Tiny World of Mushrooms

With all the dry weather it seemed like we might not get any mushrooms, but more recently we've had plenty of rain and some of the mushrooms are popping up in the back yard.

And something a little bigger.

I wish I had time to go through my Field Guide to North American Mushrooms to share what these mushrooms are, but too much happening.  Just relax and enjoy a more natural post.

More Wind, More Gramping Bike Time

Not much to say today.  Mi nieta* is amazing.  After she showed how comfortable she is on the bike trail yesterday, we tried something a little trickier.  No problem.

Here we encountered a tree branch that fell victim to the wind.

Then into the sanctuary.

This tree trunk has been on the ground a while.

If you click on this photo above, you might be able to see a blur of blue through the grass where the trail turns to the right.  I don't think this violates the no pictures of the nietos rule.

And here she's zoomed along the boardwalk before I could catch her in the distance.  It's so neat to see her go from determined but really careful last summer, to comfortable,  this summer, even on challenging trails.


She loves riding the bike and we have much better biking and closer trails in Anchorage than she has at home.


Tomorrow morning we go birding.

* couldn't link to the google translate page that showed mi nieta means my granddaughter.

The Birther Movement Is Alive And Well In the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP)

Trump got lots of mileage claiming that Obama wasn't born in the United States and thus wasn't eligible to be president.  He knew, all along, that his accusation was false.  But it played well to the sizable racist population that was smarting at the idea of a Black president.  It also got Trump lots of attention and Obama's team had to use up resources (emotional, creative, financial) and time fighting the lies, time that could have been spent constructively.

Well, it's clear now that the Birther Movement is alive and well in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), as they question the birth locations of United States citizens who live along the Mexican border.  And it has the same effect of playing to Trump's anti-immigration and racist die-hard fans as well as distracting attention and resources and time from other issues (I don't think I need to list them, though some, I'm sure we don't even know about.)

As the noose around the Trump administration tightens, Trump actions are only going to get meaner and more destructive.  We need to brace ourselves and hang tough until this poison is out of our system - or at least down to a much less toxic level.  (Am I engaging in progressive hate speech here?  I am using a strongly negative metaphor, but I think it's backed up by the example of Trump's administration trying to strip US citizens of their citizenship.  We can argue endlessly about whether there actually are some people whose midwife falsified their place of birth 30 or 40 years ago, but there's a reason we have statute of limitation rules, and it only applies, if at all, to a tiny fraction of the people being harassed.   And these 'crimes' are nothing compared to all the ways that ICE and CBP are treating asylum seekers.)

And to help keep up your spirits, here are some signs of change  as summer prepares to hand over our lives to autumn.

The mountain ash berries seem particularly abundant and large this year.  The Bohemian waxwings will be happy when they come to harvest them during the winter.


















The rose hips are also big and red and abundant.  They're still hard, but before long they will be soft and sweet and full of vitamin C.












And this mushroom has also joined the party in our yard.  I first thought I'd just post the picture without looking it up.  I've got things to do while the sun is out.  But I decided that's not me on this blog.  So I looked for my field guide to mushrooms.  But in all the moving stuff round this summer it's not where it used to be.  So after 15 minutes I gave up and made a feeble attempt online to identify it.  I give up for now.  If anyone knows, please leave a comment.  But it's a handsome mushroom.

Posts Are Piling Up While I'm Getting Other Things Done

The Amanitas are starting to pop out of the ground.  I've searched my blog here to find a post I did on the more mystical properties of the Amanita.  As I did that I found that four of the five  previous  posts with an Amanita were put up between August 6 and August 19.  One outlier was on July 15, 2016.  [The post with the most information - including the warnings of the dangers and the praises of the flights - is the first one you see in the link.  And there's one more that you need to click on "Next Posts" at the bottom to get to.  There are lots of mushrooms on those pages, plus other surprises.]

Here's one that's a little further along, with a budding one in the background.

These two little white mushrooms were poking up in the woodier area of our yard where I've been experimenting with a hugel.  This link will get you started on "hugelkulture".   I've been trying to solve two gardening issues at once:

• excess soil
• lots of trimmed branches

In hugel gardening (Hugel in German means hill), you take branches of various sizes and pile them up and then put soil on top of them.  You get a hill with lots of organic material and air pockets below.  Go to the link for details.  

The new steps in front exacerbated an old problem that began when I dug out soil along the garage so I could put in some insulation.  Dug up soil is not nearly as dense as soil that's been packed down for years.  Even after spreading some of the extra soil around the yard, I still had a garbage can full of dry sandy soil.  So now I've taken care of about 70% of the pile of branches and twigs and the garbage can full of dirt.  There's more dirt from where they dug to put in the new front steps - which expanded into areas I'd had plants before.  

Another interesting white mushroom.  In the past I would have spent an hour going through my mushroom field guide to tell you what these two mushrooms are called.  But this is a post about not having time to put up other posts.  It was only supposed to be a few picture - like throwing your back pack to the ground when you're being chased by a bear.  To keep you (and the bear) busy while I gain some ground. (Fortunately, despite being in a state full of bears, they aren't really interested in interacting with humans and so we've had relatively few encounters while on foot and usually they run as soon as they see us.)

I went to the Covenant House BBQ Thursday for lunch and to touch base.  I hadn't been to the new facility which is really nice.  I was a mentor for several young men there in the past.  But the last guy I mentored is still in my life and I decided he's enough.  And all this reminds me I want to follow up on the ADN's editorial about homelessness.  

After the BBQ I stopped by the election office to get forms to register voters, and the instruction booklet to remind me how to do it.  I became a registrar about four years ago when I was involved in a political campaign.  

I also voted early in our primary which is August 21.  There's a lot to write about that - particularly the governor's race.  I have posted a little on that with a video of Tom Begich explaining why his brother jumped into the race.  

Outside the election headquarters the flagpole had no flag.  I remember when raising and lowering the flag were like a ceremony every morning and evening.  It would be nice if we could listen to everyone else in the US and be heard by them in return so we could make the US a country we could all be proud of.  Where we'd all be proud of our flag again.  (I say this recognizing that we're in a time when those in power (who were in charge of the flag and what it represented) rode roughshod over much of the population - women, the poor, people of color, lgbtq folks, and everyone else who was other.  But I think many of those 'others' still believed that the United States was moving forward toward equality for all of them eventually.  And thus many of them also took the flag seriously.  (I could be wrong here.  I don't think the mainstream surveys ever asked questions like that - they took the answers for granted.)

Anyway, now that laws have given more people better tools to be treated fairly, those who had the power are feeling victimized.  Equality for them, apparently meant, that they still kept their special status and privilege.  

So here's my stalling post, since I've missed a couple of days already.  I've got Friday's Stand For Salmon post to put up and lots of other themes I want to pursue.  Hope you have a good Sunday.  

Water Cutoff, So We Get Out Of Town

There was a green card hanging from our door the other day that said the water would be shut off between 9am and 3pm on Thursday.  I checked on line and found this:
[UPDATE Aug 21, 2018 - I've corrected the formatting for this project and I've posted an update]

AWWU Construction Projects

• Project Manager
• James Armstrong
• Phone Number    
• 907 564 2776
• Public Description
• Work will consist of the Contractor to furnish and install approximately 2,000 linear feet of 16-inch PVC pipe, three (3) double pumper fire hydrant assembly, and eight (8) 16-inch gate valves and valve boxes, three (3) 8-inch gate valves and valve boxes, and one (1) 6-inch gate valve and valve box.

So we decided it would be a good day to be out in the woods.  The shut off the water by 11am just before we took off.

And the street was blocked off.   We drove straight down to Portage Glacier.  I'd been there a couple of weeks ago with the little kids and I really wanted to go see Byron Glacier and spend some time relaxing in the van at Black Bear campground.  It was raining too much last time to take the kids to  Byron Glacier, and since there was a rare iceberg floating by the visitor's center it didn't seem necessary.  We stopped at the visitor center first.  It was raining some, but with the fierce wind of last time, and the iceberg was gone.

The white in the middle is the glacier.  It used to wrap around and over the hill and sit in the water of Portage Lake.  And there used to be icebergs all the time.  The ranger said the berg had lasted about two weeks, melting and breaking up fairly quickly.

Then off to Byron Glacier not far away.  (I"ve been debating whether this should be in chronological order or if I should just put up pics from the day.  General chronological order won by one vote.)

Here's a ripe salmon berry we passed on the way.

And here's what's left of Byron Glacier.  I remember first seeing it when the whole mountain side was solid glacier.  Now the lower part is pretty pitiful.  When you talk to people in Anchorage about climate change - the long time residents just point to Portage and the nearby glaciers as how they know it's real.  These changes are really dramatic.  And in a short span that humans can notice.

Here's a decent sized chunk of glacier but it's really a tiny fraction of what used to be here.

This is looking up.  The clouds have lowered since I took the first Byron glacier picture above, but you can see the eerie blue ice often found in glaciers, especially on cloudy days.

Walking back we started talking to a couple from North Carolina.  They were originally from Calcutta and they were on a whirlwind tour of Alaska.  In a week they'd been to Denali, Anchorage, Seward, and were spending their last full day at Portage and then went to hike Winner Creek in Girdwood.

And in the car next to ours was a young Israeli who was touring Alaska.

This fern lined path is near Black Bear campground in the Portage Valley.  We'd stopped her last time and it was so beautiful that I wanted to explore the area a bit.  We had lunch, read, and snoozed.  I'm just starting Charles Eisenstein's The Ascent of Humanity. Someone told me about it when I was talking about how the Protestant Work Ethic doesn't work any more now that technology can do much of the work that people had to do.  That we need a knew way to think about the distribution of wealth - other than it being only paid-work connected.  (Here's one post I did on that thought.  Looking for it, I see I've started, but not finished a few others.)

Eisentein's message includes that thought, but in a much broader perspective of how many of our conceptions of the world are failing to accurately portray what's happening around us.

"In the face of an ecological, financial, social, and health crisis that isn't going away, our tools - political, technological, and cognitive - are revealing themselves as impotent.  As that happens, the belief systems that embed those tools lose the gloss we call 'reality.'  Our defining narratives are coming apart at the seems.
"This dissolution reaches to the deepest imaginable level.  Not only our social institutions, not only our ecosystems are collapsing, but along with them our answers to the basic questions of life: "Who am I?" "Why am I here?"  "Where did we come from and where are we going?" "What is the purpose of life?"

But he's also optimistic.  And in a way that might be reasonable.  He talks about how humankind's thousands of years of accumulated knowledge and technology have failed to make people happy.  How along with greater material wealth and better health for many, there is still genocide, hunger, massive destruction of the natural world.

"Something [is] so fundamentally wrong that centuries of our best and brightest efforts to create a better world have failed or even backfired.  As this realization sinks in, we respond with despair, cynicism, numbness, or detachment.  

OK, I know I promised more optimistic and that was the opposite.  Here it comes:

"Yet no matter how complete the despair, no matter how bitter the cynicism, a possibility beckons of a world more beautiful and a life more magnificent than what we know today.  Though we rationalize it, it is not rational.  We become aware of it in moments, gaps in the rush and press of modern life.  This moments come to uss lone in nature, to with a baby, making love, playing with children, caring for a dying person, making music for the sake of music or beauty for the sake of beauty.  At such times, a simple and easy joy shows us the futility of the vast, life-consuming program of management and control.  

Reading that yesterday in the van surrounded by trees and a glacial river nearby and about to go for another walk, I knew I would put these quotes into this post.

"We inuit that something similar is possible collectively.  Some of us may have experienced it when we find ourselves cooperating naturally and effortlessly, instruments of a purpose greater than ourselves that, paradoxically, makes us individually more and not less when we abandon ourselves to it.  It is what musicians are referring to when they say, "The music played the band."
"Another way of being is possible, and it is right in front of us, closer than close.  That much is transparently certain.  Yet it slips away so easily that we hardly believe it could be the foundation of life;  so we relate it to an afterlife and call it Heaven, or we relegate it to the future and call it Utopia.  (When nanotechnology solves all our problems . .  when we all learn to be nice to each other. . . when finally I'm not so busy . . .)Either way, we set it apart from this world and this life, and thereby deny its practicality and its reality in the heart and now  Yet the knowledge that life is more than Just This cannot be suppressed, not forever."

He goes on to take about the title - The Ascent of Humanity - as being an ironic take on Jacob Bronowski.'s The Ascent of Man. Ironic because he's arguing in the book that the idea of man's ascent to a better life through technology that takes us beyond nature, that has us conquering nature to improve human life, the idea of progress as we know it is false.  We've been 'improving' since the Stone Age and futurists keep telling us about new technologies that will solve our problems.  It's not going to happen he tells us.  We need to rethink our relationship to the world, to nature, and to each other.  That better life won't come from technology, but from knowing ourselves and our role in the natural world.

It's not a new message in some senses, but he's got 500 pages of back up for the argument.  I've only read the Introduction (where he outlines the arguments chapter by chapter) and the beginning of the first chapter - The Triumph of Technology - where he picks up the theme I've followed about how the promises of more leisure through technology have fallen flat.

OK, back to Portage Valley.  Despite how beautiful it was and the many pictures I took, I'm afraid these are just a pale facsimile.  You can't feel the mist drizzling on your face, or see these shots in their large context.  But I was feeling that 'more magnificent world' as I walked through this with a much lightened heart.

These are shelf fungi growing on the bottom of a cut tree.









I'm looking forward to reading all of Eisenstein's book.  I'm hoping it's as good as it seems to be in the fist 20 pages or so.

I do want to mention the idea of separation which is a key point he's making - and you can see it on the cover page (if you click on it and enlarge it).  I'm guess from the little I've read so far, this will be about many separations from what's real that humans have made.  Separation from nature.  How science has broken down into uncountable specialities so that few actually see the big picture and how everything is connected.  (Again, a big theme in The Invention of Nature, Andrea Wulf's book about Alexander von Humboldt.)  He's talking about how we have separated humans into different groups - by gender, by race, by ethnicity, by nationality, by religion.  And how humans have been separated from their true selves by the narratives of the societies they live in.

I think Esenstein would take hope from how the Trump administration is forcing so many people to rethink their conception of the United States.  The old world view has to die before the new one can be adopted.  It's not easy, but it's how things work.

And the water was back on when we got home.

Taku Lake, Campbell Airstrip Foxholes, Shaggy Mane,

A couple of shots from the last several days as I wander the bike trails trying to keep my blood flowing.

This was Taku Lake a couple of evenings ago as I tried to slip in a bike ride while it wasn't raining.


Going up the new bike trail again on Campbell Airstrip Road - there's good new bike trail for about .7 miles which connects to the old bike trail that ends at the Campbell Airstrip trailhead - I ran across this new sign on local foxholes.

click on image to enlarge and foc

I was thinking as I stopped to take a picture of the sign, that I should get it while it's new (it wasn't there last week) before the spray painters arrive.  It added a dimension to this part of town I'd never thought about.  I saved it as a fairly large file so you an click on it to enlarge and focus better.

Here are the foxhole pictures enlarged:

I've seen foxes in the Anchorage bowl, so I'm sure there are some in the woods around here, but for today, this is a different kind of fox hole.


Finally, I saw my first shaggy mane mushroom today.  It's a little early.  This is one of my favorite mushrooms.  They are delicious to eat and easy to identify.  I haven't seen any other mushrooms that look even remotely like these.  They do turn inky black after a while and then they're inedible.  I've written more on them with a picture of one going black here.

So while we did our weekly video conference with our grandson (and his little sister who is beginning to pay attention to us on the screen briefly) I showed him the mushroom, cut it up, got some garlic, onion, and tomato.  Cooked them up in some olive oil and then added a little white wine.  Mmmmmmmmmmmm.  

Spore Print

Back yard.

Big white mushroom.

Under, dark brown gills.

Spore print:

Maybe a horse mushroom, but not sure enough to eat it.

Mushrooms And Other Signs Of Rain

While July was the warmest month on record in Anchorage, ever, August, while not cold, has seen its fair share of rain.



The most easily identified Anchorage mushroom is this Amanita - Fly Agaric.  It opens up and looks like a small pizza (up to about 10 inches across).  Books say it's poisonous, but I've come to learn for Alaska mushrooms that tends to mean hallucinogenic.  I included some of that discussion in this 2007 post.

These are up to about six or seven inches across.  Wasn't quite sure what they were after a quick look through my field guide to mushrooms.

Some lichens and mosses growing on the deck.

This appears to be a polypore.  It was growing out of the ground, not on a tree.  It's about five inches across.

 Some raindrops on a nasturtium leave.

Reflections in a little puddle in a garbage can lid.

What I belief is a rosy russula.  The stem is also slightly pink.

The top and underneath of what I think is a tacky green russula.  It says they're good eating.

And the worms in the compost pile are doing their job.  As I turned things over with a shovel, I could feel the heat as nature turns our kitchen waste and leaves to compost.


Some posts that haven't gotten linked to the blogrolls that you might find interesting:

Walkable Cities Circa 1669
If Women Relate Their Own Gender Battles To Clinton's, She Wins Big
Man Goes
Who Invented Inflatable Tube Guys?

Blueberry Picking Near Powerline Pass

My daughter, granddaughter, and a friend went blueberry picking near the bottom of Flattop.  Here are a few pictures.  My family prefers not to be pictured on the blog, so you only get one of the most beautiful spots in the world.

These are crowberries.  They aren't as tasty, but they're sometimes used as filler with the blueberries.

Some interesting lichen I found on a rock.

Down below we could see the contrails of the jets at the air show at JBER (Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson).  There are four or five jets flying in formation there.  Note:  I'm not promoting military air shows like these.  I've posted on the cost of air shows and I have questions about these as promotional events for military might.  Fortunately, we didn't really hear the terrible, obliterating roar of the jets from where we were.

I found a couple of king boletes, which will make a wonderful mushroom soup.

Lots of gentian blooming.

Some of the hemlock had lots of new cones.













And then we wandered down to Powerline Pass.