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.

DURCKIES!

A few people have wondered about what kind of animals I've been working with in my new amazing 'Aviculturist' position at the Alaska SeaLife Center. I'm in the eider position, which means I help take care of our endangered eider duck species. Above is a male Steller's Eider, which has had about a 96% decline and is very very endangered. We have two research flocks: one of Steller's eiders and one of Spectacled eiders. They're research birds which provide us with a lot of information we didn't previously have about these endangered ducks. We have the wonderful position of being really the only facility in the world that can breed and research this very pretty bird! And being that it's breeding season, we've got over 30 Steller's eggs right now, not all of which we'll be hatching. We have 6 currently incubating, so hopefully in about 22 days, we'll have some baby Steller duckies! I have limited picture space on my blog, so I'm only showing you the male spectrum of the Eider duckies. This is a male Spectacled Eider. They're really my favorite duck because not only do they have spectacles from the minute they're born (much like I had spectacles from a very early age) they also have green mullets! The females are also a very pretty duck, with chocolate brown coloration. They're very large sea ducks, and can dive very deeply, which is rare overall in duck species. Most ducks, although waterfowl that spend a substantial portion of their lives on the water, can only pivot, not dive, in the water. But see how big his feet are? He can swim super well with them! This is a spectacled eider egg in a nest box! We currently have 4 eggs incubating that should hopefully hatch in about 9 days. I can't tell you how excited I am for the super cute little ducklings!! 

This is a picture from our aviary: a rhinocerous auklet! They're super cute sea birds, which we use for public presentations and whatnot. They're very good at standing on my hand!  And this is a very cute little horned puffin! He is another bird that we're able to utilized for educational presentations. And he's soooo cute! 

Just wanted to update everyone a little on what I was doing. Hope you enjoy!

We're gold-diggers, yo

Ah, Tyler and the man-mobile. Question: How many man things can you find in the bed of our truck? How many woman things? There's at least one of each....but yes, manness most definatly wins. Chainsaws, guns, augers, all the things an Alaskan man needs to bring home the family necessities, the three "F's": Fire, Fish, and Food. 

We've had amazing weather the past few days, and Tyler and I were lucky enough to have a day off together. We decided to head for Cooper Creek, the closest area to us that's supposed to have decent gold panning. We met quite an amazing man in the campground last summer when we were living between various tent sites. His name is Robert, and he's the quinticential Alaskan gold panner with the long grey beard, aviator sunglasses, and a bicycle to ride anywhere he may need. He spent last summer living in Seward in his tent, collecting derelict (or lost) fishing gear at low tide. He'd shine it up and sell it from his tent. This, of course, intrigued Tyler, and the two of them struck it off straight from the bat, having plenty of conversations regarding fishing in Resurection Bay. We soon found out that one of Robert's favorite pastimes is gold panning, and Tyler soaked up all gold digging information he could get. Robert left at the end of last summer, and graced us with camping and fishing equipment galore, not to mention another bicycle! So, when Robert showed up in town about 3 weeks ago, we were both quite excited to see him! He gifted some gold pans, and showed Tyler where to go on the map. After about a week, he decided to skip town and head back to Oregon, so we ended up with his slush box, and two pairs of cross country skis, boots, and poles! We were sad to see him go so soon, but greatful for the toy additions!  We headed towards Cooper's Creek and found a wonderful spot to camp the first night, right on a lake teeming with baby trout. You can see the mountains behind me, too...quite a beautiful day! And so warm---we'd gotten above 70 that day! The next morning we woke up, went to breakfast at a wonderful hotel/lounge in Kenai, then began our day of gold panning. You can see Tyler using the slush box above. The idea is to pile river gravel on top of it and let the river's current work the gold out of the gravel. It was a little difficult to get the hang of--we only got three flakes out of it, but I'm sure if properly used we would have harvested more.  This is Tyler with the gold pan. Here, the idea is to pile a bunch of gravel onto the pan, then start sorting and shaking until you're left with all the heavy materials on the bottom. Gold is heavier than most rock you're sifting through, so if you shake the pan with water in it, the gold will sift to the bottom.  Here's Tyler getting water in his gold pan to sift the rocks some more. We did get some gold flakes this way. It's exciting to think there's gold just hanging out in the river and we can actually find it! However, our find was anything but glorious for all the hours of work we put into it :o). We'll have to perfect our technique and try again. 

Days of the Dead

This picture was taken just before the herring started spawning in the small boat harbor. Notice the time of day: it's dark and we're getting closer and closer to the solstice, which means this was taken at about 12:30am. He had seen them earlier in the day, so we of course had to share the excitement and take our friends fishing. At midnight. Tyler will fish anytime, anywhere, so long as there's a body of water in front of him. My goal is to fool him with a puddle one day.  His vigor does indeed pay off, though! He brought home a limit of sea-bright red salmon two nights ago! They've just started running, so there are still a lot of tastey bright ones out there. Don't they look it?  The weather that day was very Sewardian: windy, rainy, chilly. But through the dreary weather, Tyler fished on for 2 hours at the banks of the river, and another hour filleting and cleaning the fish at home. We had tried unsuccessfully the day before in similar weather. To get to the fishing location, you have to wade through the river, so hip waders are a neccessity. I, however, did not want to spend $50 on waders to go fishing. So, being resourceful, I dawned my wetsuit and booties, waded the river, and although I was wet, I stayed nice and warm (although not quite toasty). I did get a few funny looks for being the girl on the beach with a fishing pole and a wet suit, though.  We made fresh Alaskan Salmon Sushie that evening! Me oh my, tastier than pumpkin pie! You can't get sushi fresher than that, and Tyler did a wonderful job cutting it up. We served it wrapped in cabbage and cucumber. He caught a few females, so we had fresh salmon caviar as well. Oh, the tastiest meal in a long time! Fresh salmon sushi is most definatly yummier than fresh clams. Thank you Tyler!  Now for a random work picture: Can you tell what it is? I'll give you a hint....it's cut open from a necropsy done on it that afternoon! It has flippers! And a very large head that was cut off and turned upside down! It's brown on the outside, red, white, and blue on the inside! That's right--a big ol' male stellar sea lion! Somebody reported a dead bloated sea lion on the other side of the bay, so the SeaLife Center picked it up to do a necropsy on it to determine cause of death. They cut it up yesterday on the beach right in front of the center, deciding it died from a blood clot caused by a long term infection. Then they tied it up to the docks so it wouldn't float away, but would decay some more. Somebody probably wants the bones. Yummy. Sea Lion stew anyone? We also got our first rehab animal in for the summer on the same day, a female Spectacled Eider, which just so happens to be the same species I work with! Exciting, huh?