Fall Riding, Moose, Ice, Rainbows and a little Bromance

It was a weekend of riding, but somehow I didn't get any pictures of anyone on bikes. Saturday a bunch of us headed out in the chilly morning up the powerline trail for a mellow social ride to Green Lake

My friends are so colorful...

 

Green Lake was completely frozen over. This is about the only time of year that you can see this lake frozen. In a week or so it will be covered in snow.

 

The moose were out all over the place, including this bull not too far off the trail. He was accompanied by four others. Another bull, a cow and two babies.

Today we rode from my friend Emmy's house, behind the ball fields, up to the STA trails and then a fun ride all the way back down. The puglsey handled the frozen bumps and roots pretty well. Not as easy to maneuver as my Dos Niner, but not too bad either.

We cut through an area I have never been through before and found this...

Joe giving himself some lovin on Bromance rock.

And these are my cats...

 

I know. Most random post ever. But fall is kind of like that in Alaska. You never know what you are going to find. Ice, Snow? Wind, Rain? It's an interesting and unpredictable time of year.Of course we are all waiting for the snow to come, but sometimes you just have to roll with what you get.

Crabapples, Raspberries, Muffins, Yum

It's no secret that I like to bake. Mostly, I like to eat baked goods. When I am having a craving for a pastry, instead of running out to the bakery, I just make whatever it is that I want to eat.

For the most part I have all of the ingredients I need on hand to make the things that I crave. Butter, sugar, flour, chocolate, eggs. Yep that's about all you need. But I also like using ingredients that grow in the backyard, or that we pick out in the wild.

This year Brian formed an obsession with picking berries. I made raspberry crisp, raspberry nectarine crisp, raspberry pie, raspberry jam, blueberry banana muffins, blueberry pie, and so on. Late in the season we still had a lot of raspberries, but I was all raspberried out so we froze a ton of them.

The trick to freezing berries is to lay them out on a baking sheet and put them in the freezer. That allows them to hold their shape and prevents them from squishing together to form a giant raspberry block. After a few hours you can take them out and put them in baggies. Then you can use only a few at a time, or a whole bag, depending on what you are making.

Today I was looking for a sourdough recipe in my Cooking Alaskan book and ran across a recipe for Crabapple Sauce. Who knew you could eat them? So I got a ladder and my ice axe (to pull the branches down) and headed out back to collect a bunch of crab apples.

Cooked them down, and made applesauce with them. It was a bit tart and I could only eat a few spoonfuls, so I decided to make muffins out of them.

I have been trying out vegan muffin recipes lately, not because I am vegan, but because I haven't had any eggs in the house and wanted to bake something. Turns out you don't need eggs to bake. You can use applesauce or mashed bananas. Yum.


So here's the recipe I came up with by combining a few of the recipes I have used lately.

2 cups whole wheat pastry flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
Pinch of cinnamon
1 cup sugar
3/4 cup applesauce
1/4 cup canola oil
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup frozen or fresh raspberries

1. Preheat the oven to 325º  Place muffin liners in muffin pans (approx. 12-16 muffins) or grease them with Pam.
2. Combine the flour, salt, baking soda and cinnamon.
3. In a large bowl mix applesauce with the sugar, oil and vanilla.
4. Add the dry ingredients to the liquid mixture and mix.
5. Gently fold in the raspberries.
6. Fill muffin cups 2/3 full.
7. Bake for 25-30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Tada! Muffins! It would probably be a good idea to let them cool first, because the raspberries will burn your tongue.

More Summer: Mount McGinnis

Rewind back to June, when we were in Juneau. I'm finding it really hard to go back and write about trips we did in June, but want to get the photos on here, so here goes.

On Day two in Juneau we woke up to tea and delicious sourdough pancakes, made by Ben's mom. Ben told us stories of all of the peaks he had climbed in the area and beyond, which was pretty much every peak on the map. The peaks he hadn't climbed he already had a route planned out. He was back in Juneau for the summer and was going to spend most of his time climbing before he headed back to school in Anchorage in August.

He gave us about ten options for great day hikes. We decided on Mount McGinnis because the hike started by paralleling the Mendenhall Glacier, which we wanted to visit while we were in Juneau.

The hike started out at Mendenhall Lake. It was hot and sunny again. I think it got up to 80 degrees during this hike. I drank three liters of water in about three hours and then did the rest of the hike without any.

 

For the first few miles the hike is in the trees, but after about thirty minutes we started to see glimpses of the glacier as we climbed.

Eventually we came out onto the ridge where we needed to turn left and start scrambling. At this time we had a great view of the glacier. We could see people down below and heard helicopters flying back and forth all day. This is kind of a noisy hike on a day that a cruise ship is in town. People get off the ship and get in a helicopter and get flown out to the glacier.

Because we ended up visiting all of the towns in Southeast where the cruise ships stop, this became a theme of our trip. We felt bad for tourists who only get to stop in town for a day and never really get to see Alaska the way we do.

Cruises are great for people who want to pay a ton of money and don't want to do any planning on their own, but if you have the time and are on a budget I would recommend traveling by ferry. You can travel from town to town on your own schedule, talk to the locals (most of them don't really like the cruise ships coming to their towns, so we found the locals were nicer to us, and they travel by ferry themselves so you meet them along the way), and you have time to really explore the surrounding areas.

We turned left up the ridge and had a fun scramble on solid granite until we arrived back in the trees.

We were now well above where most people stop and turn around on this hike, it started to feel like we might be in bear territory. Then we saw this...

Out of the trees and into the snow...

We stopped just short of the summit again because we had gone over an hour past our turn around time and were planning on getting to the ferry at 5pm.

View from our turnaround point...

Off to Sitka for an overnight ferry ride...

Falling Water Valley

Brian and I wanted to do a new hike, but didn't have the energy to climb a peak so we took Niko and Guiness, my friend Trish's dog, out for a hike in Falling Water Valley to check out the fall colors.

The doggies had fun running around on the tundra...

 

So excited that the snow is coming...

 

Taking a break to figure out what peaks we are looking at, and planning future trips...

 

I guess I would call this hike a pleasant walk on rolling tundra. We didn't gain any significant elevation and it was pretty easy going.

 

The fall colors were everywhere. I love the contrast between the oranges and yellows with the stark white snow at this time of year.

We saw more sheep this summer than any other. My camera does a pretty good job of zooming, these sheep were at least a half mile away.

 

Eventually we reached the snowline. Yippeeeeee!

 

We took note of some fun looking skiing slopes for future winter trips.

 

Guiness napping in the snow. Actually that's not true, I made her pose for this.

 

We made good time once we turned around and headed back down the valley. We took a lot of breaks and walked leisurely up the valley and it still only took four and a half hours round trip. Can't wait to explore this valley on skis.

 

I can't believe it's October already. This is the time of year we usually try to get stuff done around our house, getting ready for winter and doing some cleaning that we have neglected all summer, but the hiking has been so good, I think we'll just live with the messy house.

White Mountain Bound Again

Just signed up for the White Mountain 100 Race for 2011. Finishers from last year got a chance to pre-register a few days early and judging by the overwhelming positive reaction to the race last year, we guessed it would fill up pretty quickly.

So we sat with our laptops and hit refresh until the Register Now button showed up at exactly 12 am. Yes, pretty sad, but we didn't want to risk it.

We are in! I have actually been riding my Pugsley for the past week because my other bike is broken and I haven't had time to fix it.

I rode it out the Powerline Trail one day after work last week to climb Ptarmigan Peak and had a blast coming back in the dark on the Pugsley. I forgot how it just rolls over everything.

Winter is almost here!

Catching up and Mount Jumbo

I have a lot to catch up on with this blog. I thought about not sharing my summer experiences and just picking it up now, in September, only blogging about things moving forward. But I realized that we did a lot this summer and I want to share it and document it.

Plus I have some photos I want to share. And I didn't realize how much I missed blogging until I started writing again last week.

I guess I will pick up where I left off. May was a busy month for me. We had such nice weather that I was out rock climbing a couple of times a week, and even did my first rock lead. But as I suspected my interest in rock climbing waned after I hit all the regular spots.

Brian and I went on a two week vacation and when we came back we had six straight weekends of trips planned. That combined with bike training and there just wasn't any time to climb.

We took two weeks off at the beginning of June to tour Southeast Alaska by ferry and then headed up to the Yukon for some mountain biking.

After our one way flight to Juneau we stayed with our friend Ben's parent's in Douglas. I think I like the Douglas side better than the Juneau side. You can watch the cruise ships come down the channel and park themselves at a safe distance on the OTHER side of the water. You can hike out on the beach and it's quiet. I don't think tourists make it over there. It feels more like a community and less like a tourist town. I imagine that's what all of the Juneau area is like in the winter.

We decided to head up Mount Jumbo because it was close and we only had about 4 hours before dinner. I now understand why our friend Ben is such a strong and fast hiker. You step out of town onto the trail in Douglas and you immediately start going straight up.

We climbed up through the forest for about 45 minutes and then came out to this boardwalk and the blaring sun. It was about 75 to 80 degrees for our entire stay in the Southeast. A nice change from what we are used to in Anchorage, but not ideal hiking weather.

There was still quite a bit of snow towards the top. We decided to turn around when we were almost to the top because we didn't want to be late for dinner, but we did get some great views of Juneau before heading back down.

My favorite part of the hike was this meadow of wildflowers about half way up.

That night after dinner we hiked along the beach in front of the house.

The next day we decided to try to climb Mount McGinnis before having to catch the ferry to Sitka, more on that to come..

The New Look!

If you regularly read blogs through Google Reader or some other RSS Feed subscription program, come over and check out the new look of my blog!

I'm really impressed with the upgrades that have been made to Blogger lately. I was considering moving over to wordpress and designing my own theme, but Blogger now makes it really easy to customize your blog and really make it your own.

Now all I need is a new name. The title doesn't really make sense anymore. I stole it from that stupid advertisement for Alaska back in 2005. It was meant to scare my friends and relatives into coming up to visit. I really don't like it, but am horrible at naming things, so it has stayed the same over the years.

Any suggestions?

Above the fog on Flattop

This summer we had choices to make. We could sit inside and wait for it to stop raining, or we could head out in search of better weather. We chose the latter for the most part. If we couldn't find better weather we just played in the rain. And we had a blast.

Last week Anchorage was covered in fog for a few days straight. The cool thing about Anchorage and fog is that you usually don't have to go very far to rise above it.

Jill, Heather and I drove up out of the fog to Glen Alps to hike up Flattop, because we heard rumors of great weather up there.



And we had some of the most spectacular views from Flattop ever.

People complain about the weather in Alaska a lot, but the unpredictability of the weather is what I love most about living here. If it were sunny and warm all of the time I would be bored.

And I wouldn't get to have days like this.

Nancy Lakes Canoe Trail

Niko is kind of a nervous dog. He shies away from anything new that he deems scary. He hates the water, but Brian and I thought it was time to test out his sea legs.

Next summer we plan on taking some time off to travel around Alaska and some of the trips we have planned involve boats. So this Saturday we headed up to Nancy Lakes and rented a Canoe to see if we could get Niko in it.

We thought it would be a disaster. Niko would most likely not want to get into the boat, then we'd force him in, he'd pull his stiff leg move that he uses when I try to give him a bath, eventually we'd get him into the boat and he would tremble the whole time all the while trying to find a way out.

It didn't exactly go like that.

He got in the canoe on his own, with only a small bit of trepidation...




And off we sailed into the fog...



The trail consists of eight miles, fourteen lakes, and thirteen portages. Each time we neared land, Niko would get ready to dismount. He'd jump out, we'd carry the canoe to the next spot and he'd jump back in.




Inside the boat he laid down and even took a nap.



Sometimes he'd hear a loon calling and stand up, but Brian would start to gently rock the boat and Niko would lay back down.



It could not have gone more smoothly. Here he is practicing his zen canoe Buddhism. He really wants to jump at that dragonfly, but he is restraining himself. Impressive.



Niko "tundra dog" is more versatile than we thought.

An American Wedding

I think my sister got it right. Have the ceremony amongst a small group of close family on a remote island in the Caribbean, relax and enjoy the actual day. Then come back to your home town, invite everyone and part-ee, part-ee, part-ee.

One of the great things about hosting your wedding reception in your backyard is that you don't have to go home at 10pm when the time is up, you can make (almost) as much noise as you want, and you don't have to worry about staining the carpet. Okay that's three things. How does the song go.. Have you ever been to American Wedding... non of that applies here.

I spent most of last week setting up for my sister's wedding reception, which was held in the backyard of the house I grew up in. I would work on the reception by day, and visit friends at night. Every time I come home I worry that things won't be the same, or things won't be as fun as they were the last time, but then I see my friends and family and realize it just keeps getting better.

The party was a huge success, with almost 100 people in my mom's backyard, a tent, catering from a great Italian restaurant, a band, and cops showing up to tell us to keep it down. In my opinion if the cops don't show up, something went horribly wrong.



We danced all night to the band until the cops showed up. One of the neighbors had complained that we were too loud. But one of my best friends husbands, who is also a cop, went and talked to them to smooth things over and let the band play a few more songs.




I thought it was a good idea...



Now it's catching on...



By the way, the song they were dancing too, was "Grow Old with You" by Adam Sandler...



This picture looks harmless, but after the slow song, they sped it up and the less than sober people started dancing quickly with the candles in their hands and risked spraying hot wax all over everyone. I had to run around and pry them from their hands.

Congrats to the happy couple!



Thanks to Kate for all the great photos, even though we yelled at you for making us pose and blinding us with your unnaturally bright flash, we love you for documenting our lives for the past 25 years.