AIFF 2009 - Know Your Mushrooms and Trip to Hell and Back

A couple of movies that are NOT in Snowdance (the movies made by Alaskans or in Alaska) but maybe should have been played Tuesday night.

Part of Know Your Mushrooms included scenes of mushroom hunting in Alaska. As I said in the previous post, it was a fun movie, but nothing great. If you are interested in mushrooms - and the movie makers think everyone should be because of their importance in the world - you might check it out. A couple of viewers give their impression of the movie.



Unfortunately, there was only that one showing of Know Your Mushrooms.


[Video about Trip to Hell and Back removed at the request of the person in the video]




Trip to Hell and Back is paired with Girls on the Wall in the Program Road to Redemption and plays again Saturday, Dec. 13 at 3:15pm at the Museum.

AIFF 2009 - Tuesday Picks

The 5:30 shows include Know Your Mushrooms at the Bear Tooth.  Snowdance 2 at the Alaska Experience Theater - a mix of Alaskan made and/or made in Alaska.  Out North has Snowdance 3 which includes People of the Seal and Unalaska along with in competition animation Hugo in the Land of the Lemonshark.   Given my interest in mushrooms, I'm headed to the Bear Tooth


Animation 1 at Out North at 7:45pm  tonight is full of good stuff, including Peter Dunlap Shohl's Frozen Shorts.  Also Calypso and the Mouse that Roared.  And Topi, which I'm expecting great things from - I missed it because I had to leave early on Saturday to get to Hipsters.  There's a lot of good stuff in this mix and if there's one you don't like, well it will be over soon, and the next one will be up.

But I saw most of this one, so I'll be at Son of Sunshine, one of the features in competition, at 8pm  at Bear Tooth.

The other 8pm showing, at Alaska Experience Theater, is two shorter documentaries, including Trip to Hell and Back, which is in competition, about horses and crystal meth.  Looks like a very interesting picture.

Sunday Walk in the Woods - Campbell Airstrip

We went to Campbell Airstrip yesterday for a walk because it's close and it's flat. This is my favorite cross country ski trail. You can see what it looks like in winter.

Lots of people and their friends were out today.

No sooner were the horses almost out of sight
and the bikers came by.

While today it was in the high 60s F (@20C) there have been
some cool nights and some plants are already hinting at fall

Can anyone tell what these are?

Rose hips have lots of vitamin C. And I love picking them and eating them along the way. It's an acquired taste, but this time of year when they are soft and almost sweet they are great. So how much vitamin C do you think they have per 100/mg? The chart below from naturalhub.com shows the amount of vitamin C/100 g of some other fruits. (The column that shows green kiwi has 98 mg/100 g.)

Kiwifruit, green	Actinidia deliciosa	98	74	exceptional
Kiwifruit, yellow	Actinidia chinensis	120 to 180	108 to 162	exceptional
Lemon juice	Citrus limon	46	3*	-
Lime juice	Citrus aurantifolia	29	1*	-

Orange	Citrus sinensis	53	70	excellent
Papaya	Carica papaya	62	47*	excellent
**Pawpaw/Asimina	Asimina triloba	14	28(estim)	good†
Passionfruit, purple	Passiflora edulis	30	5	-
Peach	Prunus persica	7	6	-

The answer is at the bottom of the post.

Most of the devil's club was still green.
This one is a little ahead of things.

Some of the dogwood (no, not the tree) is still green.

Finding a good patch of dogwood to photograph

allowed me to see this seven legged spider.

And some dogwood is already red.

While I stop to take pictures, J goes on ahead. Why was I not
surprised to see her waiting for me in a sunny spot?

A great young boleta.

Even a fly fisher in the creek as we went over the bridge.

And this is Blake from Glenallen.
He works for the BLM there, but is going to UAA,
so he was doing their survey of people using BLM land.

Here's the rosehip vitamin C answer. Compare the third column numbers here with those in the table above. For Alaskans, they are out in the woods waiting to be picked and eaten now, or stored away for winter.

Rosehip	Rosa pomifera cv.'Karpatia'	1,500	45(estim.)	excellent	[5]
Rosehip	Rosa sp. cv.'Pi Ro 3'	1,150	34(estim.)	very good	[5]
Rosehip	Rosa sp. cv.'Vitaminnyj-VNIVI'	2,000 to 2,500	60 to 75(estim.)	excellent

5. These are three different types of roses. Full citation at naturalhub.com.

More Mushrooms, Some Flowers, and the Garden Workers

I didn't count them, but there must be 100 mushrooms at least in the back yard, maybe 15 - 20 varieties. Can you tell we had some rain? But today was almost balmy by late August standards in Anchorage. T shirt weather. So, enjoy the pictures.

And these are my loyal garden workers
transforming our old leaves and kitchen
wastes (no meat, just raw vegies) into rich compost.
They just show up in the summer and start working.

Primrose Campground Wet Mushroom Walk

I'm using "A picture is worth a thousands words" here. DZ and I went to Seward Sunday afternoon. Actually we stopped about 17 miles shy of Seward and camped at Primrose Campground. It was grey, but we took the trail head for about an hour before dinner. There's a reason these places are called rain forests. So here are some views, mostly of mushrooms. Then yesterday we went kayaking for three hours in the morning in Seward, had lunch with a former student who lives in Seward, then hiked to the edge of the Harding Icefield in the afternoon. This post is basically Primrose.

But, before you get there... In April, the Seward Highway was closed just below Moose Pass for a weekend + while they built a new bridge.

So, here's the new bridge.

But what wasn't clear, is that just before that bridge (if you're headed to Seward) is another bridge that is down to one lane with stoplights on both sides. It would seem that this is a basic infrastructure issue that should have been taken care of too. Will it be like this all winter?

Anyway, we got to Primrose and found a nice campsite along the river and took off on the Lost Lake trail. It was already 6pm, threatening to rain, and the trail was pretty muddy, so this was just a before-dinner stroll. And I'll let the pictures tell most of the story. At least what I saw.

Here's DZ on the trail.

Watermelon berries.

Most of these mushrooms I just can't identify
(and so we didn't add any to dinner),so you'll just have to
enjoy their beauty or weirdness without labels.

The blueberry I can id.

And I know this is a shelf mushroom, but not what kind.

After dinner, we walked over to the lake - this is the southern tip of Kenai Lake. The clouds were low, to say the least. And it started to rain finally.

The next morning - yesterday - the clouds had lifted

quite a bit as we headed to Seward.

Rain Garden

Current visitors in the back yard.