closed.  And they had cards on all the A sites (>30 feet> telling you not to park there.  

Also, with the gas tax Anchorage added last year, gas is cheaper in Wasilla.  And amazingly, the cheapest was at Trapper Creek - $3.04 for unleaded.  

Drive To Denali

 This is going to be quick.  I'm outside the visitor center to get WIFI and the mosquitoes are out.

We see good views of Denali a ways past Wasilla, but clouds were moving in.  When we got to the big view point at Mile 135 it was cloudy.  Was the white cloud on top the peak?  

It was the peak and as we watched, the clouds cleared up a bit and we saw more of the peak.

I just couldn't do this icy lake justice.  It's much more beautiful than the picture.

Near Summit Lake, we saw our first caribou.  We also saw a couple of moose, but I was driving and couldn't get a picture.

It was sunny all the way up, though it started raining slightly here.  The sun is out, but so are the mosquitoes.  

AIFF2020: Dinner In America: A Movie I Shouldn't Have Liked, But I Did

 I'm falling way behind here.  I'm pretty much picking pictures based on the photo, title, and description.  Here are some I think are worth watching.

Narrative Features

I really didn't expect to like Dinner in America   It starts off in an institutional dining room.  Someone throws up on his tray of food.  I almost stopped it right there.  But I didn't and we get to follow an out of control drug dealer (no, that's just one of his personas) have family dinner in three different homes, do a lot of crazy shit (sorry, that's the best description), and win over both of us.  This is a good movie.  Filmed in Michigan.  

Small Town Wisconsin was filmed in Wisconsin.  We even get a tour of Milwaukee.  Another main character who does lots of things that don't endear him to the others characters or the audience.  A little past midpoint we discussed abandoning the film.  We didn't.  It would have been a mistake.  

Foster Boy - This is more Hollywood than film festival.  It has two well known (there may have been others) actors - Matthew Modine and Louis Gossett Jr. - and  Shaquille O’Neal is the executive producer.  This is a court room drama.  A rich, conservative corporate attorney is assigned, against his will, a pro bono case of a 19 prisoner who is suing the foster care corporation that placed him in about a dozen homes.  A compelling film with appealing heroes and appropriately nasty villains.  

Of the three, I'd say Foster Boy had a number of loose ends - where I couldn't quite believe a) the lead attorney didn't get suspicious faster about his son's cancelled trip or b) all the dirty tricks that happened over Thanksgiving weekend.  I attribute b) to squeezing events that happened over a longer period of time into a couple days to fit the condensed time line of the movie.  The film said it was a fictionalized account of a true story.

Shorts  I think are worth watching:

Masel Tov Cocktail - I've already written about this, but I'm including it again just in case you missed my earlier mention.  At this point, this is my favorite film of the festival.  This was a tricky project and it all fit together wonderfully.  It couldn't have been told as well in any other format than film.  

 Cake Day - A good story told economically and movingly.  

Woman Under the Tree  - Maybe a bit longer than necessary, but it's a well told tale of a homeless woman.  

The Marker - Like Cake Day, a good story told well.  

Happy (Short) Films -  I've added this category because this festival is heavy with issue films.  Here are two shorts, particularly Pathfinder, that present the beauty and wonder of the natural world.  

 Pathfinder - A small group of adventurers put up a slack line high up among snow peaks in Norway with Northern Lights in the background.  Pure joy.

Sky Aelans - Also up in the mountains, the people of the Solomon Islands are protecting the mountain environment.  The camera shares some of the wonders up there worth their care.  

I still have lots of movies to see.  There appears to be a lot worth watching.  More later.  

Back Home To Snow And Moose

We left from the D Concourse at SEATAC which has my favorite art piece there - Michael Fajans' High Wire.  I posted about it back in 2008.  (Back then I wrote that it was in Terminal B, but it was definitely in D yesterday.  Maybe the old post was wrong.)

After a couple of gate changes, trying to get in as much of the impeachment hearings as I could, we were in the air above the clouds over Alaska.  It was late afternoon - Anchorage's official sunset yesterday was 3:48pm, but if it's not too cloudy, we have long twilights - and the orange glow was on the western horizon, while out my east facing window there were snow mountains.

And around 4:20pm it was still light enough to capture these exquisite winter scenes with only a slight blur from the long exposure time.  

And as we circled over Cook Inlet to land in Anchorage, the sunset was still painted on the western sky.  

I went out to get our passes for the Anchorage International Film Festival which begins tomorrow night and to pick up some groceries and just on 36th there was a moose crossing the road in the dark.

One of those amazing moments when out of the darkness you realize there's a magnificent

moose and there's no time to react.  Fortunately it was still in the oncoming lane as I passed.  No time to even take a picture, even if I hadn't left my phone at home.  What a great welcome home.




At my dentist this morning this moose was on the wall.  Not quite the same.  But I was sitting still and so was the moose.



















And I'm pleased to say that my studded tires worked like a charm as I rode over to the dentist and back.  I'm getting a little more confident that they aren't going to betray me.  Hoping my trust in them proves warranted.  I won't be reckless, but a little less cautious.









So, let's just leave this post as it is - on light subjects or art, travel, mountains, moose, AIFF2019, and biking in the snow.

TSA Starts Trip Poorly

We both got flagged by the security machine at the Anchorage airport.  I got a very intimate patting down.  "I have nothing in my pockets"  "You're wearing Levis.  The keep you warm and the machine detects heat."  J got the same treatment.  But she got a second one as well.  Here's my wife the terrorist.

Really, how many 70+ year old American women terrorists have there been in the US?  Ones who have a record of recently flying fairly frequently without incident and have round trip tickets, etc. 

There are at least two ways of detecting terrorists:  One is to examine the person - find out if there is anything in their background or behavior that suggests a problem that needs more attention.  That's not what all these airport detectors do.  They examine based on the machine.  They told me when I pointed out that my wife was a very unlikely suspect that "if the alarm goes off, we have to exam."   

This really does feel a lot like theater.  Somewhere there has to be a happy medium between ethnic profiling and terrorist profiling.  How much time and money does TSA spend on people who have .00001 chance of being a terrorist?   I'm sure they have detected plenty of guns with the machines, thrown away lots of pricy water bottles, and someone has sold a lot of scanning machines.  

(I checked.  There seem to be a fair number of companies making money of this theater. ) 

But once we were in the air, life looked better.

The fresh snow on the Chugach looked magical.  

And the Olympic Range was poking out of the clouds as we neared Seattle.  So was Ranier.

If you look closely, there's an airplane to the right of the mountain against the clouds.  

And walking my granddaughter to school we passed this tree with all its leaves in an almost perfect circle below it.  

The school is really wonderful.  It's part of the public school system, but like Stellar and Polaris in Anchorage, it requires a lot of parental volunteer work.  There's grades 1-6 in two large connected and non-institutional classrooms.  Here's a part.  

Every child should have access to a place like this.  I stayed about 15 minutes.  All the kids had stuff to do and were working quietly.  My granddaughter was writing in her journal.  Then they had a small meeting where they talked about empathy.  And about lice - it's that season.  

Later, after school, we went for a walk through the woods while she was having a music lesson.

There's lots of other things to write about, but I've been busy.  

Been Busy - New Kitchen Floor, Not Yet Winter, Fog

It's November 11, 2019.  We haven't had any snow in town.   Friday when I went to my OLÉ Homeless class, it was sunny and comfy and the snow was disappearing on the mountains.

And this yarrow flower is hanging in there outside in the yard.

A few times things have gotten frosty,

like Saturday when I rode over to UAA for the Citizens Climate Lobby meeting.







It was also foggy that day.

Our delayed winter has me not wanting to stop biking and Saturday didn't offer any problems, but I decided to break down and get studded tires for my old mountain bike that I've used for winters.
 I didn't realize how speedy [spendy] studded tires are.  It cost more than the old bike, which I'd gotten at a YMCA auction maybe ten years ago.  But if they keep me from breaking an arm, they'll be worth it.  This bike's old wheels were perfectly fine in packed snow, but as winters have gotten warmer, there are a lot more icy days.  We'll see how often I actually use the bike and how well the studs work.

This morning was probably the coldest this fall - about 27˚F outside.












Meanwhile, inside has been rather chaotic.  Our old carpet is wearing out, very noticeably in spots.
And the linoleum in the kitchen was getting yellow, so we went for a new floor there too.  But they said to do the kitche/dining area first.  And that had to be shipped up from Outside.  We've been waiting for a few months now,  It looked pretty bad from time to time as TK determined that the old floor had to go so the kitchen wouldn't be higher than the carpet with the new bamboo panels.  

But he cleaned everything up pretty well each evening.  But there are tools all over the place.









But we're almost done.  This was actually Saturday night when we put up a temporary folding table up.

This side was finished today, but there's a little more on the kitchen side where a wire to two outlets got cut.  Fortunately, the electrician is scheduled for Wednesday to do some work on our old fixtures and putting in LED fixtures and other trickier jobs.

So we've juggling things a bit this last week.  And I'm working on more film festival posts.  The documentaries look great.  I'm just going through the features and they look interesting too.  My enthusiasm has been renewed and I'm looking forward to the festival which begins Dec. 6.  There's a new AIFF 2019 tab under the header.  Good night.

The Sun's Been With Us All Day

After several days of rain, the sun finally came out, and stayed out all day.

Went to the monthly Citizens Climate Lobby (CCL)  meeting.  This is the first time I remember that the main speaker was an Alaskan - from Ketchikan - Kiera O'Brien.    She's also a Harvard grad who was head of the Harvard Republicans, and she's organized a national group called Students for Carbon Dividends.

You can watch to the video of the national call here, and see the CCL website here. Kiera was on a delayed flight, so one of her co-workers Alexander Posner also participated.  He did an excellent job as well.

Now that most people accept the reality of Climate Change, it's important to know that there are things that can be done to reduce the impacts.   The Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act is CCL's main focus.  It's  been called the most effective single act that can be done to reduce carbon.  You can learn more about that here.  If you feel you want to do something about climate change, I urge you to check the link and then call your members of Congress and tell them you want them to pass the Act.

Then a stop at the library to pick up a  book and then a short loop on the bike trail to enjoy the sunny - if chilly - morning.

The snow is much lower on the mountains that before the rain.  This is from the Alaska Native Medical Center campus.

Here are some late grasses shining in the morning sun.  As we go toward winter, the sun gets lower and lower on the horizon during the day.

There was ice on most of the puddles on the trail.

And here's a picture from yesterday.  Not sure where else to put it.  It's dinner at the Queen of Sheba Ethiopian restaurant last night.

I planted most of the leftover daffodil bulbs.  I've had mixed results in the past, but I'm going to be optimistic.  I hope I can post pictures of yellow flowers in the spring.

Once Upon A Time I Thought I Might Catch Up. Fat Chance.

As I wrote the title, I realized we never can catch up in life, but I was referring to little things like writing blog posts and paying the bills.  Today was my wife's birthday.  We went for a movie and dinner.   It seemed like a good day to spend the early afternoon in a movie, but the rain had stopped and there were even breaks in the clouds when we got there.

 And the snow was mostly gone from the Chugach.


I've already  written about my mixed feelings about going to see Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.   Now that I've seen it, if I hadn't, I wouldn't have missed anything important.

Even though I've eaten at Musso & Franks, went to movies at the Bruin theater when I was a student at UCLA, and even interviewed George Putnam (there was an ad for his newscast on a bus stop) for my junior high school newspaper.  Putnam arrived in a gold limo - a Rolls, I think - and he smoked through the interview even though his bio said he didn't smoke. (At least that's what my memory tells me.)

The movie began in a Pan Am 747, which set alarms off right way, since the date posted was 1969.  I'd read that the period details had been carefully done.  And yes, I know some odd details.  In this case because I first flew on one of the early Pan Am 747 flights - from Honolulu to Tokyo - in March 1970. (I was flying from a Peace Corps training program I worked at in Hilo to the second part of the training in Thailand.)  Pan Am 1 and 2 had just started flying. I think it was Pan Am 1 that flew around the world toward the west and Pan Am2 to the east.  Did it start earlier in 1969?  I've now had time to look it up and the first commercial flight was in January 1970.

It wasn't a bad movie - though I generally skip movies with lots of violence - but it felt artificial throughout.  Cardboard.  I assume that was intentional since it was about Hollywood and all the phoniness of that life, but as the birthday girl said over dinner at the Thai Kitchen, with all the really good stuff we're seeing on Netflix, it just didn't cut it.

So I'm reduced to writing filler pieces like this because I just haven't had time to finish my thoughts on the Joseph Maguire hearings and several other drafts that probably will never get beyond that stage.  

And tomorrow I start a slew of OLÉ classes.  (Continuing ed classes aimed at retired folks at UAA.  I think they pay for themselves so maybe they won't disappear next year.)   I have an actual project in one that I need to spend extra time on and I haven't figured out what I'm going to do.  It's a Pecha-Kucha class - you present 20 pictures in seven minutes with narration of the story they tell. Well, I've got plenty of pictures, but organizing a compelling story is the challenge.  As I see it now, though I'll probably discover that was the easy part once I get the story figured out.

Other classes I enrolled in include:

• An Overview of the Pebble Copper-Molybdenum-Gold Prospect 
• The Innocence Project
• State and Federal Courts and Current Legal Issues
• Homeless, Homelessness and Finding "Home"

And a one time short class that's a trip to an Escape Room.

I'm hoping the classes will provide plenty of fodder for the blog.

Some Things Change Slower Than Others - Denali Sunset

This was the view this evening from O'Malley on the Green where we went for an event.  The day started at six am when I turned on the radio - still in bed - members of the House Intelligence Committee questioning Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire.  I thought he was a reasonable witness - well last one I saw was Lewandowski so the bar was low.  But he seemed respectful and caught in a difficult position.  He'd been recently hired (after much of the subject of the hearings had already happened) and he couldn't come out directly against his boss.

But in bed, I wasn't taking notes, so if I'm going to write about it, I need to review transcripts.  But today I was busy going through a to-do list that's been getting three or four things added for everything I actually get done.

So you get the mountains.  Foraker on the left, Denali on the right.  Everything changes.  These mountains change daily as the weather changes.  And the mountains are slowly wearing down.  But very slowly.


Denali is 20,308 feet tall (6,190 meters).  It's about 150 miles from Anchorage as the raven flies, (or  241 km.)  Unlike Everest and Anaconda,  it's pretty much a free standing mountain, towering over the rest of the Alaska Range..

We walked over to the university (of Alaska Anchorage) the other night.  It was a beautiful evening.

Even though it's mid-September now, there was no snow yet on the mountains.  The speaker was Katharine Hayhoe.  I've heard her talk a couple of times via the Citizens Climate Lobby (CCL) monthly meetings.  She's an incredible speaker with lots of recognition - like 100 most important people awards kinds of things.  In the Climate Science field she's know as a communications specialist and does a lot of work with the Evangelical community.


Probably the thing that was new for me Wednesday night was this idea:

People don't disagree so much on whether there is climate change, even if it's human caused.
The disagreements - including the denials - arise from the perceived consequences of climate change.  Conservatives see the consequences of doing something about climate change are seen as such a threat to our economy and way of life, it isn't worth it.  So the challenge is to educate them on how switching away from fossil fuels is not only doable, but will actually boost our economy.  If you aren't aware of that part, check out the CCL website.  CCL's emphasis is on getting Congress to legislate a fee on carbon with a dividend,  because for most experts on this, it's the most effective and achievable way to have the biggest impact.

Rather than write what she said, I'll just give you her Ted Talk.

Crossing The Andes Again, This Time As The Sun Sets. Aconcagua?

Here are some pictures as we leave Santiago and fly back to Mendoza.  We were greeted like old friends by Alberto as we return once again to the Hotel Bohemia.  And we have a morning flight to Córdoba tomorrow.  So just a few pictures.



             

And then, presumably, we were in the Argentina side of the mountains.  When we did the ‘mountain tour’ a week or so ago (don’t think I got around to posting it) we got up into the snow.  In fact it was snowing.  If it had been clear, we would have seen Mt. Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Western Hemisphere.  But we didn’t.  So I’m guessing the peak in the next picture could be Aconcagua.  Alberto thinks it could be (and he’s climbed to the top twice over five attempts.). Or maybe he just wants me to feel good.

I also looked on line for pictures to see if there were similarities.  Here’s a picture of Aconcagua from  Unico.

I’m not sure you can enlarge my picture  enough to see the dip on top that’s similar to the picture below it.

I’d also note, that flying over the Andes is a bit like flying over the Chugach as you leave Anchorage, but the mountains look a lot different.  I’m trying to figure out why.  There’s not as much snow.  They seem more jagged.