As I have mentioned, spring is well on its way. Our 70 inches of snow is almost gone, the ravens have left town, moose babies and bear cubs are coming out. Here are just a few of the recent events marking the changing of the seasons:
Sunrise this morning was at 6:15am – sunset will be at 9:30 or so tonight. In only 8 more weeks we will start to lose daylight each day as the sun travels south again.
Per a previous post, the bears are awake. We had friends hiking this weekend who saw a mother and two cubs and this article contains more information on the bear mauling mentioned last week. This is an amazing story. The hunter chose his partner well for his shooting ability. Very few people could put three .22 caliber bullets in a bear’s head in that high adrenalin situation.
The first guns only show of the season was Saturday (and we had to stand in line to get in the door). We now own a bear gun for when we hike off of the beaten track. (Ok – it isn’t an official “bear gun” but that’s what we are calling it.) Robert wanted to know what I thought of it and I said I’m not carrying it – too heavy – but it looks very nice and loads/unloads like a dream. Now we will have to see if it knocks me over when I try to shoot it.
Spring Carnival at Alyeska was also this last weekend. This is the “last hurrah” for the skiing crows. The big event for this carnival is the Slush Cup. If you look at the pictures, people ski/snowboard down a steep incline towards a giant pool of icy water to see how far they can get across before sinking in. Many of them have costumes on as part of the creativity element of the contest. Other events include taping a lawn chair to your skis and seeing how far you can go downhill without crashing. (Sit back and picture this in your mind – it had to be funny.) Helmets are recommended for this event!
And to top it off, we went for a walk the other night (sans Squirt) on a “not ready for prime time tennis shoes” trail. This translates into, we had never been on this path before and it was muddy, muddy, muddy, slushy and there were large ponds at the bottom of hills with a small covering of ice. One of these was deceptively deep and we got soaked walking through it. (I know how the slush cuppers felt.) The neat thing was we saw two ducks swimming on one of the puddles…very happy (which is why we went the other way – we didn’t want to disturb them). Our tennis shoes are still drying out!
Squirt is doing great although he is rather perturbed at his dog food only diet! Stitches come out next week.
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