How We Roll with the Nome Journals

 There is no way on earth that I will be able to write the Nome Journals while they are still fresh in my mind.    Friday I will pick up two of my cousins at the airport in Anchorage.   They are coming to rebuild three sets of exterior stairs at my house.

Lest you get the idea they are a couple strapping young lads, Bud is five months younger than me and I'm 82.   Bob is five years younger.   I will be very busy for the ten days that they are here, helping, make design decisions, writing change orders, getting in the way, and feeding and watering.

But I have a lot of photos to show you and stories to tell, so that's what I'm going to do--in no particular order.

So, my birding friend Leilani, with whom eI have taken a lot of photography trips to photograph birds and whatever else got in your way, suggested we go to Nome this year rather than the Denali highway as we usually do.   I agreed.

A Willow ptarmigan on a roadside snowbank.

Nome in the spring is a bird paradise.   Both birders and bird photographers head there from mid-May thru late June to catch the migrating birds.   For some species, it's the only place you can see them.

We were joined by my pals Marg Wood and Shelly Kurtz from Canada, both excellent photographers.

So here's a quick story from the last day of the trip.   Remember, I promised stories but not in chronological order.

  GET OUT OF JAIL, NOW!

It's our last morning in Nome and we're heading out of town when we spot a number of people pointing binoculars and cameras at some trees on our left. Leilani Devries pulls our car into the parking lot and a kind gentleman graciously points out a nesting Northern Shrike in one tree and the male close by in another.

We're happily clicking away, exchanging bird location info, and about to finish up when a burly uniformed man approaches and says, rather politely, "Sorry, but we can't have you here."

We had unknowingly parked in the parking lot of a medium-security prison. "Sorry, we didn't notice," we say and get in the vehicles.

"How can you NOT notice?" he asks, a look of stupefaction on his face. When I look at the nearby building, it is obvious that it's a correctional facility.

"People, binoculars, cameras," we respond. "That means birds!" He's still shaking his head and smiling as we drive away.

Scenery