The Frosted Pagans

November is here, and brought the icy cold with it. For Halloween, we decided to tromp through the woods like good little Hallow's-Eve spirits. Seward was in the high 30's, but by the time we got 25 miles out of town, everything was covered in a thick frost, like this little plant.

It was a beautiful fall day, and our first day hiking around in freezing temps. These logs were all covered in chonchs.

We were hiking around Trail Lake.

This frozen lake puddle is a wonderful example of solid water geometry. Ah...science in action!

This salmon had died on the edge of the lake. The perfect Halloween Zombie!

We found a large broken up puddle on the trail. Since we had the guns, we decided to have a shootin match at the ice chunks. When you hit them, they explode in what sounds like a shattering of glass.

I like to eat ice. mmm.

After a long romp in the woods, we came back to the house with grand plans of getting dressed up and hitting the town for Halloween. The romping had exhausted us, so we layed down for a nap only to wake up and find that our mold problem, which has moved us to the living room and out of the bedroom, has now travelled to the living room. So we're now surrounded by the mold. Ewe. In our exhausted state, we decided to end Halloween with an "Evil Pizza". He's about to spit on us.

Novemer 3rd brought our first real snow! Look, the Spectacled Eiders like to eat it! We've reached winter, and the darkness has set in. Here comes our 6 months of cold!

hares and crows, just hares and crows.

Fall hasn't been a particularly eventful time for us. We did get one beautiful day of sunshine clouds a couple weeks ago that gave opportunity for some interesting pictures. I went beach coming with my camera , and while standing in the middle of a sea-level cloud, these crows swarmed around me. They crowed and crahed to each other between the flaps of wing beats, and as soon as they finished surrounding me, they were off to swarm a log down the beach.

Farther down the beach, the fog clouds parted. A perfect fall day.

That same week Tyler blasted his first snowshoe hare! I was proud of the hunter, and we savored the meat Hassenpfeffer style. The hare soaks in a wine/vinegar marinade for 3 days in order to tenderize the meat, then there's about 2 hours worth of cooking time to serve the dinner. We were both afraid that after all that effort, my German meal wouldn't turn out. But the hare was delectable! We made it a complete German meal with dill potatoes and rotkraut...the Steinmetzers would have been proud. :o)

Fungal Frollics

We spent most of our August/September trying to harvest as many different things as possible. We unfortunately were unable to fill our cornucopia with wilderness harvests this year, but did manage to find a few new fungi for the table. I thought I would start our mushroom blog with a very Alaskan mushroom: the Alaskan Gold. There is a fine gold powder all over this mushroom which immediately covers your fingers when you pluck the mushroom. It's the mushroom that gave Alaskans "Gold Fever" ;o) The above pictured mushroom is not quite table-worthy, although people with super human stomachs have been known to eat this variety and feel no nausea.

This grouse, however is QUITE table-worthy! Its dark meat has become one of my favorites.

While Tyler shot birds, I found mushrooms. This is a "hedgehog mushroom".

This is the underside of the hedgehog mushroom. You can see the tooth-like underparts that give the mushroom its name. This mushroom is quite delectable. We made a wonderful shrimp mushroom scampi.

Conch shells abound in these Alaskan woods! In Washington, I always felt super lucky when I found a large conch, but here it's not uncommon to find tree swarmed by them. This tree was covered in them, and apparently a smallish mammal overtook its hill of a root system, as well. Ecosystem: 2 Tree: 0

This is what our kitchen table looked like for the better part of a month. We were constantly on the prowl for mushies. I would often go after work on my favorite just-out-of-town mushy trails to find new species to ID. In order to properly ID mushrooms, you have to place the cap on a sheet of white paper for a few hours. The cap drops its spores, which create a fungal fingerprint. Each species has a unique sporeprint. So, while some species can look very similar, and one will make you severely ill and other won't, you can use spore prints to ensure it won't kill you! I find it exciting.

We hiked out to Troop Lake in September. It's only a couple miles off the road, and there's a great aluminum boat complete with one ore about 2 ft long. We took it on the lake, but the fish didn't bite.

On shore at Troop Lake someone built a tarp/stick shelter. I think it's nicer than our apartment.

Is the squirrel sleeping or dead...I bet you can figure that one out!

We love fungus! As long as it's not growing in our walls....

Steinmetzer Round 2

We stopped at one of the few places with wide sandy beaches in Alaska and did some good ol' famliy clam diggin! We were blessed with a beautiful blue sky for our day of mudskipping, too! Tyler found this Pacific Sandfish while we were diggin--he's a MONSTER for a sandfish! Once he put the fish back on the sand, it dug down and was completely burried in less than 5 seconds. I once again attempted what all siblings across the world have attempted since the dawn of sibling-time...to stab my sister in the neck. With a moose antler. Sadly, I missed the jugular and she lived to stab me back. We hiked to Exit Glacier. This glacier is only about 10 miles from our apartment. And everyone had super fun climbing up to it!! And here are the Steinmetzers, surrounded by birdies, specifically puffins. No, this is not an Alfred Hitchcock movie...these birds are much more well behaved. One even fell in love with Deanna and tried to be whisked away romantically on her shoulder. Those cute little googly-eyes almost won her heart over, I'm sure.

To cap the visit off, we had a bonfire by the apartment. Tyler got a super amazing collapsible fishing rod from my parents for his birthday, so of course had to try it out as fast as possible. It's made more for freshwater fishing than surf casting, though, and his efforts were fruiteless. However, it should be a nice pole for the upcoming ice fishing season!

It was wonderful having the family out for a visit, and of course we were all sad to part ways. Help me convince them to move the catering business up here ;o). I think everyone enjoyed their little Alaskan experience!

Steinmetzer visit Round 1

Ma and Pa Steinmetzer came for a visit with Sister Deanna this August. We had great fun showing them the Alaskan wilds!!!!

We showed them the woods around town, and this beautiful amenita muscaria was at one of our trailheads. Mushrooms abounded for their trip! It was the perfect week for mushroom picking in Seward, so we brought home more than one bag of mushrooms to identify over their stay. Our little apartment was overrun with fungus and family.

At the end of the trail, a bridge crosses a stream. Virtually every stream in Alaska is a salmon stream, so Ma and Pa are dutifully watching the drama of Salmon Smackdown taking place in the spawning bed below. As males fight for females, they chase and bite each other in a much more epic and gruesome war than

any Ultimate Fighting Championship battle you'd see from your couch on the telly. More mushies!! These are some king boletes along the trail. We picked them, and were all quite excited to try them for dinner. They're a large and very choice edible, but Tyler and I had yet to actually find them and try them. Unfortunately, when we cut them open to finish the ID process at home, we found the maggots had already made their way inside the mushroom. Sadly, we had no harvest fo

r the family to try. Deanna and I went on a hike by ourselves while my parents went fishing. We came across three moose swimming across a pond only about 3 miles from our apartment. Swim, moosies, swim!

We spent a few days on the other side of the penninsula in Homer, where we saw our very first Alaskan slugs! We had always been told that slugs couldn't live this far north, but there they were, those 3 inch long little beauties. Oh, the slimey things we miss about Washington...

We ended up with AMAZING weather while there and took this nice fresh family portrait. A very Alaskan view, I think.

Summer Synopsis

I know, I know, we've been terrible about updating our blog since the start of last summer. We're just too happily busy with our time off! So, I am hoping to briefly sum up our fun turbo speed summer, and I assure you the dreary dark of the winter months will promote a more post-savvy Barenjager.

Berry picking is an essential part of being Alaskan. Every time we venture to the woods, we bring a bag for any goodies we might fine, so we did plenty of berry picking this summer. Here, we're on Lost Lake trail, just outside of Seward. We found blueberries, raspberries, and watermelon berries on the trail, all of which ended up in a very stuffed sack by the end of the excursion. Deanna and I ended up making a delicious wild berry meringue pie with it when she was here for the family visit!

Tyler shows off his man-berries. Yes, those are penises. Yes, you can chew them up and swallow them. Our good friends Sara and Chad got married this summer, and as the only bridesmaid actually living in Alaska, I threw the bridal shower. No bridal shower is complete without a penis of some sort, at least you can eat these! I made most of the food for the wedding. These were some carmelized onion pinweels. I even made the pastry dough from scratch! I didn't realize how time consuming that project would be--I don't recommend it, even though the handmade dough turned out far superior to the store bought variety. Homemaking it just isn't worth it. The food was a hit, and we had a good party! I didn't take many pictures the day of the wedding, but here I am with the bride. Worshipping her loveliness, of course. They married on top of an Alaskan mountain....quite beautiful!

Adventure Summer!

Here I am crouched over a 5 gallon bucket (free from NAPA), in a camp chair (free from transient campers) plucking a free range spruce grouse. Spruce grouse is damn tasty, very dark for a bird, with a slight tinny flavor and hints of saffron and llama.

Way too proud, but hey this is big game according to how this year is going, damn you Fortuna. Cool burgundy colored bolete, some of the boletes up here are almost black! Blue bruisin, a nice contrast to the warm ochre underside of this mushroom cap. Tyler's mom came to visit this July and we enjoyed the greater Kenai Peninsula's sights. Here we are in Nikiski at the Rusky Orthodotsky Churchy. Babies here are born with full beards and are baptised in vodka.A trail near moose pass AK. The plant we see in the foreground here is monkshood. A poisonous plant that was utilized by the natives as poison to tip the darts of there atl-atls to kill humpbacks and other whales. Did i mention it's free. Free gold for the taking!!! OK, so we didn't find any this time, but we have found flakes here before. someday I'm gonna strike it rich enough to get a new tattoo. A tattoo of a shovel and a pick axe of course. A secret pond with a rustic looking picnic table i hand hewed for the occasion. Around the campfire this night while i was sipping on a cool MGD a beaver actually climbed out of the water, to within 4' of my ankles so that he could cut a choice piece of alder. I have two witnesses to this event, booyah. There was also a loon nest amongst the lily pads in the background. A forestfirey sunset. It was a rather dry summer after a wet summer the year before, thus we had 300 forest fires in the state by mid july.