Tales of Bears and Brooklyn
9 - 11 August, Ian
Earlier this week we returned to Chena Hot
Springs Road, where we'd previously seen eight moose. This time we saw (only)
two; our main purpose, though, was to head along the Angel Rocks Trail, which is
a 3.5 mile walk through the woods. I was rather hoping to see a bear, although
Paula and the girls were less enthusiastic. There is plenty of advice around
regarding what to do if you find a bear in your path. One strategy that's
widely advocated is to curl into the foetal position and play dead. The other
strategy, equally widely advised, is to make lots of noise ("bang pots and pans"
they all say - better advice for campers than hikers), "make yourself look big"
and under no circumstances back off. This really is quite a choice and it's
difficult to see how you would hover between the two options. Having said that,
a booklet from the Tourist Office does advise that you play dead but if the bear
persists in attacking you then you fight aggressively for survival, trying to
aim blows at the face, nose and eyes. Hmm. We also have materials that advise
you to discern the motivation of the bear in deciding whether to play dead or be
aggressive: if the bear is threatening you because it "feels defensive" then the
foetal thing is better, whereas if the bear is in a hunting frame of mind you're
best to stand up for yourself. Seems like a tricky discrimination to make if
you're being attacked by a fast-moving 12 foot tall
carnivore.
Apparently there's a timely new documentary film out by Werner Herzog about an alcoholic mad guy who had a fixation on bears and eventually got himself mauled to death. We want to see it - have you?
We've also just planned an overnight trip to one of the big National Parks here, and one of the main attractions is the possibility of seeing a bear. You can't drive far into the Park yourself so we had to choose between catching one of the shuttles converted from old yellow school buses or paying a lot more money for a more luxurious tour bus. We chose the former and I hope to describe it when we've been. But in our fact-finding everyone looked at me as though I was nuts when I asked if we can actually get off the bus/coach to take photo's if we see a bear. It seems that you can't, although you may be able to if you see moose, which everyone says are equally dangerous. Doesn't it seem unlikely to you that a bear would charge a bus-load of tourists taking snaps? And if it did, surely someone could squirt it with bear spray. (This is a variant of pepper spray that they really do sell and which apparently works.)
Anyhow, we didn't see a bear on the Angel Rocks Trail, although the knowledge that black bears actually live in the dense forest added to the atmosphere. In the depths of the trees the path is soft and springy underfoot from pine needles and mosses and there is a perfection to the boreal calm. At the higher elevations the path breaks above the tree line to reach granite outcrops that have become a recurrent feature of our past few months to offer panoramic views across the Chena valley. There is a longer walk, some 15 miles with much greater ascent and descent, that I'd like to do but which is probably a bit of a stretch for us.
The only other mammals we saw before we got back to the car were a nice couple from New York State, though there were plenty of butterflies including some cute swallowtails. Zoe also took a photograph of a wolf print. Despite knowing that wolves live in the forest, I was initially dubious about whether it wasn't just a dog (simple, common explanations being right more often than exotic ones) but I've been convinced (the text-book correspondence to the animal print guides, the long claws, the fact that it was crossing rather than following the track). We'll include it in her newsletter later this month.
In this blog I try to keep my facts accurate but with none of my books here I do sometimes rely on you all picking up on any errors. (By the way, I noticed after I'd posted my last blog that although Alaska indeed crosses the 180 degree line, thus making Mike's statement that it's the easternmost - as well as the northernmost and westernmost - state accurate, it doesn't cross the international date line as I'd written. The date line, as my new pocket atlas shows, wriggles around the edge of the Alaskan islands.) With the newsletters I try to be especially scrupulous since they're going off to the girls' schools. So I was disappointed to realise yesterday that we'd made a mistake in the Corsica newsletter. In the woods on the way to the Cascades des Anglais we'd seen some tiny little mammals that I thought were voles. Well, yesterday Zoe and I were walking along the track leading to the house and we saw another little critter run across in front of us. Back in the lodge I found a sketch of it in a large Websters illustrated dictionary, and also discovered the difference between a vole and a shrew, the former being what we saw yesterday and the latter being what we saw in Corsica. Shrews have tapered noses.
On the drive home from the Angel Rocks Trail we passed some shaggy-haired animals in an enclosed field that we'd noticed on our previous journey. We'd speculated then that they were yaks and this time we went and asked. It turns out that they are yaks, which are farmed there for their meat (tastes like beef, they say) and their wool. They had a baby yak running around with them who, though thankfully not having horns yet, was still capable of giving a robust "playful" head-butt.
There you go; her name's Liddy.
The ladies we spoke to there also told us a little about how they find living in Alaska. In the winter the sun never rises across the horizon and they get only a couple of hours of murky grey light each day. With the temperature pretty constant at 40 below, they still drive around several miles every day doing the things they have to do.
Today we intended to hire bikes and use some of the dedicated cycle paths around here. At the hire place, though, they had no bikes of an appropriate size for the girls. Also today is, for the first time since the day after we arrived, particularly smoky all across Fairbanks, no doubt indicating more fires. The weather has been fine - seventies and eighties - for the past few days but this doesn't have the same transformational effect on the place that it would in England. No one seems to have noticed. Instead of the bike ride we returned to the cinema and, following a recommendation from Helen, saw The March of the Penguin, which is a lovely documentary.
We've also spent a greater than average amount of time in the cabin the past couple of days. I've been reading a novel that Steve bought for me called The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. I can't speak highly enough of it: it's fabulous. In fact, I did intend to include an excerpt so you could see for yourself, but I've decided against it (but I'm open to persuasion next time). It's set in the Thirties, mainly in New York City. It almost makes me wish we were spending a month in the thick of it in Brooklyn or Manhatten, although I know if we'd done that we'd have inevitably got drawn into quite a round of seeing people that may not have been so relaxing. But the book is totally captivating and it's even given me an idea for a mini-project when we return: if I'm still doing work that requires frequent trips to NYC I'd like to spend an evening in each of the five Boroughs; suggestions for what to do are welcome, though not urgent!
Also this morning my extra RAM arrived and my mac, which was getting chewed up by my photo album is now smoking (metaphorically!). For $260 I've quadrupled my memory, which is money very well spent. I have a couple of computer questions now. First, I'd like to pick up a junked 15" PowerBook to rip off the screen to replace mine, which is cracked in the LRH corner. Given that mac users tend not to sell off their old ones, does anyone know if this is viable? I'll get round to looking on ebay, although our routines don't lend themselves to web surfing. I tend to stack up all of the stuff I need to do (email, which is written off line; podcast downloads - I get From Our Own Correspondent and Democracy Now but not Car Talk since it needs to be purchased (!) with a US-billed credit card; blog posts; occasional must-do web look-ups) and run into web places and execute it all in a quick batch cycle. The circumstances are never favourable for recreational surfing.
My second question is about our blog and our homepage. I set them both up quickly before I left using readily available just-add-water tools. Since then I've been a bit dissatisfied, particularly with the disjunctions between the homepage itself, the blog and the slideshows. So I could use some more sophisticated (or newer) software to integrate the whole thing more and make it more, well, white. The downside is that it all works. Any advice?
Here at Mountain View Lodge, I'm really enjoying the fracturing of time effected by the multiplicity of loud clocks; it's an oblique and fun riff on the extreme 9 hour time difference between here and home. There is one clock that chimes on the hour at a time that approximates quite well to my watch. Then there's another than hits it about 15 minutes off. And the cuckoo clock seems to be all over the place, maybe typically 15 minutes off the other way; the girls set and wind it every day and it seems to get more random as the day progresses. In the hours after bedtime it will mischievously strike six, and at other times it's managed 13. None of them strike with the stately dongs that you might expect, separated by perhaps a second per chime: they all have a madcap listen-up-now pace, though the more reliable one is also the most conventional and the speed of its hour chimes is lively rather than frenzied.
Last night I listened to them all, several times. After listening to a re-run of From our own Correspondent and then Rachmaninov's 2nd Piano Concerto (corny but I love it) and reading for a while, I wandered out onto the veranda to see if the Aurora Borealis were firing up yet. At this hour my keener colleagues in New York were already heading to their desks and, it was, implausibly, almost lunchtime in England; our cuckoo clock was flitting erratically between all of these tome zones. By next week I hope to see the Northern Lights here, but there was no sign of them last night. There were some stars out, though those overhead needed you to look directly at them to see them against the sunlight still leaking in from over the horizon. A couple of planets were more clearly visible low on the skyline. One of them was large and unusually orange, and I thought that while you'd expect that to be Mars a local radio station had reported that Jupiter was now visible and maybe that was it. This afternoon I checked on Starry Night Backyard, which is a lovely piece of software that tells you everything you (or at least I) might want to know about what you can see overhead at night. It was Mars.
Apparently there's a timely new documentary film out by Werner Herzog about an alcoholic mad guy who had a fixation on bears and eventually got himself mauled to death. We want to see it - have you?
We've also just planned an overnight trip to one of the big National Parks here, and one of the main attractions is the possibility of seeing a bear. You can't drive far into the Park yourself so we had to choose between catching one of the shuttles converted from old yellow school buses or paying a lot more money for a more luxurious tour bus. We chose the former and I hope to describe it when we've been. But in our fact-finding everyone looked at me as though I was nuts when I asked if we can actually get off the bus/coach to take photo's if we see a bear. It seems that you can't, although you may be able to if you see moose, which everyone says are equally dangerous. Doesn't it seem unlikely to you that a bear would charge a bus-load of tourists taking snaps? And if it did, surely someone could squirt it with bear spray. (This is a variant of pepper spray that they really do sell and which apparently works.)
Anyhow, we didn't see a bear on the Angel Rocks Trail, although the knowledge that black bears actually live in the dense forest added to the atmosphere. In the depths of the trees the path is soft and springy underfoot from pine needles and mosses and there is a perfection to the boreal calm. At the higher elevations the path breaks above the tree line to reach granite outcrops that have become a recurrent feature of our past few months to offer panoramic views across the Chena valley. There is a longer walk, some 15 miles with much greater ascent and descent, that I'd like to do but which is probably a bit of a stretch for us.
The only other mammals we saw before we got back to the car were a nice couple from New York State, though there were plenty of butterflies including some cute swallowtails. Zoe also took a photograph of a wolf print. Despite knowing that wolves live in the forest, I was initially dubious about whether it wasn't just a dog (simple, common explanations being right more often than exotic ones) but I've been convinced (the text-book correspondence to the animal print guides, the long claws, the fact that it was crossing rather than following the track). We'll include it in her newsletter later this month.
In this blog I try to keep my facts accurate but with none of my books here I do sometimes rely on you all picking up on any errors. (By the way, I noticed after I'd posted my last blog that although Alaska indeed crosses the 180 degree line, thus making Mike's statement that it's the easternmost - as well as the northernmost and westernmost - state accurate, it doesn't cross the international date line as I'd written. The date line, as my new pocket atlas shows, wriggles around the edge of the Alaskan islands.) With the newsletters I try to be especially scrupulous since they're going off to the girls' schools. So I was disappointed to realise yesterday that we'd made a mistake in the Corsica newsletter. In the woods on the way to the Cascades des Anglais we'd seen some tiny little mammals that I thought were voles. Well, yesterday Zoe and I were walking along the track leading to the house and we saw another little critter run across in front of us. Back in the lodge I found a sketch of it in a large Websters illustrated dictionary, and also discovered the difference between a vole and a shrew, the former being what we saw yesterday and the latter being what we saw in Corsica. Shrews have tapered noses.
On the drive home from the Angel Rocks Trail we passed some shaggy-haired animals in an enclosed field that we'd noticed on our previous journey. We'd speculated then that they were yaks and this time we went and asked. It turns out that they are yaks, which are farmed there for their meat (tastes like beef, they say) and their wool. They had a baby yak running around with them who, though thankfully not having horns yet, was still capable of giving a robust "playful" head-butt.
There you go; her name's Liddy.
The ladies we spoke to there also told us a little about how they find living in Alaska. In the winter the sun never rises across the horizon and they get only a couple of hours of murky grey light each day. With the temperature pretty constant at 40 below, they still drive around several miles every day doing the things they have to do.
Today we intended to hire bikes and use some of the dedicated cycle paths around here. At the hire place, though, they had no bikes of an appropriate size for the girls. Also today is, for the first time since the day after we arrived, particularly smoky all across Fairbanks, no doubt indicating more fires. The weather has been fine - seventies and eighties - for the past few days but this doesn't have the same transformational effect on the place that it would in England. No one seems to have noticed. Instead of the bike ride we returned to the cinema and, following a recommendation from Helen, saw The March of the Penguin, which is a lovely documentary.
We've also spent a greater than average amount of time in the cabin the past couple of days. I've been reading a novel that Steve bought for me called The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. I can't speak highly enough of it: it's fabulous. In fact, I did intend to include an excerpt so you could see for yourself, but I've decided against it (but I'm open to persuasion next time). It's set in the Thirties, mainly in New York City. It almost makes me wish we were spending a month in the thick of it in Brooklyn or Manhatten, although I know if we'd done that we'd have inevitably got drawn into quite a round of seeing people that may not have been so relaxing. But the book is totally captivating and it's even given me an idea for a mini-project when we return: if I'm still doing work that requires frequent trips to NYC I'd like to spend an evening in each of the five Boroughs; suggestions for what to do are welcome, though not urgent!
Also this morning my extra RAM arrived and my mac, which was getting chewed up by my photo album is now smoking (metaphorically!). For $260 I've quadrupled my memory, which is money very well spent. I have a couple of computer questions now. First, I'd like to pick up a junked 15" PowerBook to rip off the screen to replace mine, which is cracked in the LRH corner. Given that mac users tend not to sell off their old ones, does anyone know if this is viable? I'll get round to looking on ebay, although our routines don't lend themselves to web surfing. I tend to stack up all of the stuff I need to do (email, which is written off line; podcast downloads - I get From Our Own Correspondent and Democracy Now but not Car Talk since it needs to be purchased (!) with a US-billed credit card; blog posts; occasional must-do web look-ups) and run into web places and execute it all in a quick batch cycle. The circumstances are never favourable for recreational surfing.
My second question is about our blog and our homepage. I set them both up quickly before I left using readily available just-add-water tools. Since then I've been a bit dissatisfied, particularly with the disjunctions between the homepage itself, the blog and the slideshows. So I could use some more sophisticated (or newer) software to integrate the whole thing more and make it more, well, white. The downside is that it all works. Any advice?
Here at Mountain View Lodge, I'm really enjoying the fracturing of time effected by the multiplicity of loud clocks; it's an oblique and fun riff on the extreme 9 hour time difference between here and home. There is one clock that chimes on the hour at a time that approximates quite well to my watch. Then there's another than hits it about 15 minutes off. And the cuckoo clock seems to be all over the place, maybe typically 15 minutes off the other way; the girls set and wind it every day and it seems to get more random as the day progresses. In the hours after bedtime it will mischievously strike six, and at other times it's managed 13. None of them strike with the stately dongs that you might expect, separated by perhaps a second per chime: they all have a madcap listen-up-now pace, though the more reliable one is also the most conventional and the speed of its hour chimes is lively rather than frenzied.
Last night I listened to them all, several times. After listening to a re-run of From our own Correspondent and then Rachmaninov's 2nd Piano Concerto (corny but I love it) and reading for a while, I wandered out onto the veranda to see if the Aurora Borealis were firing up yet. At this hour my keener colleagues in New York were already heading to their desks and, it was, implausibly, almost lunchtime in England; our cuckoo clock was flitting erratically between all of these tome zones. By next week I hope to see the Northern Lights here, but there was no sign of them last night. There were some stars out, though those overhead needed you to look directly at them to see them against the sunlight still leaking in from over the horizon. A couple of planets were more clearly visible low on the skyline. One of them was large and unusually orange, and I thought that while you'd expect that to be Mars a local radio station had reported that Jupiter was now visible and maybe that was it. This afternoon I checked on Starry Night Backyard, which is a lovely piece of software that tells you everything you (or at least I) might want to know about what you can see overhead at night. It was Mars.
Posted: Fri - August 12, 2005 at 09:14 AM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM