Mike from Iowa - How Are You Doing With All That Water?

The title is pretty much the post.  Mike's been a frequent commenter here.  He's warned me about the danger of bears, but his state's been pounded with tornadoes and now flooding from rising rivers.  Hope you're doing ok.  

Biking Stories This Week - Moose, Innocence, Post Cards, Bike Lanes, Big Leaves

 The moose are out this week.  Tuesday, walking toward Goose Lake we ran into a cow and calf.  Two bikers and a runner had already alerted us, as they were looking for alternate routes.  We got close enough to see them through the trees and walked back.  

Thursday, biking to up Campbell Airstrip Road, I passed a young bull with a nice growing rack.  It was the part of the trail that separates from the road.  Where I'd been warned by a driver a couple of years ago that they'd seen a bear on the trail.  So when I get to this part, I ring my bell a bunch to no one is surprised I'm there.  And down below the trail was the moose.  On the way back, I looked for him down below and there was nothing there.  Then there he was right next to the trail.  Turned back and took the road down.  Where I was able to get this picture.   You can see he's almost on the bike trail.

Then I stopped in the Botanical Garden.  They have a great plant sale.  Well, they sell plants all summer.  There's a good selection of interesting plants - local and not - that do well in Anchorage.  The plant sale is right at the front so I think you can buy plants without paying admission.  But the whole garden is worth some exploration.  And things change in there every week as different flowers start to show.

Here's some Shieldleaf Rogersia at the Garden.   These are very large leaves - the sign says China, Korea.  

They grow in the shade and my yard has lots of shade so I bought one about three years ago.  Bugs have been eating at it each year before it gets real big.  But this year it's looking better.  

Friday I had a couple of stops to make downtown.  First I dropped in at the Alaska Innocence Project.  They help prisoners who claim they were wrongly convicted and have evidence to back their cases.  They helped get the Fairbanks Four freed several years ago.  

I took an Óle course  several years ago, taught by Bill Oberly the (now retired) director and was highly impressed with their work.  

Prisoners don't get a lot of sympathy from the public, and innocent people behind bars is one of the biggest injustices in our society.  Since

Since it was a beautiful day we met in their conference room on the roof.

That's Francisco on the left and Jory on the right.  Here's a short video - under 2 minutes - that I recommend.  It talks about why people are wrongly convicted and how many there are.  

On the way to their office I found the new protected downtown bike lane.  I'd read about it in the Anchorage Daily News, but forgot about it until I came across it.  What an improvement.  No dodging pedestrians on the sidewalk or cars in the street. I could relax and just ride.  But there's not much of it - less than 1/2 mile I'd guess.  And then to get to the office I had to go back to the streets.  It even has its own street light with red and green bikes.  

Next stop was at Tim's to pick up some postcards to mail to voters.  This is probably the least painful way for introverts to be actively working to save Democracy.  [If you think I'm being alarmist, let's talk.  The mainstream media are treating the election as if Trump were a normal candidate.  He's not. Mainstream media only look reasonable in comparison with Fox.  With the Far Right capture of the Supreme Court, a Trump presidency would be the end of democracy in the US.] In this case the Environmental Voters Project combined with the Citizens Climate Lobby.  Tim's in a log cabin downtown, but this one has been modernized a bit.  It even has a touchpad to unlock the door.  

I have some work to do.  

Today was a spectacular day.  I picked up a book that was on hold at the library for me.  I think I requested it six or more months ago - The Sympathizer by Viet Thang Nguyen.  It won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the first 15 pages pulled me right in.                                           I'm still working on Many Things Under a Rock - a book about octopuses.                                                           From the library to the post office to get post card stamps and to mail a letter to my grandson who is away at camp.  The post office was closed, but I could mail the letter.                                                        Finally I could bike on.  As I said, it was a beautiful day - our warmest of the year I'm sure.

                                                                                      I doubt  the official temperature,
which is measured at the airport, was 77˚F (26˚C), but it was a nice, nice day.  

I went up Arctic to the Campbell Creek bike trail near Dimond and then back down the  trail past Taku Lake and eventually home.  I've gone, as of today, 475 kilometers, this summer.  (That means since the trails were clear enough of snow to ride.)

We had salmon on the deck this evening - with loud rumbles of thunder in the background.  That's not something we get often in Anchorage - sometimes none in a year or three.  

So keeping it fairly light today.  Happy Fathers' Day to all of you lucky enough to have this awesome responsibility. 

Denali Was Out In Full Glory

Here was the view from the mile 135 Denali Lookout point last Tuesday afternoon.  The mountain was magnificent.  The tallest mountain in North America.  All 20,310 feet (6,190.5 m) were showing, just about.  Aconcagua in Argentina is 22,831 feet (6,959 m).  But Aconcagua is one of many peaks in the Andes range.  The whole of Denali can be seen from 3000 feet and up.  And Tuesday it was all out and clear.  

After about four years in Alaska, I wanted to make a post card of clouds, labeled "Denali as most tourists see it."   There was a couple from Toronto there taking in the sight and I wanted to let them know how lucky they were to see this great view.  And we became friends for the next couple of days, enjoying the park together.  

Below is that same view on Thursday afternoon on our return to Anchorage.  My postcard view.  You'd never know North America's highest mountain was hiding behind those clouds.  You can also see that a lot of snow melted in those two days.  

And below is a picture of Denali from the North (on the right), on the road in the National Park.  Still clear.  

Our Canadian friends got great views of the mountain.  Below it resembles a full moon just rising.  

But as lucky as they were with the Mountain, they were unlucky with animals.  I don't remember a trip to Denali when we saw so few big animals.  The few we saw were not particularly close. There were plenty of ptarmigan, gulls, and ground squirrels.  

First we hiked along the Savage River trail.  We've learned from past experience that this early in the season, the trail on the east side is still full of snow and ice in parts, so we hike to the bridge along the west side (right side in the photo) and returned the same way.  

As you get closer to the bridge (about one mile each way) you start to see these Tolkien rocks.  

And excuse me for putting all these photos up extra large.  Denali National Park is extra large and even this effort doesn't do it justice.  

We stopped at Sanctuary campground for lunch, where we saw this giant head in the rocky mountain across the way.  Anyone else see it?  Two of us did.

Just before Teklanika campground, there is a pair of small lakes, ponds really.  One had buffleheads and pintails and a kingfisher.  The other had northern shovelers.  

We parked at the Teklanika overview - which is as far as you are allowed to drive - and walked down to the bridge below.  You can drive in the first 30 miles only until May 20 when the tour busses start.  (Well, they already had some tour busses for the benefit of cruise line passengers, but not too many.)  Beginning May 20 you can only drive as far as Savage River (12 miles in.)  The road is still closed at mile 40 due a a huge avalanche a few years back.  So 20 miles further to Eilson, and then the next 30 to Wonder Lake aren't accessible. An Anchorage Daily News article say it won't be done until 2026.

It was only as we were headed back after a long day, that we saw the first large animal - a caribou.  There were two moose after that.  Denali - being far north with a short growing season and a long winter, is no Serengeti.  There just isn't enough food for the large herds in Africa.  But three large animal sightings is pitiful.   It was a VERY windy day, and perhaps that kept the animals hunkered down.  

Our new friends headed to their hotel outside the park and we got back to our campground.  I'd brought a bunch of the broken tree limbs from the back yard post winter clean up and some nice dry pieces of firewood and we quickly had a dinner cooked in foil.  First on the grill while the flames were high, and then on the coals a little longer.  

New Year's Day Birds

We dropped the family off at the airport Monday.  It was a beautiful sunny day with blue skies and t-shirt temperatures. The sky was clear and you could see snow up on Mt. Baldy. We like walking along Ballona Creek, but thought since we were coming from the airport we could start at the ocean end.  

There's a bike trail along the creek that goes at least to Culver City and connects with the beach trail south to nearly Palos Verdes.  North, it goes through Marina Del Rey and then connects with Venice and Santa Monica trails.  I've marked in red our walk from the beach to Lincoln and back.  

We saw the hummingbird hovering first.  It's iridescent ruby throat flashing brilliantly.  It flew off and then quickly returned an lighted on this high bush.  I'm still fighting my auto-focus on my Canon Rebel.  I've read instructions, but the auto-focus has trouble figuring out exactly where I want to focus.  For most things it's not an issue, but for birds far away or tiny birds relatively close, it's frustrating.  I'm open to links that could help.  I left the image small because you can see how out-of-focus the bird is when I cropped it bigger.  

And I couldn't get the iridescent flash, though you can see the emerald wing suggesting it.  

The egret is much bigger and easier to get in focus.

I was fascinated by the egret's toes as it started walking.  It didn't respond to my request that it get a less difficult background.  You have to look carefully.  I counted four toes.  

I originally thought these might be sanderlings, but the legs seemed the wrong color.  Maybe a type of sandpiper.  I couldn't tell for sure.  

The water here is where the marina opens to the Pacific, not the Ballona Creek side of the trail.  You can check here.

I'm guessing this is a white pelican, but you can check yourself. 

You may have read about large waves this weekend in Southern California.  The waves didn't seem huge, but they crashed pretty much straight down.  The bike trail on he beach was covered with sand and the high tide lines were way, way up on the beach.  

 

Spices Keep You Healthy

At some point, after three years in Thailand, I was convinced that science had ignored the health benefits of capsaicin - the part that makes hot peppers so spicy.  Surely, I thought, this heat helped to preserve foods, in a different way than salt does.  

Today this 24 year old paper popped up on Twitter that confirms my assumption.  What I didn't recognize was that garlic and onions are even better at the killing and/or inhibiting the growth of microbes.  Though I did assume the high use of garlic in hot climates had some health benefits too.  

The authors write in the overview:

"We wondered if there are any predictable patterns of spice use and, if so, what factors might underlie them. In this article, we summarize the results of our inquiries. We found that spice use is decidedly nonrandom and that spices have several beneficial effects, the most important of which may be reducing foodborne illnesses and food poisoning."

Prediction 1. Spices should exhibit antibacterial and antifungal activity.

And this chart shows that 

Prediction 2. Use of spices should be greatest in hot climates, where unrefrigerated foods spoil especially quickly.

They looked at cookbooks from 36 countries to see what spices were used, how many recipes included spices, how many spices per recipe, and which spices.  The used a climate atlas to rate the climate in each of the 36 countries. 

Prediction 3. A greater proportion of bacteria should be inhibited by recipes from hot climates than from cool climates.  

". . . the mean fraction of recipes that called for each one of the highly inhibitory spices used in those countries increased significantly (Figure 8a). However, this correlation did not hold for less inhibitory spices (Figure 8b). There was also a positive relationship between the fraction of bacterial species inhibited by each spice and the fraction of countries that used that spice, indicating widespread use of the spices that are most effective against bacteria."

There are a number of other things they looked into (ie. cost of spices, lemon/lime juice increases anti-microbial power of spices).  

So one question I have relates to the fact that our bodies rely on microbes to keep us healthy.  My awareness of this came well after 1999 (when the spice article was published) and I'm not sure how well it was known in 1999 or by the authors.  Do spices harm the gut biome?  

The article is written in clear language that should be easy for most people to understand most parts.  It also has pictures of spices as well as straightforward charts.  

Darwinian Gastronomy: Why We Use Spices: Spices taste good because they are good for us 

Paul W. Sherman,   Jennifer Billing  Author Notes  BioScience, Volume 49, Issue 6, June 1999, Pages 453–463, https://doi.org/10.2307/1313553   Published: 01 June 1999

They use' microbe' in some places and 'bacteria' in other places.  Since I wasn't completely sure about what each term meant, I found this American Society for Microbiology page "What Counts As A Microbe?"

Clouds! (It's Been Rainy In LA)

 I was out in the car yesterday when it started raining so hard I had the windshield wipers to the fastest speed and I still had trouble seeing through the wet on the windshield.  

Sun did make cameo appearances throughout the day.  

Today it was sunny when I got up - though there were lots of exciting clouds, ranging from white to almost black.  

This iris opened since yesterday and the sun seemed like a good opportunity to get on my bike  for a ride along the beach.  

This is the last block on Rose Ave as you get to the beach in Venice.  The border between Los Angeles (Venice is a neighborhood in LA) and Santa Monica is about a block to the north (to the right in the picture).

Parts - not many - of the bike trail had a couple of inches of water and some sand.  

Headed north, Santa Monica pier is up ahead. 

There are a few wooden walkways from the bike trail to near the water.  I wanted some pictures from near the water.  Above I'm looking north.

Below I'm looking west. 

And below I'm looking south back toward the pier.  This is NOT a black and white photo.

It was at this point, as I was picking my bike up out of the sand, that a life guard in a truck came over to me and said that NOAA reported there was a thunderstorm due in the next half hour and to clear the beach.  (There weren't that many people out anyway, only a few down by the water.)

At this point I felt the first rain drops.  The temperature was in the low to mid 60s F and felt warmer when the sun was on me.  

As I rode back, the palm trees along the palisade in downtown Santa Monica were nicely silhouetted.  

And below I'm approaching the Santa Monica pier from the north.  I hadn't seen the ferris wheel turning when I passed by the first time and it certainly wasn't moving now.  Nor did I see any action on the roller coaster.  

It never rained too hard, despite the ominous clouds.  Some blue and some hint of sun if not actual sun were always visible.  

On the way home I stopped at the 99 Cents store.  But most of the shelves were empty. The cashier said January 5 would be their last day.  They did have produce.  Two avocados, an artichoke, and some broccoli cost me $2.  

When I got near home, it wasn't raining, but there was water gushing down the hill to the flat area.  It had rained very hard while I was gone, but not where I was.  Later my granddaughter took this picture when it rained heavily again and you can see some of the rain coming down, though the picture doesn't capture how hard it was raining.  

The rain seems to have fallen here and there over short periods of time as clouds moved through.  The following list shows rainfall in inches as of 7am Thursday for the five days prior.  There's a lot of variation and this doesn't count what fell yesterday and today.  

Oxnard 6.13

Porter Ranch 4.82

Culver City 3.43

Westlake Village 3.31

Downtown LA 1.98

Bel Air 3.27

Long Beach 1.24

Van Nuys 4.30

Santa Monica 1.80

Northridge 4.54

Whittier 1.51

Pasadena 1.61

Castaic 2.53

I found different numbers when I googled Los Angeles annual rainfall. (Some variation is surely due to location.)  But the range was between 12 and 14 inches!

This is all a reminder that the earth itself is doing fine.  The changes brought on by climate change, the loss of species, are irrelevant to Nature.  The landforms and oceans will survive and evolve without us.  

The coming climate catastrophes are only catastrophes in the eyes of humans.  I'm not sure what the animal and plant species that are being threatened know or feel.  The earth has experienced many changes over its billions of years.  Our hominid ancestors only appeared around seven million years ago.  And individual human lives are like flashes of lightening (which I never did see today) in comparison.   

So go out into nature and learn.  

Chicago Pics And A Bit On Percy Julian

 This is basically going to be photos of the last couple days in Oak Park and surroundings.  

I always thought the Continental divide was in the Rockies and up on through Canada and Alaska, but the folks in Oak Park think it's there.

I think John Dewey got it just about right.

We walked about 2.5 miles yesterday to meet J's brother and sister-in-law for lunch, so we saw a lot of things we'd have missed in a car.  Like these church doors.

A dog park in Oak Park.  Our friends ran into friends they hadn't seen in a long time and it seemed like a happy coincidence.  Numbers were exchanged.

I seem to be the only one excited about the new Halloween decoration on our friends' balcony.  

This only makes sense if you know that Frank Lloyd Wright lived in Oak Park and there are lots of his buildings (mainly houses) in town.  I think some of my Anchorage friends are trying to make this point as the Assembly is taking on redoing the zoning codes.  Right-sizing isn't necessarily NIMBY.

Today, October 1, we went to Evanston - just north of Chicago - for a birthday party and walked along Lake Michigan by Northwestern University.   It was a warm day!

Downtown Chicago is in the distance.

We drove along the lake to downtown. 

Best I could do from the car.  

As we wandered on home we passed through a part of town known as Ukrainian Village.  I believe the rest of this sign said "Institute of Modern Art."

Finally, our friend took us by a large house and yard in Oak Park.  It was bought by Percy Julian.  

Julian was a chemist with degrees from Harvard, and Vienna. From Science History:

 

"A steroid chemist and an entrepreneur, Percy Julian ingeniously figured out how to synthesize important medicinal compounds from abundant plant sources, making them more affordable to mass produce.

In the 1930s chemists recognized the structural similarity of a large group of natural substances—the steroids. These include the sex hormones and the cortical hormones of the adrenal glands. The medicinal potential of these compounds was clear, but extracting sufficient quantities of them from animal tissue and fluids was prohibitively expensive. As with other scarce or difficult-to-isolate natural products, chemists were called upon to mimic nature by creating these steroids in the lab and later by modifying them to make them safer and more effective as drugs. . .

"Julian was born in Montgomery, Alabama, the son of a railway mail clerk and the grandson of enslaved people. In an era when African Americans faced prejudice in virtually all aspects of life, not least in the scientific world, he succeeded against the odds. Inadequately prepared by his high school, he was accepted at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, as a sub-freshman, meaning that he had to take high-school courses concurrently with his freshman courses.

Majoring in chemistry, he graduated as valedictorian of his class in 1920. After graduation he taught chemistry at Fisk University for two years before winning an Austin Fellowship to Harvard University, where he completed a master’s degree in organic chemistry. After Harvard he returned to teaching at West Virginia State College and Howard University.

Unfortunately, I did not take a picture of the house.  But there are lots of pictures of Julian and of the house in Oak Park.  

The point of this being, that the family may lose the house because his daughter is having trouble paying the taxes.   From Chemical and Engineering News:

"The family home of Percy Lavon Julian sits on a corner lot in the Oak Park suburb of Chicago. Julian was already a renowned organic chemist when he bought the two-story stone house in 1950. His daughter, Faith Julian, remembers a time when the home was not just the center of their family life, but also a place where her father thrived as a scientist and entrepreneur until his death in 1975. Despite multiple racist attacks to push them out of the neighborhood, Percy Julian would not leave his home, she says. “My dad never wanted to move. He loved this house,” she says.

Now Faith is fighting to stay in the Oak Park home, where she still lives. Taxes, home repairs, and medical expenses have left Faith struggling to maintain ownership."

You can read more of the details at the link.

Frank Lloyd Wright is, rightfully, an icon in Oak Park, Illinois.  His house and the many buildings he designed and were built in Oak Park attract a lot of tourists.  

Like many important, but unsung Black American scientists, Julian's house and legacy are not as celebrated in Oak Park or other places  One would think that the city leaders of Oak Park could work with the Chemical community and Black organizations to work out a way to preserve the house and let his daughter live there as long as she wishes.  Certainly there are pharmaceutical corporations that have earned tens of millions of dollars if not much more, from his discoveries.  

This is precisely the sort of thing that people like Ron DeSantis are trying to make sure the students of Florida never know about. 

Here's an August 2023 Editorial at OakPark.com that offers some hope things will be positively resolved.