HNT...Home away from home

I have had a wonderful home away from home on my camping adventures. And it won't be an adventure if I didn't take pictures to share!

I have absolutely no idea how this picture happened but I didn't delete it b/c after looking at it I liked the "creepy" factor to it. This was night two at the Becoming an Outdoor Woman weekend. I was in my tent and asleep by 9 pm! I was beat! You can see the bags under my eyes even in this crazy shot!
I am loving my Eureka two person tent. I just need to figure out a few more weekends to use it yet this summer!
I'm tucked in for the night without the dog on this trip. Makes for a lot more room plus I only had a #50 backpack so not a lot of space to haul extras. I slept like a log this night though. And yes, you can still tell how chewed up my ankles are from the prior weekend plus all the new ones.

Happy HNT!

Taylor Mountain Caribou

The evening on top of Taylor Mountain is up there with the Iditarod on my Alaska experiences. The view was amazing and it was the first time I have seen more than one or two wild caribou at a time. Well worth the drive up the trail road to get there. Taylor Mountain is off of the Taylor Highway just south of Chicken, AK.

This was just one example of the enormous bull caribou walking next to the truck.

There they go.

Just beautiful!I could have sat all night watching this group.

WOW! BOW is amazing

I had a phenomenal weekend at the Department of Game and Fish Becoming an Outdoor Woman course. There will be plenty more to follow in terms of pictures and I have more from last weekend's Chicken trip too. However, I'm beat and am going to head to bed very soon. This was a shot from my Rappelling course. I think I have a new hobby!

Chicken, AK

Last weekend was time for another Alaska adventure. I had been on call for two weeks in a row and in one week saw nearly 100 patients. R&R was much needed. This summer's to do list included Chicken, AK and Valdez, AK. Chicken was the most inexpensive of these options so Chicken it was. Ruby and I left Fairbanks at 2:00 Friday afternoon.

Chicken, AK is 276 miles down the road from Fairbanks, north of the AlCan Highway. It is a former mining town home to around 400 people at it's peak. It was made famous in the book "Tisha" about a school teacher who went to work doing her best with the miner's children. Her school house still stands. The rest of the area is now a tourist attraction on the Taylor Highway as one heads north to Dawson Creek, Yukon Territory, Canada, home of the Klondike Gold Rush and tales by Jack London.


If one lives in a town called Chicken, one must have a sense of humor. The community was named as such after locals wished to name the community after the main food source, "Ptarmigan". Ptarmigan are a small grouse like bird which cooks up similar to grouse or pheasant. However, the locals could not come to agreement on how to spell Ptarmigan and settled for "Chicken". Chicken it has remained.

I have a new backcountry tent and a friend helped me find the perfect riverbank camp site.The river noise drowned out anything else and I was below the main bank so no one could see me. The morning view out the door was gorgeous.

































On Saturday morning I began a side trip to Boundary, AK which continued on to the Canadian border. It was only an additional 45 miles. The landscape was awe inspiring. I had no clue this mountain range existed. The area is home to the Yukon-Charley River National Preserve. The entire area around Chicken is crisscrossed by rivers feeding into the Yukon. In fact, for the last several weeks most of this gravel highway has been closed to travel secondary to severe flooding and washed out roads.



The area doesn't have a lot of trees once you get high up but the wild plants are still abundant.






















This is the gas station at Boundary. Sometimes there is gas and sometimes there isn't. George, a "local" originally from New Jersey operates a catch me all store that includes a cafe, a few spare parts, gas, and coffee.

This is one of the old original cabins of the area.

George directed me to Davis Dome. In former years thousands of caribou called this area home. It is miles and miles of rolling hills covered in tundra brush, cranberries, blueberries, and forget-me-nots. Ruby and I called it a good spot for lunch. The absolute quiet is mind boggling. It reaches a spot in your soul that doesn't get touched very often.

After a day of exploring along the road, Ruby and I tried our hand at gold panning. I sat along the river swishing and draining for an hour and a half without much luck. It was nice to sit and do a mostly mindless task while sitting in the sun along a bubbling stream though.

This is downtown Chicken. Local Sue runs the Emporium, Liquor Store, Saloon, and Cafe. If you are looking for a wide selection of Alaska books, this is where to stop. She has a wonderful collection and she is featured on her own post card too! Signs of the gold rush remain. An old gold dredge sits along one of the rivers. Many come in the summer to pan and there are even a few fully operational dredges elsewhere along the river.

Mosquito Fork was home for the weekend but camping elsewhere would have done nothing to decrease the level of bugs. I think the locals should have named the community "Fly" when they failed to spell "Mosquito".


































Before a nice lunch Ruby and I went to the Post Office to mail a few postcards. Robyn is the local post mistress and while I heard a lot about here I didn't get to meet her since I stopped in on Sunday.

This was great weekend and I have more to share. I got to see migrating caribou and have more amazing pictures of rolling mountains. Ruby had just as big of an adventure. Ten miles before getting to Chicken she jumped out of the window at 35 mph and got herself a bit of road rash. She played hardcore though and ten miles out of town on the way home I could hear her snoring from the back seat. That's one tuckered woofer!

HNT...Biten in Chicken

This weekend I went on a solo camping trip to Chicken, AK. It's a former mining town of up to 400 people at one time in history. The permanent summer population is around 17 and in the winter 6. I pitched my tent along one of the many river banks. It didn't matter that it was Mosquito Fork...the entire area was infested with mosquitoes after over 6 inches of rain. To say I got bitten in an understatement...

Look what I grew!

I saw this vegetable at the Farmer's Market last summer and this summer I just had to try to grow it :) It's called Romanesco. It is sort of a cauliflower and it is sort of a broccoli. I planted six of them and two never grew but the other four have been getting bigger and bigger leaves on them since the very first week. Today I went outside to check on the things (got stung by two different bees in the process) and discovered they are growing. Are they not just the strangest looking plant ever but at the same time just crazy cool?!?!

Adventure Planning

I don't recall many things about my marriage anymore that were good. As they say "hindsight is 20/20". However, there was one thing my ex-husband introduced me to that I will forever be grateful for. In October 1998 he drove me to the top of Going To The Sun Highway in Glacier National Park. A life long love affair began. That spring he took me to Yellowstone National Park on my very first camping trip. The love affair only deepened. In the five years we were together we spent many a night under dark star filled skies. I had never camped growing up. Once I was introduced to it, it was infectious. The marriage grew into something I didn't recognize but the love affair with the great outdoors continues. As a wedding gift to ourselves we bought each other new sports sunglasses and a Kelty 2 person backcountry tent. We spent five nights of our honeymoon in this tent. We camped at Many Glacier campground in Glacier National Park and did day hikes every single day. I saw my first grizzly bears on that trip. I didn't shower for five days on the trip. The Kelty Crestone 2 person tent is truly a tent for two ONLY if you truly know the person you are sleeping in it with. Two years later when the cheating bastard walked out on me, I could have cared less that he took the TV and DVR with him. The idiot took my Kelty tent and left me with no means to go camping.

Eight weeks later I graduated from PA school and needed to study for my board exam. My house was filled with pictures of the two of us on our wedding day. It was not a very conducive environment for studying. I was also scared to death to go camping by myself. I HAD to pass the boards though and I COULDN'T let him take all of "me" away. Dear friends loaned me a tent and I packed a cooler of food along with a backpack of study materials to head to Glacier. Half way there the park closed due to forest fires and still I wouldn't turn around. I found a state park near Big Fork, MT and I spent three days in my borrowed tent outlining the blueprint for my exams. I ate cold food and went to bed when the sun set and got up when it came up. Two weeks after my first solo adventure of camping I took my boards and became a certified PA.

After passing my boards, I spent money I didn't have and bought this cheap tent from Target. I then made my first solo trip to Glacier National Park. I didn't sleep a single wink the first night and I was convinced every sound I heard was a bear about to eat me alive out of my tent. The next day I hiked myself into exhaustion and then set at Lake McDonald Lodge journaling until I could barely keep my eyes open before returning to my tent and sleeping like a baby. Since then, I have solo camped several times in Glacier and my friend Rachel has kept me company on many more trips. Now Rachel is working at Sperry Chalet at the peak of Heaven in Glacier and I'm living in Alaska. Who would have guessed?

Last summer I did day trips about Alaska solo and entertained my aunt and a friend for two weeks but stayed in hotels. Alaska is big and wild. The animals are big and wild. The people are unique and sometimes wild. I wasn't sure enough of myself to take to my tent and camp. This summer, I know more. I know more people. I have a bigger to do list and less funds. Camping is what I can afford this summer. I'm home from a trip to see friends and family with summer time to enjoy yet in Alaska. I'm ready for the next adventure.


Friends talked me into taking a course sponsored by the Department of Game and Fish called "Becoming an Outdoor Woman", fondly referred to as BOW. It is a three day, woman's only weekend of workshops ranging from various fishing courses to boating classes to big game hunting to backpacking and climbing. I have a really nice back country 40 lb custom fit backpack. I have flown with it as luggage but never hiked with it. Therefore, the first class of the weekend for me will be Back Country Backpacking. The Great Outdoors Target tent is a great tent. It works for car camping. But when all packed it's heavy. Nearly 10 lbs packed up. Ten lbs packed into a back country pack takes up too much space and weighs too much.

While on vacation I went online and began the hunt for a inexpensive, one to two person, lightweight back country tent. EUREKA!! I found one. My new Eureka two-person back country tent packs down to just over 4 lbs in half the space the Great Outdoors does. It was waiting for me when I got home. Next weekend I am taking it on it's first adventure. Ruby and I are going to the Alaska metropolis of Chicken! Ask Lime what she thinks of the not so frequently asked questions link on the Chicken homepage. The summer population booms to an official 17 according to the US Census but the website says up to 50! There are still operating gold dredges, a few bluegrass festivals, a big river, and some odd Alaska adventures to be had there. I'm going for a T-Shirt.

Tonight I had to make sure I still remember how to set up my tent. They both went up and I think I'll be okay. They will both be always present in the back of the SUV and I don't know which one I'll sleep in next weekend but in two weeks the Eureka will fit snugly in my pack for my back country hike.

Adventures to be had, there are!

Saturday night crafting

Summer Saturday's have been rainy for the last month. Monday morning rolls around and it's gorgeous outside minus the forest fire smoke. Today was no exception. Around 200 am this morning it started raining. It kept raining. I got up at 9:30 and it was still raining. I poured a cup of coffee and crawled back into bed to read. Somewhere around 11:00 I fell back to sleep and got up again at 1:00. Ruby and I went into town to get groceries and then get her nails trimmed. The sun was shining and it was nice out.

4:00 rolled around and it got really dark outside. The rain started with a burst of thunder and the heavens opened. I gave up on the TV because it was so loud on the tin roof I couldn't turn the volume up loud enough to hear it. The lightening got really close and there as one crack of simultaneous lightening and thunder which literally shock the house. I shut the windows, turned on the lights, and started working on some cards. The storm only last for about a half hour but with it and the intermittent cloud bursts over the last 24 hours my garden water holding tank is now half full.

July 1st was the start of the new catalog for Stampin' Up with new colors and new stamps. I used the new set Apple Blossom to make these two cards. They were fun! Now I have a few notes to write to all those that I got to spend a little time with while I was home. Tomorrow going to try to grill out with some friends, maybe the sun will stay out. If not, I can always work on a few more indoor projects.

Senses

I'm taking the time to stay home this weekend. My original plans at the beginning of the week were to head to Denali National Park this weekend to camp at Riley Creek Camp ground. By Friday my suitcases from vacation were still on the bedroom floor fully packed. I decided maybe I should stay home and catch up. I have my suitcases completely unpacked, all the bedding washed and put back on the beds, and now I'm sitting with my feet up enjoying the things my senses are taking the time to feel.

The last three days have been extremely hot for Alaska summers. When I was in SD it was 100 degrees with 20 mph winds. I was looking forward to being back in the North country. Well Friday it hit 90 degrees at my house. So much for that theory. This morning has made that all better. I'm in my bathrobe enjoying a fresh brewed cup of coffee. I can hear the rustle of the leaves outside with a light breeze. I can smell the wet grass from last night's light rain which brought a break in the temps. I can feel the breeze on my bare legs. The sun is out and the day is bright. My animals are lounging around with me. Spread out and enjoying the breeze as it rolls through the house.

I think I'm going to leave today to my senses. Days like this confirm why I love living here.

HNT...Sisters

Guess which set of gams lives in Alaska...
Happy HNT!

My girls

People have asked me if I came home for anything special. The answer is yes. I came home to work Grandma's Marathon. I started working the finish line medical tent after a college friend died at the finish of the Chicago Marathon. This year was a bit rough because we had a death in our tent; not my patient but that of another volunteer I know well. The other reason I came to visit was for these two little pumpkins! I came at Christmas to "babysit" Miss Quincey because in spite of being born on my birthday I didn't get to see her until she was over a year old. Well, Miss Q has a brand new baby sister, Kenley Grace, who I had to come see as well. I have spent the last few days doting on these little ones.


Quincey has always loved books but now she "reads" them to herself. She found both Spot's for me when I asked her where Spot was. She is also in a front facing car seat since I was here at Christmas. Much easier to hand her french fries that way. We went over the pass today to drop her off at Grandma and Grandpa's camp site so her mom and I could go to lunch.

Quincey didn't take a morning nap so she was a bit indecisive about what to do come the time to leave her. She was appropriately distracted by her farm animals.

After lunch at the Windbag with a huge piece of mud pie, Heather and I went back to the house and this is how i spent the afternoon. Not a bad way to spend vacation at all. Kenley loves to be held and snuggles. She makes really cute little baby snores too.


She is just starting to be able to "smile" for us at 4 weeks old. There is a near identical picture of the above of Quincey when she was that age. She was a happy baby this afternoon and after a midafternoon bottle she feel fast asleep propped up in the corner with her hands daintily crossed. These girls will steal a few hearts! I love them like real nieces.