Winter Tree Trimmers Spend 45 Minutes On The Mountain Ash

 The other day the Bohemian Waxwings came to harvest the berries of our Mt. Ash trees out front.

Today the moose were here to trim the tree a bit.  

While the young one was feasting, the mom was acting as lookout.

I'm guessing that one benefit of dirty windows is that moose are more likely to see the glass.  When it was looking in like this I was hoping it wasn't thinking about tasting the green things inside.   There was a spring visit long ago when just outside the windows was a row of budding tulips and I watched from two feet away as she - one-by-one - took each tulip bud.  

Nature Keeps Doing Its Thing Despite Human Beings

 Humans have changed the landscape of the earth ever since they settled down in one place and began cutting down trees.  With modern technology we've been changing the earth at a devastating pace.  But nature is resilient and ever evolving.  Even if we were to kill half the life in the oceans and destroy half the landscape, nature measures time in millions and billions of years.  It will endure.  And if we aren't totally crazy, life forms will survive.  I even wonder whether COVID isn't one of nature's adaptations to human life, a way of slowing us down to allow other life forms to escape our hunger to destroy.  

But there is still much of nature to still awe and amaze us.  The other night when the clouds had briefly left the Anchorage sky, I walked out onto the deck and tried to capture the beauty of the frosted trees in the backyard.  The image on my iPhone was pretty dim, but editing tools on my laptop enabled me to get it back to what it actually looked like, and even more dazzling than it really was.  

And Sunday we enjoyed one of my Anchorage winter highlights - the visit of the Bohemian Waxwings to harvest the berries on our Mountain Ash trees.  They come in swarms of 30-50 birds, swooping down and then abruptly taking flight and then returning.  

Regular Snowfalls Outside, Things Growing Inside

 My personal trainer is working on my upper body this winter.  It keeps giving a little more snow to shovel four or five times a week.  Today there was about three or four new inches.  

We've also had foggy days.  Which in December, when we get down to five and a half hours or so between sunrise and sunset, makes it seem even darker.  But the snow and ice do such beautiful tricks.  

Here's ice patterns after shoveling the deck.  We'd had a couple days where it got above freezing and then froze again.  I hadn't gotten the snow off the deck, so there was this thin glaze of ice after shoveling.  It should get more focused if you click on it.

And my van was used by the snow as a canvas too.  

And here are some spruce needles holding up a blanket of snow that's turning icy.

Inside, the green stuff continues to give the illusion of a different season.  This is a bromeliad I brought up from my mom's yard where they grow like weeds.  We've had it here maybe 20 years.  It bloomed the first two years, but hasn't since.  I guess I need to check the local bromeliad society to get some tips.  It has offered up new sprouts so now I have three of these.  

But I can't put them where people move back and forth.  The thorns - look closely - are nasty.  

And it's nice that I still have geraniums blooming.

And someone sent us a box of pears.  We've been eating away.  I made a pear omelette and J made a couple of pear tarts.  

Six Images Winter, Visitors, Nourishment

 

We have several Steller Jays that visit regularly.  Part of me wants you to see how blue it is.  But the snowy background made the exposure of the bird dark.  But when the bird is dark you focus more on it's silhouette.  

It's been snowing close to every day.  I figure my personal trainer is adding an inch or two regularly to get me outside with the snow shovel, since my biking is pretty much curtailed.  

Today it snowed a bit harder.  I think we have about three inches to be shoveled.  

Besides the Steller jay, we had some moose visitors who left messages in the snow to let us know they'd been by.  

Meanwhile, inside our cooking gives other interesting visuals.  

Cooking bananas and kiwis for my morning oatmeal.  

And a whole wheat bread using Mrs. Nash's old bread machine recipe.  Except the bread machine is long gone and the recipe didn't have temperature and time instructions.  

Mushrooms And The Buses - More Denali Pictures

 Here are some more pictures from Denali - the Alpine Trail and the Healy Overlook Trail.  

This was the Alpine trail.  Nature's a pretty good landscape artist.  

I'm not sure what these black mushrooms are, but they're pretty cool.  

I think these are puffballs.  

Ever since I read Richard Wright's  The Overstory, I realize that 'rotting' log just doesn't convey the process of giving back life that trees do after they die.  They're homes and food to untold species from small mammals, birds, and too many insects to even think about.  And then they give back all their nutrients and atoms for other trees and plants to use.  "Rot" has too negative an image.  And this is why we compost most of the food scraps from the kitchen.  Watching the compost heap full of scraps and leaves and other green plants slowly turn into rich compost - a factory of worms and all sorts of little critters - transforming the 'waste' into new plant food reminds me every year  that nature doesn't need humans to sustain the planet.  

Best as I can tell from my mushroom field guide is that these tan fungi poking up out of the ground like fingers are possibly strap coral mushrooms or pestle coral mushrooms.  

I just liked the look of this clump of tree trunks on the side of the trail.  

And when we got to a road we thought (correctly) was a shortcut to our car, we passed the bus lot.  It would appear that they are using a lot few buses this summer, even though they are only allowing half as many people on.  We had no interest at all on a bus ride with strangers for hours and hours.  But if this were my first and probably only trip ever to Denali National Park, I might have thought differently.  

There was another row of buses to the left and another to the right.  

Getting Out Safely - Trip To Portage

We've been mostly homebound since we got back to Anchorage early March.  There was a masked trip to the doctor that week for a COVID-19 test that the State nixed.  Then a follow up to get tested for other things, that all turned out negative.  Since then the only places I've been 'inside' is our house and car.

I order groceries online for curbside pickup.  Same with library books and at Title Wave.
My outings are reserved to our yard and my bike rides which are on a route that sees no more than 5-10 others on the trail in a 6-9 mile roundtrip ride.  And we've had no visitors.  We have a carpet sitting in a warehouse that was supposed to be installed in March, but we didn't want anyone in our house for two days.

So yesterday was our first trip out of town. (The last gas receipt I have is for October.)  It was raining when we left - which I hoped meant we'd see fewer people.

I was taken aback by all the traffic.  This is one of the most beautiful rides in the world, even on a rainy day.  But all the traffic, some construction,  and the low visibility dimmed my pleasure.  Lots of RV's and boats.

I get that camping is healthy outdoor sport, but we have a virus and our state active case numbers are rising rapidly. We've got 1503 active cases as of today, more than double the 718 we had two weeks ago on July 10.  If you try, you can minimize your contact getting outdoors, but how many are distancing and masking when they encounter others?  Based on people I see on the bike trail, not many.   People take risks all the time, so COVID-19 is just one more risk to many, like smoking or driving down the Seward Highway.  Both of those also involve endangering others.

When we turned onto the Portage Road the traffic ended for us.  We pulled in and walked the trail through a variety of landscapes just off the road.

Devils club from below (above) and from above. All shiny from the rain.

There are still some hanging glaciers up on the tops of the mountains.

At one point I  was  photographing  these brown birds on the chance I could identify them later ( haven't had yet).  I heard some sneezing.  That wasn't good.  We'd only seen a couple people - well away from us in the campground.  We had been on the trail about 90 minutes and these were the first others we had encountered.  We pulled up our masks and proceeded.  There was a couple around the bend, in their 60s or 70s maybe.  She pulled up a mask when she saw ours.  But the sneezer didn't have one.  I was pissed at him, but the serenity of the hike wasn't disturbed and I had no interest in stopping to tell him how I felt about him sneezing maskless on the trail.   I assumed enough time had passed since he'd sneezed that gravity and the rain and our masks would protect us.  They only other person we saw even somewhat close was the campground host who came by to tell us day hikers should not park in the campground.  I was disturbed again that he was going around giving people papers to sign without a mask.  Since we were leaving, he never got closer than ten feet or so.  

                          

I get it that I'm on the extreme isolation side of the COVID-19 response spectrum.  I have that privilege because I'm retired, I have a house and yard.  But I also monitor Alaska's COVID-19 count daily on this blog (see tab under the orange banner on top) and I'm acutely aware of how our active cases have doubled in the last two weeks to 1503.  That's not a lot compared to other states, but those states had low numbers once too.  

The ride back home was easier.  The traffic was coming in the other direction.  That's tricky on the Seward Highway where people get impatient behind bulky campers and pass where they oughtn't.  But we had a car ahead of us to block any impulsive drivers.  (I realize that's a pretty grim form of defensive driving, but on that mostly two lane road out of town with more than its share of head on collisions, it's a coping mechanism.)  

We stopped briefly at Potter Marsh, but didn't stay long.  It was windy and we were ready to get home and have dinner.  But we'd had a great day and a reasonably safe outing.