Ride Along

Step outside my home and close your eyes.  You'd swear you were at Niagara Falls.   A tremendous amount of water is cascading down the mountains and it is loud.

Yes, those big white patches are snow from last winter.  This is the view from my kitchen window.

And the view from my living room window.

 Yes, it was raining when I took those shots.


I heard on the evening news that Moose Pass was among the communities affected by flooding from recent storms that have dumped an above-normal amount of rainfall in these parts, so I decided to go see if I could find anything that looked like flooding.

This is part of Trail Lake where the railroad crosses the outfall of the lake.  Yeah, the lake is high, but I've seen it worse.

The railroad trestel.

The planes and floats at the local flying service looked okay.   I really didn't find any flooding.  Like I said, I've seen it much worse, but there is rain forecast for the weekend.  Without the hurricane-force winds this time.

Nothing exciting going on, so I headed home.  Want to see where I was?

 Well, I did say "where I was,"  not "where I was going."

Rolling Along into Winter

Unbelievably, considering the hurricane force winds that have been ripping through here, our autumn colors remain.

My favorite birch tree in autumn.  She grows all alone in a spruce forest and thus her colors stand out against the dark green.

A tree, a rock, a picket fence and colorful bushes.  What a cool scene.

Golden birches and  willows,accompanied by blueberry bushes turned red in my side yard.

The view from my kitchen window on a rainy day.

The quaking aspens guarding my driveway.

Weather forecast:  hurricane force winds during storms three and four this month.  Flood warnings.  An "atmospheric river," they're calling it, funneling high winds and heavy rain right into Alaska.

We'll see how long the leaves remain on the trees.

 

And you, my little friend, where will you be spending the winter?   In my woodshed?

Long Time Gone

For a couple weeks I'd been planning a trip to Anchorage to run errands, my list growing exponentially with every passing day. 

One recent day, I woke and realized I needed to go to town that day, a two hundred mile round trip.  Hop, skip, and a jump.

It took four trips to the car before I felt I had everything I needed.  Then I drove off without my list.

It took three trips into Costco to get everything right, and even then I missed a couple things because I didn't have my list.  The day continued like that until finally I felt like I should have stayed in bed and forgotten all about this day.

The weather had been spectacular all day, after days of rain.  In the early evening, I noticed just a piece of a rainbow over the Hillside as the sun caught a localized shower over the Chugach Mountains.

Eventually, I left Anchorage as the sun was starting to set.

It's 35 miles from Anchorage along Turnagain Arm to the town of Girdwood, just a bit more than one-third of my way home.  It took my an hour to travel that far because I kept stopping to take photos.

Eventually, I reached home and looked at my forgotten list.  I now have a new list started for my next trip to Anchorage.

Somebody changed everything....

...while I wasn't looking.

I have spent the last two plus months with my nose to the grindstone.  Or, to be more correct, to the
sanding disc.  This basket of tools, in particular:

When I finally reached the end of my project for this season, I looked up and looked around.  Darned if someone hadn't changed the season on me.  To wit:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sigh.  back to cleaning up the mess from the sanding discs...

THIS IS ME

Breaking Light

The storm that whipped through here last night did no damage in this area that I know about, but then I haven't been off my own grounds today.

Anchorage, in particular the mountains that rise above the flats of the city, got hit with winds over 100 mph.  One amateur meteorologist reported a gust of 131 mph.  Trees were knocked down all over town and the power was out to thousands of customers.

The only thing I see different around here are two pots of calendula that are suddenly missing blooms and stems with no trace of them across the gravel drive.  I suspect their disappearance might be related to some fuzzy black and white long-eared critters that have taken a liking to my yard, except they have heretofore not shown any interest in them.

Right in the middle of former president Bill Clinton's speech to the Democratic National Convention, the sun broke through the clouds and put on a rather dramatic display of light.    (There's a political metaphor in there somewhere, but I haven't quite figured it out yet.  It could go either way.)

It also revealed something I am definitely not ready to see.

Here's another view of that same rainbow, showing the other side of the valley.  Notice anything?

If you still haven't figured it out, here's one more:

 

Snow.   New snow.

The crazy neighbor kid up the highway is cheering, hoping we get more of it, dreaming about being up there "shredding" it.  Knowing him, I have no doubt he'll be up there this weekend, doing exactly that.

Crazy kid.

Small Dog Warning

I watched Hurricane Isaac's progress closely last week, worrying that friends in southern Florida and near Pensacola in the panhandle would be in its track.  It veered west instead and plastered New Orleans again, on the anniversary of Katrina's destruction.

My friend near Pensacola mentioned in her blog that she had read Salvage the Bones as the hurricane wrecked havoc, and was almost hyperventilating as she finished it.  The novel is about one family's prelude to Katrina and their harrowing experiences during that hurricane.

I downloaded the book to my Kindle and stayed up until 3 AM finishing it last night.  I was almost hyperventilating, too, and I've never been through a hurricane.

 We had a pretty good storm over the weekend, with a 12 hour power outage Saturday and high winds.  Along Turnagain Arm and the Upper Hillside iin Anchorage, the winds were hurricane force.

We don't have hurricanes up here in Alaska.  We have "storms" and "Arctic lows" that rival hurricane force winds and heavy rains, but they're just storms, just No-Name storms.  Out in the Bering Sea, where the worst of the worst are born and then bear eastward towards Alaska, there's one of those massive "storms" whirling towards us right now.

I've experienced a couple of those storms while I was working on the island of Amchitka in 1987 and 1988.  Amchitka is so far out in the Aleutian Chain that it would be in tomorrow if the International Date Line hadn't zigged and zagged to keep it in today.  They weren't fun.  Not at all.  One of them was downright frightening.  The other, in blizzard form, was a lot less frightening because I was in a building somewhat protected from direct winds.

When the Anchorage TV channel made a weather forecast its lead story this evening, it's probably best to pay attention.

It did; I did.

After hearing about a new storm on the way, with winds of 50 to 70 mph and gusts from 70 to 90 mph, I decided to batten down the hatches.  All the ladders came down from my summertime project, drop cloths were folded and stored inside, and the deck furniture stashed in a safe corner.

The foreboding clouds of an approaching "storm'  this afternoon.

Sustained winds of 50 to 70 and gusts to 90, by the way, would qualify as a Category 1 hurricane, but as I mentioned before, we don't have hurricanes in Alaska.

Already the approaching low measures 971 millibars and is expected to arrive with a low pressure of 964 to 968.  The blast that just hit Louisiana and the Gulf coast measured 968 millibars.    This storm, say the meteorologists, is unusual in that it's the kind of storm we usually see in the winter, not in early September.

Jackie, the Channel 2 meteorologist, concluded her forecast with "it's a small dog warning."

What the heck.  We don't have hurricanes in Alaska.

Just storms and Arctic lows.