Life at Alaska Garden Gate B&B

Surprise! Through the bathroom window

2010-10-28T17:17:00.003-08:00

Guys or anyone standng up next to the bathroom windows can get quite a surprise when they are first awake and glance outside--Surprise! Quite a crowd gathered right outside the bathroom!

Fall Visits from the Mooses

2010-10-28T17:13:00.004-08:00

Our mooses came by to say hello and have a bite. It's good to see them! This is a daughter who is now the mom. I think possibly the mother who brought her calves here every year for 6 years may have died, or maybe just moved territory, but that seems unlikely. This is not that same mom, but I'm suspecting it's a girl calf who was raised in this area, because she knows the exact route around our property that they've always made to the bushes, fruit trees, and other good snack locations. It looks like this mama had twin girl calfs this year, too!

2010-08-24T14:33:00.004-08:00

What a pretty summer at Alaska Garden Gate B&B and Cottages!

New room shots from the cottages

2010-08-24T14:27:00.008-08:00

Here are updated pictures of how the rooms are lookin this summer. The first three are of Evergreen guest apartment, and the last three are in a cottage.

The peak of summer, from our cottages

2010-08-24T14:12:00.004-08:00

In between the record-breaking 31 days of rain this summer, we had some wonderful blue sky days. This view is from the cottages towards Matanuska Peak and the Knik Glacier.

New summer photos of the new cottages!

2010-07-03T11:56:00.004-08:00

On my website, so far I've only had interior photos and video of my new cottages, because they were finished in January, and the outsides were not much to look at without any flowers. Here are new pictures showing the cute little windowboxes and perennials that have been placed around them. The lawn was hard-won, after a month of watering the dirt 10 hours a day. That nearly killed us, to fit that in as well as other chores that had to be done, and it was expensive, too. Nice grass doesn't come easily in Alaska. Now things are starting to really come together and look pretty nice with these brand new little cottages!

Starting seeds for summer flowers

2010-05-23T11:54:00.000-08:00

Now that there are lush window boxes full of summer flowers, it's hard to think back to their beginnings. In January, I set up a half dozen tables in the living room windows and start all the flowers from seed. Little Girl likes that she can pass beneath the tables to still see out the windows to keep an eye on her mooses.

First trip to Juneau

2010-05-01T11:02:00.001-08:00

I had the opportunity to go to Juneau for the first time for a State of Alaska program meeting at the end of April, so Kam and I went a few days early to have a mini-vacation and see the sights. For me, it has been too expensive to go there just for fun, since the only way in or out is by air or by ferry. It was a very nice opportunity to have "spring" in April. They had grape hyacinths and daffodills out, while we still had much snow at home, 600 miles north.

We stayed at the Baranof and thought it would be a nice place, since that's where many of the scandals involving state senators and representatives have taken place in deals caught on hidden camera. It was neat to see how people live way up the mountainsides in town, including this set of stairs that went up something like 7 or 8 stories from street level. Each bag of grocieries, etc, has to be hand carried up. Not many fat people in Juneau! We had a beautiful, warm, sunny day to walk around, which was great. Town's not that big...It's about the size of Palmer, in terms of square blocks to explore, though the population is much more dense than Palmer.

We ate at a famous/infamous bar in the downtown for our first lunch. The photo above says it all about mythical old-timer bars in Alaska like this one: naked ladies, mounted moose heads, and a 300 pound halibut I can't recall the name of it, but had a great time studying all the life preservers marked Cape Hatteras and Bangor Maine, as well as the ship flags stapled to the ceiling which included ships calling from Norway, Sweden, Italy, cruise lines large and small, and an Exxon flag. Very fun eye-candy all over the walls in there!

The Hangar was our dinner spot and we loved it so much, we went back about 4 more times over our times there to try different things each time. One night our meeting group went over to Douglas Island for pizza at Bullwinkles, which was a great idea, too.

We were there days before the first cruise ship of the season came in, so everyone was sprucing up, including this fellow putting a new coat of paint on the bear chair outside a shop. No one seemed in too much of a hurry, though, as I might have anticipated, given that thousands of visitors would be showing up in 6 days.

We rented a car and drove every inch of road, just to see this territory that looked so odd to us. It's very much more mossy and rain-foresty than in our area of Alaska. You know that in your mind, but seeing it is really neat. The botanical gardens were not officially open yet for the season, but wandering around was well-worth it. They did something I've never seen: take old tree trunks and roots, and stick it in the ground upside down so the roots are about 12 feet in the air like an umbrella canopy. They had many many of those, growing with ferns, flowers and mosses, all draping over and through the roots. It was a very cool look.

We also went out to the rock church of St. Therese on a little causeway island. The church has a retreat center there, and it's a place of quiet and peace. I enjoyed that very much.

We enjoyed the hospitality Juneau shared with us. Given the resources it took to get all of us there, I have to respectfully disagree with the decision to have our capitol located this far away from the bulk of the population. Imagining the cost of bringing in the 10 or so participants in our meeting, and then extrapolating that to having our entire government based here, flying in and out all the time...Seems pretty spendy to me.

Winter Olympics athlete from Palmer, Alaska

2010-03-03T10:59:00.000-09:00

Palmer's own Kerry Weiland played for the USA women's hockey team at the Winter Olympics. Here's a picture of her and the team on the ice, receiving their bronze medals. Kerry came to a Palmer Chamber of Commerce luncheon to speak, sign autographs, and she let everyone hold her medal. It looked kind of like a fancy crushed pop can as I saw it going around the room, but was surprisingly very heavy and beautifully crafted.

Winter in Alaska is good for...

2010-01-25T10:56:00.000-09:00

My favorite day of the year, living in Palmer, Alaska

2009-12-22T11:02:00.005-09:00

Colony Christmas is a town celebration in Palmer each December. It commemorates the first Christmas the Colonists were in Palmer. It had been a hard first season of hacking out fields, crops, and homes and barns from wilderness. Everyone had next to nothing and spirits were low. The train brought in gifts to raise their spirits, with treats like a box of oranges. Now Colony Christmas is a chance to enjoy the best things about Palmer: a warm, caring sense of community, sharing what we have, and having fun together.

Here are pictures of us with the reindeer, the horse-drawn wagon going around town, and a photo of the "Tuba Christmas" concert put on by everyone with a tuba within 100 miles. A few didn't make it coming from Anchorage because they got lost, but it sounded amazing and we all sang along.

3 mooses! 3!

2009-10-20T21:24:00.000-08:00

How exciting! I saw mooses outside our bedroom window so went for my camera. When I came back, I saw that there were 3 of them! It was mama with two 4 month old twins! I didn't realize she had twins again this year. This was our first time seeing this year's twins. They had been quite secrative before this, but what with all the fruit trees ripe and delicious, apparently this was a good time for an introduction to Alaska Garden Gate B&B for the young ones!

You may recall that mama had twins last year, too: the boy yearling is the crabby one who keeps chuffing at us and mock-charging when we get out of our cars, and his sister had a run-in with a car but seems to be mostly healed and walking on her fourth leg again. Moose stats tell us that Mat-Su moose bear more twins than moose in other regions. The browse locally is more nutritious for moose moms and supports more twins sets coming to full term, as well as seeming to play a role in twin conceptions.

Driving back from Fairbanks

2009-10-09T21:39:00.002-08:00

Coming back from the Alaska Travel Industry Association convention in Fairbanks, I left pretty early to be home by mid-day. The sunrise offered some beautiful photos just south of Fairbanks, and then also of the bridge over the Nenana River at Nenana.

Les Francais en aout

2009-09-18T09:14:00.005-08:00

Mid-August, I had a group of 10 French folks on a tour stay here 3 nights. Due to a problem with a room, it was especially cozy (the two tour guide fellows got the living room...). They were supposed to have a guest apartment with a kitchen, and that's the one that was out of commission while they were here. This led to them cooking dinners in my kitchen with much joie de vivre until nearly midnight.

Everyone dealt with what came their way very well, and we got to know each other through my rusty French. They learned a few things about Alaska and I learned that after making big American breakfasts for them several days in a row, they will only eat toast, and lots of it. Love that toast. Josette who was particularly sweet just sent me 2 photos they took as mementos of their time here. They were so kind to present me with flowers their last night here. In return, my parting gift to them were a couple jars of local highbush cranberry and fireweed jellies, for future toast.

Fall colors

2009-09-16T09:00:00.000-08:00

Another photo from my friend Collette Hand, who has Alaska's Harvest B&B. She was out for another motorcycle ride and said the colors along the Glenn Highway by the Matanuska Glacier were positively neon. The vibrant yellows and reds played off the blue lakes and alpenglow on the mountains that evening.

Another neat picture

2009-09-08T18:29:00.004-08:00

This one is also from Collette at Alaska's Harvest B&B. She and her husband Joe went motorcycling to Valdez and saw this sign.

Amazing photos from Alaska

2009-09-08T12:55:00.006-08:00

My friend Collette Hand shared these photos. She has a beautiful bed and breakfast called Alaska's Harvest B&B, just a couple miles from mine. The one of the rainbow is over Turnagain Arm as she and her husband, Joe, were motorcycling down to Girdwood a week ago. See the white beluga whales' backs in the water? She said they saw 25 that evening in the arm. The next photos are ones taken by a family friend of theirs who works on the North Slope. Collette said this friend was watching these polar bears frolic while he was on his lunch hour--How cool!

The boy moose and guests

2009-08-21T13:15:00.000-08:00

This year's yearling moose, the boy, is filling out nicely since earlier photos I posted in June. His antlers have come along nicely and he has filled out a lot, too. He has been in the apple tree in the morning quite a bit. This time I caught him as people were packing up to check out. They grabbed their cameras and all took photos and movies from the front porch as he munched.

Soaring on thermals

2009-08-19T12:47:00.001-08:00

The Sandhill cranes are back~ It's thrilling to watch them soaring on the thermal winds outside the picture windows.

Adventures I've gotta try, and you should too!

2009-08-04T10:56:00.002-08:00

Catching up with friends, while I've been running the B&B, they've been out having Alaska adventures this summer. I would like to share a couple of them with you, in case you'd like to try them. One went to Tokasitna Lodge and commented on how unique that was, to be staying with them out in nowhere, in gorgeous surroundings. The others did a rafting float trip. They started 40 miles up the Chulitna river from the McKinley Princess Wilderness Lodge (on the Parks Highway). I think they may have gotten dropped in by plane--not sure. They said the water was clear and you could see obstacles coming. It wasn't too challenging and was incredible scenery. They had a great time ending up at MPWL, to sit out on the beautiful deck there looking at Denali, eating a well-earned cheeseburger. I gotta try that sometime!

Mowing hay

2009-07-22T11:13:00.002-08:00

My neighbor Jay came over and mowed my hay field for me the other day. I don't need it for anything and he can use it for his cashmere goats, for bedding.

A Garden Gate wedding

2009-07-22T11:09:00.003-08:00

We had a lovely wedding here last night for about 50 guests. It was cool and a little too breezy for those in strappy dresses, but it couldn't have been more beautiful in the gardens. Here is a picture of the happy couple right after the ceremony, which I took from inside the B&B so as not to intrude.

Below decks on the Titanic

2009-07-22T10:52:00.004-08:00

I had the opportunity on Monday to go on a cruise ship, to tour it, and to learn about their environmental and conservation measures. I took this same tour, too, last July since it was also offered to community leaders a year ago. This year I remembered my camera, so I got a picture of the poster that fascinated me last year. When you're below decks in the bowels of the ship, down by laundry and waste managment and the engines, there are water tight doors that would close in case of disaster, just like in the movie Titanic. That was an eery feeling. Here is the poster showing employees to stay away so they wouldn't become dismembered in case those doors were closing. Not that that happens often but still...

Anyway, it was lovely to tour the Princess Coral and learn all that they do to protect the environment. I knew from last year that they take blackwater (from the toilets) and clean it to the point that it pours clear from a tap (as well as having less coliform count than most of our city water supplies). I also learned this year that they are thinking about stewardship of the environment in places such as the spas (water usage) and even the offices (recycling the printer cartridges).

I liked seeing all the flags rolled up in their neat wooden boxes in the bridge where the captain guides the ship. They keep flags for any possible country where this ship would sail. This ship is narrow enough to go through the Panama Canal so many of the flags were Carribbean or European, not just Western Hemisphere like some of the PanaMax boats that are too wide to take through the Canal.

Height of summer

2009-07-18T11:05:00.005-08:00

The sunflowers are not quite in bloom, but the delphiniums are almost at the peak of their beauty in the gardens--perfect for the wedding which will be here later this week!

Ptarmigan family

2009-07-14T20:02:00.003-08:00

I didn't have my camera with me either time, but I saw a new ptarmigan family twice today. When I got up at 5 a.m., an adult ptarmigan was keeping watch so a smaller one could cross the open space of the lawn, over to the wild edges of the lawn. I thought it was maybe a male, then a female crossing. When I came home with groceries this afternoon, along the edge of the driveway, there was a large one, and then 3-4-5 ! smaller ones. They must be almost-grown chicks. I drove along slowly, just 3 feet from them. As usual, they cluck and twitter but then don't move away until you're right on top of them. They fluttered straight up into a tree just a few feet off the driveway. I'm glad to see this many chicks. For a couple years, I haven't seen that many ptarmigan in the woods--I was afraid that some larger critter had finished them off.

Summer flowers

2009-07-07T10:54:00.004-08:00

This summer has been just gorgeous, and much warmer than average. Wildflowers, garden flowers, and the window boxes are just busting out in peak beauty.

Independence Day

2009-07-05T12:15:00.000-08:00

It's become a tradition for me to go to Hatcher Pass on or around July 4th. It's a wonderful place to celebrate the best of what our country is, in its natural beauty. It also is timed well usually for Little Girl and I to cool down if it's been hot. This year, it has been hot! We had several days of mid-80's and I've been sweltering! Little Girl loves the rushing river at Hatcher Pass. The gurgling water is a curiosity to her-she always looks for where that sound is coming from! She cocks her head side to side and pokes into the water. It's also nice for her to cool off in the glacier-melt stream.

Gorgeous morning mountains

2009-06-14T17:57:00.004-08:00

Guests were busy snapping pictures while I was making breakfast. When I looked outside, I could see why they liked this shot. The way the winds were blowing the clouds as the sun came south was gorgeous (it makes a big circle like a flat clock or dinner plate overhead). The sun doesn't so much rise in the summer as make a circle above our heads. In the middle of the night, it's to the far north, then does a little twirl overhead into the night hours when it returns to the north. It will start to sink below the horizon in late July. Next week is the summer solstice and gives true meaning to our Midnight Sun.

Palmer's little town celebration: Colony Days

2009-06-14T17:52:00.004-08:00

Each summer, Palmer celebrates the town's roots with Colony Days. It commemorates the arrival of the Pioneer families who settled the colony in the 1930s. The weekend is full of small-town events like a classic car show, the parade, showing off the vintage tractors, a best smoked-salmon dip contest, bed races, etc. I tried to get a few good shots of the Forest guys with their chain saws and axes slung over their shoulders, but those pictures didn't come out well. Here is a farmer on his 1940s Massey tractor and the Palmer Chamber of Commerce team hustling against the IBEW union team in the bed race finals.

Early a.m. moose, cool video of flightseeing

2009-06-09T02:56:00.002-08:00

I'm up at 3 am because the dogs at the farm next to me are going nuts in the woods between us. I don't hear others stirring, so I'm glad it hasn't waken them. The dogs are two Great Pyrenees who guard a small herd of cashmere goats that my neighbor is raising. The moose won't bother the goats, who are inside a secure fenced area, but must be close enough to have the dogs' attention. My neighbors, who moved here in the 1950's, said they've only seen bears on their farm twice since then, during very bad winters. Otherwise the bears prefer to hang out in the mountains that ring our valley, where people don't annoy them.

I was surfing on the web last night and found this cool video on Talkeetna Air Taxi's blog. The bush pilot who is the subject of this short online video is one I've flown with before. This tells a little bit about what it's like to be a woman bush pilot who flies around Denali: http://www.authentictv.com/UPLOADS/DEVELOPMENT/DANIELLE-H.264.mov

It's a Boy!

2009-05-30T09:54:00.002-08:00

Oops--yesterday I thought the new visitor was a girl moose, but then last night, when he came back for a bite at 10 pm, we could see the little nubbins of antlers started on his forehead. We're not sure if he was bugged by our flashes going off in the house windows or if it was mosquitos, but he was ticked off and jumpy! I got a good video I will try to edit down to size to put on here.

Out the bathroom window--Surprise!

2009-05-29T12:03:00.004-08:00

Quite a few men guests have reported a surprise first thing in the morning when they are, um, standing in the bathroom and glance out the window. My guest from Virginia was able to get his camera and get these pictures from his bathroom.

This is a yearling calf. I may not be familiar with her. The moms are calving right now, which means they chase off the yearlings, so this little girl was off, foraging on her own. She may be last year's calf who grew up here or she may be a "stranger" who got chased off by a mom living nearby but not usually on my property. She's a little rough-coated looking, shedding out her winter coat, but looks pretty healthy after winter.

She was chowing down, from one green thing to the next around the yard. It got warm here a good 3 weeks early. Our summer has come earlier than usual, so lucky for them, they get the fresh salad buffet on every tree, bush and flower. She looks pretty petite here (in the picture she looks about donkey-sized to me) but actually she was about 6 feet tall, just quite a bit smaller than adult stature.

You can see the window box flowers are growing in earlier than usual, too. Normally, we would never put out annual plants earlier than June 1, but it's been a gorgeous, warm spring since early May.

Flying up to Denali Base Camp

2009-03-19T20:56:00.000-08:00

For my friend Georgianna's 40th birthday, my friend Maggie's 50th birthday, and my upcoming 40th birthday, we went flightseeing around Denali to celebrate and mark the year with something special. We went with Talkeetna Air Taxi, who took us up to Base Camp near Denali. We did a glacier landing and hung out for a while at the camp. It was a stunningly gorgeous day and not too cold. We figure it was probably about -10 at Base Camp.

I had thought we'd see people and tents up there for climbing season, but I was off by a few weeks. Climbing season doesn't really start for about 3 more weeks, lasting until early July, for that prime mix of long sunny days and milder temps, but before the snow gets too soft and avalanche-prone. So, it was a surprise to make our soft landing on the deep snow of the glacier, and find 4 people just standing around up there. I asked our pilot what they were doing. He said they came up for a day-ski and winter camping for a day or two, likely. We didn't trudge through the snow to where they were standing because it felt pretty cold to us. We stayed just long enough to take lots of pictures of the beauty around us (I didn't realize that the Don Sheldon Mountain House was just above us on a narrow rock plataeu. It has a wooden outhouse which has no door and the most stunning view of Denali from a potty that you can get). We were only up there 6-8 minutes, about the longest the engine could sit without having an engine blanket put on.

This was my first time shooting video up there with my camera and I got a few cool moments that seem to "translate" to how amazing it is. The sheer granite cliffs you see are in the Great Gorge. It's incomprehensible to our puny little human brains--those cliffs are over one mile high and the glacier filling the valley is nearly 2 miles wide in that view.

Iditarod Restart

2009-03-08T20:48:00.000-08:00

We had a great time at the Restart of the Iditarod in Willow. We had VIP passes because of my business sponsorship of the Iditarod so we could go behind the scenes and get up close with the teams. The first image is Martin Buser in his fancy truck with the Rotary International End Polio Now logo, since he helped to raise awareness for Rotary. The second image is me and the Iditarod mascot, and the last picture is veteran musher Dee Dee Jonrowe in her signature pink, since she's a breast cancer survivor.

Cake with Gov. Sarah Palin

2009-02-05T18:26:00.002-09:00

I was asked to serve cake and lemonade after a contract signing ceremony where Sarah Palin signed on behalf of the state of Alaska. It was for the new $42 million dollar prison that will be built in the Mat-Su Borough. The new facility will allow Alaskan prisoners to come home from Arizona, where we currently ship many of them because we don't have spots for them. It was fun to take part in the event, with TV cameras there and a good crowd. My camera takes pixely photos, but you can still tell it's her. She looked a little thin to me.

Learning about village life

2009-01-20T09:53:00.003-09:00

I had the chance to attend a neat program put on by the State of Alaska’s department of commerce to promote tourism in small towns and bush villages. I was surprised at how many folks I already knew who were there, among the 20 attendees. I forget what a small place Alaska is and that we’re all likely to run into each other time and time again.

I was glad to see Tamara again, from the village of Ruby. I’d met her two years ago at the B&B Association of Alaska convention two years ago in Fairbanks, closer to her home a couple hours down the Yukon River from there. She and her husband are building a lodge on their land. They brought in a portable sawmill to mill the logs they cut off their land.

I stayed overnight in Anchorage to be ready for an early start. While I was out walking the dogs, I heard wingflaps overhead. I looked up and saw an eagle with a torn up bunny in its talons, being chased in hot pursuit by a raven. I’d never seen that! I mentioned it to my innkeeper, a lifelong Alaskan, and she said that likely the raven was hoping the eagle would drop something—that it was unlikely the raven would try to attack the eagle.

This 2-day workshop was to pair mentors with mentees who are newer in business in the tourism segment. I’m a mentor to Brian James, who has created the Solomon B&B (www.solomonbnb.com) which is located outside o f Nome. He would like to learn more about marketing and how to reach birders who would appreciate the massive annual migrations along the Bering coast.

There were many speakers who addressed our group.

One woman named Tandy who leads expeditions into the Arctic in Alaska and Russia told about her mentee she worked with last year, a woman who wanted to start a tour to take clients to her family’s fish camp in the bush, and then she fielded questions about how to find good insurance. She said you want a tough time finding insurance—here was one that threw her agent: She had a high-end client who wanted a native-made umiak (a skin covered boat) from Russia. Tandy found five people in Russia to build it. Then, the client wanted to have it taken across the Bering Strait from Big Diomede island (Russia) to Little Diomede island (Alaska). Her insurance agent had not previously insured five guys in a skin boat rowing across between two continents.

Travis from Copper River Adventures shared his story of having created a tour that was well enjoyed but just didn’t have enough volume to keep it going. He did a tour of his little native village, Chistochina, and took visitors around to each home. They had tea with his nana, then went over to Lena’s where she was tanning moose hides in a shed. He knew that hides are tanned using brains, but he didn’t know until then that it’s rotten brains in a jar and just how bad those smell.

One fellow, Bruce, couldn’t make it to our group. Weather didn’t allow him to fly out from Kaktovik, up on the Arctic Ocean near the oil fields. He called in and when asked about his bio, he said he does tours up there, ATV, polar bears, caribou, whatever. He’s also on a whaling crew, he said.

At lunch, one of the guys in our group from an island in the Inside Passage bumped into long-time friends. Afterwards, I asked how he knew them. He said he went to high school with the woman, Cornelia Marie. He said she’s Cornelia Marie who owns the boat Cornelia Marie. I thought that probably meant something but I didn’t know what. He said it’s one of the boats on the TV show Deadliest Catch.

I have been learning so much about what it's like out in each bush village. I've been asking everyone about the price of gas out their way. One woman with a B&B in Tanana mentioned how hard it is for teens in the bush to get their drivers licenses. That never occurred to me. She said how expensive it would be to fly them into Fairbanks to go get their permits, pay to take drivers lessons, then figure out how to get a vehicle and insurance for it out in the village where they don't have any paved roads.

One last thing I found interesting—as several of us mentors introduced ourselves, I heard time and time again that each of us had been in business five or six years (I’m just over the 6 year mark). Only in Alaska would six years of experience make one the senior, wise, old-timer!

Little Girl the Husky Eats an Entire Moose

2008-12-31T11:16:00.003-09:00

My mighty hunter, Little Girl the husky, loves being on moose patrol out in the yard and surrounding woods. It is her number one joy in life to try to herd the mooses out of her yard. They will have no part of that and mostly ignore her. She exacted her revenge this Christmas. I've never seen her take down and consume an entire moose.

She has never been a food-thief. She has never taken food off counters or the table. My newer dog, Hunter, came with some very bad habits so Little Girl has seen the benefits of checking out those surfaces. Mom and Gramma are here with me this week for the holidays, visiting from Illinois and Wisconsin. We made Christmas cookies together, and we frosted them one evening. The next night, before we got them boxed up for friends, we were in a different room and heard a patter of paws in the vicinity of the dining table. We returned just in time to see Little Girl drag away the moose and take it to her spot on the living room carpet to devour. She showed no signs of remorse.

View from the top

2008-12-29T11:23:00.003-09:00

Playing tourists, Mom, Gramma and I went to Alyeska and took the tram to the top. I had never done that. This is their first visit here in the winter, from Illinois and Wisconsin. We got the combo package for tram lift and lunch at the top. That was a highlight of our time together.

The views were magnificent, and perhaps just as neat was the fact that it's Christmas break and the ski resort was teeming with teens out of school. Their energy was fun and showed how Alaskans love to have fun in the snow, even if it was -15 degrees at the top of the mountain. The alpenglow on the mountains this time of year is extraordinary. Watching the mountains turn pink and orange was gorgeous. We also enjoyed watching little planes buzz around below us, closer to the valley floor, down by the hotel, which appeared tiny from our vantage above. From our table at lunch, we overheard kids exclaiming about skiers who hopped off the edge outside the restaurant to do a double diamond run. Those looked as close to vertical as I can imagine. We also saw a helicoptor ferrying heliskiers into the back country to drop them into virgin powder.

Snowboarding at Hatcher Pass on Christmas Eve day

2008-12-24T22:32:00.006-09:00

My mom and gramma are visiting from Illinois/Wisconsin for Christmas. It took them 3 days to get here, with the winter storms going through the Lower 48 and back-ups at the airports. Once everyone had slept enough, we went out on errands during our 4 hours of sunlight today.

On the way to Palmer, I decided to drive up to Hatcher Pass because neither of them has seen how glorious it is in the winter. They've mainly visited in the summer and fall before. I may actually prefer Hatcher Pass dressed in for winter than the lush green of summer. It's so breath-taking. The winding Little Su river is covered by ice a good 18" thick, then layered with about 3 feet of snow on top of that. There are spots of open, rushing water, where you can see the layers of ice and snow on top of the river, beside the open spots. The mountains are fluffy and thick with snow. And everywhere is white white pure white. So gorgeous.

I took them up near the top to see kids getting dropped off by dads in pick up trucks. The kids strap on snowboards, hop up, then disappear over the edge, off the road. They'll get a ride up with the next dad waiting at the bottom with a truck. Mom and Gramma enjoyed watching youth being so active in the mountains on an eight degree day. We commented how much more serene and beautiful this was than hustling around in a mall somewhere.

Christmas Mooses

2008-12-09T22:24:00.002-09:00

I couldn't figure out why Little Girl hadn't come back to the door after I let her out the last time for the night. I went outside to see if I could see her in the moonlight off the white snow. I perceived a big dark something and went, oh, mooses! Then I saw her, and saw she was 10 yards away or so, watching them. When I came out, she decided to be the defender and started barking at them. They paid her no mind. They kneel down on their front knees by the chokecherry tree to nibble dried cherries off the ground. It was snowing pretty hard, a very pretty night time sight.

It occurred to me that all I'd need was a baby Jesus in a creche to place by that choke cherry tree, and maybe some industrial big lights on a stand so a camera could capture that picture?? Then I could catch them in the act of nibbling and get a great photo that looked like they had come to adore the baby Jesus. Wouldn't that be a good photo for a Christmas card?

Talkeetna Bachelor Auction

2008-12-06T22:31:00.001-09:00

I've wanted to go for years, but I finally got there: The Talkeetna Bachelor Auction. Nowadays it's a little more fancy with more hoopla than in former years--sexy music on cue as the guys strut the catwalk. It's not held at the bar any more. Now it's in the new community arts and theater building, the old hangar. But the spirit is still the same: it's done in the spirit of fun and celebrates the traits of the quintessential Talkeetna man.

Never, ever have I seen a grizzled, straggly haired 70 year old take to the stage to Too Sexy For My Shirt and then do a pretty convincing strip-tease, if you can get past the saggy tummy and man boobies in glaring day-glow white. He may yet find his perfect mate to help him start a sustainable commune lifestyle above the Arctic Circle--he clearly has several good years left in him and has a few moves to please the ladies, from those hip thrusts he showed off. He fetched $135 and was given a rousing ovation for sharing his talents with us.

Amongst those looking for "a special lady with a full set of teeth" or "my soul-mate who has a boat, and a motor," there were a mix of fine-looking young men, accomplished and interesting prime of lifers, and then the older gents. The night's top bid went for a silver-haired fellow in a Western jacket and cowboy hat. When asked why women should bid on him, he replied that he was a conductor on the Alaska Railroad, had been for 44 years, and retirement was 25 days away. Those gals were lining up for a chance at that pension! His bidder won a date with him for a whopping $1150.

It wasn't quite the laid-back affair I had heard about. Now everything was spiffed up quite a bit. They had the two gay guys in town do the theatrical lighting and the music, and the woman taking tickets primped for the event. She was wearing a set of Carhart's coveralls and bunny boots to be next to the cold entrance, but then had her hair pulled back pretty and was wearing the most delicate, perfectly-sized strand of pearls to accent her outfit.

It was pretty evident who the townies were, in their women's Carharts and boots, and then the entourage from Anchorage who'd caught on that this made for a fun Girls' Getaway Weekend. There were about 100 women in cocktail dresses and plunging necklines, teetering around in pointy heels (I have no idea how they made it from their cars into the building). You could tell them by their clothes, their shiny hair, and their straight teeth, kind of like how you could tell Americans by their straight teeth and perms when I lived in Europe in college. At the end of the event, they suited up, putting on their celery and cerise Patagonia and Northface (clean) jackets to giggle their way along the main street.

It was very, very fun evening, and just that right mix of wierd and odd in an Alaskan way. See www.bachelorsoftalkeetna.org . Just like the saying up here, The odds are good, but the goods are odd.

Marking the Important Moments in life with Guns

2008-12-01T16:01:00.005-09:00

This weekend I was present for two conversations about guns that really said a lot about Alaska to me.

I was at the hospital bedside of Charles, a dear elderly man in our church. He suffered from terminal cancer, but it was his kidneys that put him in the hospital right before Thanksgiving. Friday he started to really perk up and was his usual comical self. Saturday, he was in and out of it but we figured he just needed rest. His wife Rachel had gone home to shower for the first time in three days. While Rachel was out, a call came in from one of his sons. We held the phone to his ear as they talked briefly. We heard him mumble "You get all the guns, except for your mom's .38." That nearly cracked me up, in spite of the gravity of the situation. When Rachel returned, Charles was sleeping and we relayed his comments to her. She said she didn't want the .38, she wanted the .45. This from Rachel, a long-haul trucker who's 82 years old and maybe 100 pounds. Charles heard us discussing it and roused from sleep to tell her which gun she should have. They agreed that the 9 mm Glock was her favorite and easier for her handle. Charles passed away the next morning.

Also this weekend, I had lunch with a new friend who's only been in Alaska about 10 months. She's living in an apartment and her next door neighbor, a man about her age, has been getting friendly. They chum around some evenings and he's helping her learn to play guitar. She said she's been clear with him that she's interested in just being friends. She said recently she mentioned something they'd done for fun to her co-worker, a long-time Alaskan named Margaret. She said that he'd taken her to his favorite spots to target shoot. Margaret said, "He took you shooting? That was a date." My friend said, oh, no, they were just friends. Margaret said, nope, it was a date. And if she got a gun from him for Christmas that was an engagement present.

First moose harvest of the season

2008-11-08T10:46:00.002-09:00

What a night! What an Alaskan night! For the first time, I attended the Anchorage Opera with a friend. We got all snazzied up and went into town for dinner and the opera. Carmen was done very well with local players. On our way out of Anchorage at 11:30 p.m., I got a call from Scott who goes to my church. He called to say we got a moose. I said I’d be there in just about a half hour, when they would arrive also.

As you may have seen in previous blog entries, my church is on the list of nonprofits to get roadkill moose. Whoever responds to the call first gets the carcass. They guys go out with a trailer and a winch or pulley system and pull her onto the trailer (usually it’s a cow moose). It takes them a little while to gut her, roll the gut pile quite a ways off the road so scavengers aren’t hit by cars, then get to my house. They bring her to my house because I heat my garage and she can hang in there at 37 degrees (refrigerated but not frozen or exposed to any other critters) for a week to age. They back the trailer in, hook the winch to the stud in the rafters, and hang her up by her back legs. Skinning is pretty easy that way. It took Scott and Mike only about 20 minutes to skin this one, which was actually a yearling male, not so large. It was a funny sight that I was standing there in little bitty open toed shoes and dress and a wrap while the guys worked in bloody Carharts.

The next day I warned my other renter that there was a moose in the garage. This renter, a first-year teacher, laughed as she headed that way with a bag of garbage to take out to the trash can. She’s a 22 year old new teacher from Indiana who’s having an adventure, doing a one year contract in our school district this year. She said, like a toy stuffed one? I said no. She said is it trapped in the garage—did it get stuck there? She thought I meant alive, like the ones we see in the yard and outside her door. I shook my head no and you could see her wondering what was in store. I’m pretty sure she was grossed out to find two sides of moose hanging and bleeding out in the middle of the garage.

The Palin Effect

2008-10-20T07:45:00.000-08:00

Boy, this “season” just won’t end! I’m so thrilled, but so tired, because I’ve still got a pretty full house! Usually things die down after Labor Day but this year, guests keep coming to our area because of the “Palin Effect.” There are tons of reporters, extra police, secret service and general gawkers wanting to find out about her and filling up the hotels and our B&Bs.

Busy fall catering

2008-10-06T10:43:00.000-08:00

What a busy couple of weeks! When it rains, it pour with the catering. In the past two weeks, I’ve done several huge jobs with another B&B owner and friend, Mary Littlefair. She owns Alaska Gold Rush B&B and also caters with her company Susitna Shorty’s. We went together on a couple of jobs that were too big to tackle each on our own.

In a ten day period, we fed over 1200 people. There was a large breakfast and lunch for the University of Alaska Anchorage at the Fairgrounds, for the Northern Agriculture Symposium. They had a couple hundred foreign guests from northern countries like Sweden, Norway, Russia, China, Japan, and Canada who were here to learn about our agricultural advances. That was followed by the Greater Palmer Chamber of Commerce’s annual Auction. This year the theme was Passport to Fun, with an international theme. We put out four complete meals of different ethnic flavors, everything from salads to hot veggies and breads to entrees and desserts. Our menu included Mexican, French, Indian and Thai, bringing flavors to Palmer that you can’t find locally. That was for a couple hundred people. The following week, in addition to my regular Chamber of Commerce luncheon and Rotary luncheon I make each week for their meetings, we next did two large banquets on the same night in different places. That took some organizing! We were asked to provide the dinner for a community fundraiser for a man who fell off a high pole and shattered many bones in the line of doing volunteer work for the Fair. We were asked to bring food for 5p00. We fed 562 before the food ran out, and they raised over $70,000v for that man’s medical costs that evening. At the same time, we were running a buffet dinner for the Alaska & Hawaii Region of the Moose Lodge as they held their annual convention in Palmer this year. That was fun to feed a couple hundred of them at “home base” since I do most of my cooking out of the Moose Lodge kitchen, since it’s one of the few commercial kitchens available in Palmer.

Moose are too close for comfort

2008-09-18T20:36:00.002-08:00

My renter who’s a teacher for the school district on a one year contract from the East Coast says that the moose have been waking her up in the middle of the night as they roughly graze on the bushes against the 3 large picture windows in her apartment. As they browse, they are not gentle about ripping off and biting through the willow bushes. Their heads knock into her windows and startle her from her sleep. She asked for window cleaner because their tongue marks and slobber are all over the windows. She has a dog, Tashi. Tashi is about a 4 pound Shih Zhu. Tashi is quite brave and runs up to the mooses outside in the yard to let them know to back off from her windows. Then, my renter reports, she runs over to Tashi and scoops her up from in front of the moose. I have said in no uncertain terms that this is very dangerous behavior for both of them It scares the stuffing out of me.

I get to play tourist around the Mat-Su Valley

2008-09-10T10:25:00.002-08:00

I’ve had good friends visiting this last week and we got to play tourist. Besides that I’m less busy in September, it’s also a gorgeous month to get out and see Alaska. We fit in a much as we could in the days they were here. Each of the guys had a different favorite—walking on the Matanuska Glacier, flightseeing around Denali, and ATVing to the base of the Knik Glacier. We had stupendous weather for all of it and the fall colors were going bananas in reds and oranges. They vetoed the Kenai Fjords whalewatching trip on that morning because we were all just too tired from doing so much.

In the first photo, I've circled where planes just like ours have landed on the glacier below us. You can see a bit of the "runway" tracks of where the plane on the right landed with the speck in the upper left of that circle being the plane. You get a little perspective on how large the mountains are around us. In the middle of the photos, I put a round circle around the Sheldon Mountain House. You can't see the house, just the outcropping of rock which is hundreds of feet tall. What looks in this photo like a small area is a butte with a flat top about the size of a football field where pioneer bush pilot flew in lumber and supplies and built a cabin. In the lower photos, these sheer granite walls are 4000 feet tall, well over a mile in height. It's very hard to get a true sense of what that means to us. It's only when another plane went by below us, looking like a speck of a fly, that we could imagine just how vast these cliffs are.

A new moose family moves in

2008-09-03T10:24:00.000-08:00

There’s a new mom moose and calf coming around the last couple of days. It’s not my usual mom moose. This one is not as tolerant of Little Girl’s barking and antics. She’s very protective of her calf who is a little on the small side for this time of year. I’m a little concerned about my mom moose who’s lived around here for the past 5 years with each of her new calves each year. I have seen the twins, growing up well, up the road from my place about a half mile, hanging out in woods there, but without mom around.

Time to head south for winter

2008-09-01T10:20:00.003-08:00

Summer’s ending and the sandhill cranes are using the field at the end of the driveway as their staging ground to stock up on a few last bugs and grains before heading south. These photos are from the driveway of the house across Trunk Road.

Wasilla's Vice Presidential Nominee Sarah Palin

2008-08-29T10:18:00.000-08:00

This is the third biggest event to happen in Alaska history! Governor Sarah Palin was noiminated to be the Vice Presidential Nomination on Sen. John McCain’s ticket. The only days more memorable in state history are when Alaska became a state 50 years ago, and when the pipeline was put in.

This photo is a bad one I took with my cell phone at her inaugural ball a year and a half ago. I wasn’t very far away and did get to talk to her, but the photo came out poorly in the low light of the dance. It was very cool to go to a governor’s inaugural ball. And I can claim to have met Gov. Palin several times. For a while a couple of years ago, we used to bump into each other at the grocery store. You know how if you see someone in one aisle and say hi then bye, how you keep criss-crossing every aisle with them? That’s the extent of my personal knowledge of Sarah Palin, that I said I thought it was great that she might run for Governor, and now she’s running for Vice President of the United States. Alaskans are so excited today!

Fair time!

2008-08-28T10:54:00.002-08:00

The Alaska State Fair is held near Palmer, just about 4 miles from my B&B. It's the busiest time of year in this area for us because on top of all our Lower 48 and International visitors, many Alaskans come to the Fair, too. The phone rings all day with people pleading to just let them have a sleeping bag on the living room floor for a place to stay.

I always have good intentions of buying a 3-day pass for a discount, but the truth of it is that it's a struggle to get away even once a year to attend the Fair, with all the sheets and towels to wash and endless chores of the B&B. Layer onto that, that at this point, we B&B hosts have been going constantly for over 100 days in our season...Usually we're thinking, "you just gotta make it through the Fair..." because then typically after Labor Day, our season ends. Visitors head home for the start of school; Denali's season of bus tours comes to a close and Alaska starts to "shut down" to some degree. That's changing year by year as more visitors are around later and tourism businesses stay open later, but usually by Fair time, we are good and tired.

This year, I did go to the Fair on the second Saturday. Our B&B association took part in Experience Alaska Day, which was an opportunity for tourism businesses from around the state to promote what we offer here and around Alaska to the Fair visitors. We had a booth where we gave out our brochures, and we also had a quilt raffle going on. One of our members made a quilt for us with an Alaskan theme to raffle as a fundraiser. After I worked at the booth, I met my friend Cassadra and her son for a walk through the exhibits and dinner.

It was fun to hang out with them and to eat "Fair food" which is different here from state Fairs I'm used to in the midwest. In the midwest, of course the Fair is held during hot weather and what you crave are cold foods like lemonade and ice cream. Here, it is almost always moving into "fall' weather with rain and cooler temperatures by the time the Fair starts. We go for hot foods which are often seafood based, like delicious salmon chowder, halibut skewers, crab bisque, and bacon-wrapped scallops. There are also the "regulars" like cotton candy and funnel cakes.

The photos show what has to be the most beautiful, natural parking lot in the world, me at our booth, and Cassandra and her son on a kids' ride, with the mountains in the background. It's hard to tell the scale of the delphinium flowers in the photo, but they are HUGE. The flower stalks rise nearly four feet out of the vase and are as big around as a basketball at the lower end.

Fresh Snow

2008-07-25T19:46:00.002-08:00

This summer has been unseasonably chilly and rainy, to the point that two nights ago, it snowed! On the TV weather report, it showed pictures of Hatcher Pass with fresh snow, and all the mountains out the living room windows had a good dusting at the tops. Snow came down as low as 3000 feet, whichi is unheard of this early. Usually "termination dust" (the first snow, which is said to terminate summer) isn't until the latter part of the State Fair at the end of August. It looks similar to powdered sugar on brownies at the tops of the mountains. Today it melted off, since we had sun for a couple of hours. So far, the tourists have all had just great attitudes about it all--you see different things when it's cloudy and grey. It tends to bring one's focus in closer, to details, since you don't see the broad mountain ranges in the distance, et cetera.

Down here at my elevation (600 feet above the tidal water of the Knik Arm, down the hill from me), the wildflowers are in full bloom at the peak of summer. I was out in the back wildflowers this afternoon, shaking rugs, and stood still for a moment--there was a very sweet scent. I figured out it was all the clover in bloom, specifically. The fireweed smells nice, too, but is slight. Daisies, Indian Paintbrush, flax, crown vetch, fox tail grass, and the lupine are all bustin' out in their finest colors right now in the back gardens. In the front gardens, the hardy rugosa roses are just finishing a fine stretch of masses of rubine and pink blooms and taking a breather before the next bloomfest. Then, they'll be in bloom with the delphiniums which are a week or so away from beaking into full splendor. The pinks, wild geraniums, iris, and daisies in that garden are doing their best to entertain as well.

Touring a cruise ship

2008-07-17T20:23:00.002-08:00

Forty folks from the Mat-Su Valley were invited to tour a cruise ship in Whittier last week, and I got to go with! This year, I'm the president of the board of the Mat-Su Convention & Visitors Bureau. It was a really neat trip! The Alaska Cruise Association invited us to tour the Princess Coral, in port for the day, to see how they deal with wastewater, water usage, food sanitation, and environmental issues. They're reaching out to opinion leaders in tourism, the business community, and politics to get their side of the story out, since many folks still think of cruise ships in the same terms of the Exxon Valdez tanker in terms of being polluters and environmental hazards.

It was really something to go below decks to see the underground city of thousands of workers. We got to see how they sort through every bit of garbage and recycle something like 80% of it, with just little bits being incinerated. They carry tons and tons of crushed, palleted plastics, glass and other stuff getting carted back to Vancouver for recycling. The other kind of refuse, the human kind, goes through big systems where bacteria and membranes break down blackwater from toilets and refine it until is runs clear out of the test spigots. As we walked through the engine room seeing huge engines with huge parts and gears, it made me think of my only other reference to large ships, The Titanic movie. It was hot, maybe not as hot as the boiler room in Titanic where the men shoveled coal. It was really clean, though--not oily and black. Everything was freshly painted and neat as a pin. Everybody's uniforms were tidy and pressed. The laundry rooms and kitchens were very interesting, too. The only part that freaked me out was that we were several floors below the waterline. They showed us the watertight doors and to respect the siren-sound they make as they are closing in emergencies. That took me straight back to Titanic fright, of the engine rooms flooding and guys trying to get through the watertight doors as they closed in the movie. That was scary, that and the posters they had up next to the doors, telling people in several languages to stay back, showing a uniform jacket with one sleeve torn off and bloody about elbow length.

I didn't quite get down the whole system, but it seemed that whole areas of jobs were occupied by one nationality. The Captain, those on the bridge, and one of the head engineers were Italian and spoke Italian on the phone back and forth. The laundry guys were almost all southeast Asian, and the servers in the dining room for our delicious luncheon were largely slavic or eastern European.

I learned a whole lot about parts per billion, how much copper should or shouldn't be in the water, how the EPA does testing, and about sensitive marine mammals like bi-valves such as scallops and what is harmful to them. We learned that the Princess Coral is a Pana-Max--the widest ship able to go through the Panama Canal. They now have post-Pana-Max ships which are too wide to go through the Panama Canal, but may stay in the Pacific, for example, doing Alaska runs in our summer then perhaps sailing from San Diego to Hawaii in the winter or heading further south.

There were several invited guests on our trip from our agricultural community and the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The cruise lines are pursuing Mat-Su Valley produce to use on the ships for guests, to use local vegetables. They did a test run this summer with potatoes and carrots and hope to expand what they're buying next year in larger quantities.

That's news to me

2008-07-12T09:38:00.003-08:00

I was on the local news, on our NBC station the other night. The reporter out here in the Mat-Su Valley called to ask how visitor trends were looking this summer. I said very good--far above what I anticipated earlier this spring when we were all afraid that gas/fuel prices would keep people from making the trip to Alaska. I said if she wanted to interview my guests, I had a Swedish group here and also guests from Minnesota and Texas, and they agreed to take part. Here are pictures of them being interviewed in my living room, and the link to the final clip which aired at 5, 6, and 10 p.m. : http://ktuu.com/global/story.asp?s=8614058

We have TWINS!!

2008-06-14T11:28:00.003-08:00

While I was making dinner last night, I glanced out the front door and saw a moose calf on the tennis court! And then another! Twins! We have twins! This is the first time in my five years here the Mama moose has had twins. It was 3 girls then a boy calf last year. I can't tell the sex of these babies, but they must be less than a week old. They were still walking very stiffly. Of course, I imagine this was their first time to walk on pavement, figuring out what the heck this tennis court thing was in the yard!

The last sighting of Mom moose was nearly two weeks ago, by guest Sai walking our dog hunter out in the woods. Sai said she spooked the moose and it charged her and Hunter, but there was plenty of distance between them and the moose, and the moose turned away. Sai wasn't able to tell with the undergrowth if Mom moose was still pregnant at that point; presumably so.

In a day or so, I'll have the new video of the baby twins walking around. Already, Mom is instructing them in the ways of how to take advantage of the B&B property: she showed one of the calves how to stretch up into the apple tree and pick out those delectible, sweet apple blossoms for a snack. I suppose the red currant bushes along the house will be the next stop! I guess I should add in three more guests for breakfast each day now!

Coulda Woulda Shoulda: a polar bear pelt

2008-06-12T15:14:00.000-08:00

At today's Rotary club luncheon in Palmer, the speaker was from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, to educate us about the recent decision to list the polar bear on the Endangered Species Act. That federal decision is one that most Alaskans disagree with, feeling strongly the bear is not only surviving but is thriving in the vast areas it has as habitat on the north and west coasts of Alaska.

The speaker, a biologist for the university, has researched and studied polar bears for decades. His talk centered largely on the politics of ESA's (animals listed on the Endangered Species Act) and particulars such as how in one area a wolf could be considered endangered while in a different environment it could be overpopulated and hunted to prevent it threatening other species. So, while it wasn't quite what I was expecting, it was still very interesting to learn about the issue.

The Alaska Oil and Gas Association has recently started sending out newsletters of which I got one by mail. I don't know much about that industry, except that I've really enjoyed learning about it through thier newsletters. For instance, I didn't know that most of the major oil producers now use military-style night-vision goggles and scopes when they are approaching where to do development in an area they lease. This is because most research is done in the winter when ice roads can be put in. The heat-seeking visioning tools help them to identify where mother polar bears are denned in with cubs, because they show up as a warmer spot on what to our naked eyes would like a vast stretch of indistinguishable snow drifts, The technology helps the oil and gas folks stay clear of denned polar bears (and not run through their dens unintentionally), which prevents cub and mother mortality in an easy way.

The Rotary speaker was invited by a member of our club, Eddie Grasser. Eddie's a quiet guy who I suspect is more politically connected than anyone might imagine of this fellow in jeans and a denim shirt. I'm not entirely sure what Eddie's up to currently, but he has been a big game guide in his past and is an excellent pilot. He is or was the head of NRA in Alaska and serves as a lobbyist for hunters in Washington, D.C. He does a lot of fundraising for education around hunting, to teach kids about the outdoors and to make people aware of subsistence rights and laws. He mentioned he'd been too busy lately with fundraisers. Someone else in the club asked how much he'd raised in the past six months. He said just about a half million dollars. He's a very humble, down to earth guy who is right there to help when needed. Two years ago, our Rotary president was doing an ultra-sport race thing which took him overland through the Talkeenta mountains where you travel as quickly as possible from one point to the other carrying a small inflatable personal raft or whatever ropes or anything else you think you'll need to cross rivers, get up and down mountains, etc. besides basically running the miles of the course for a day or longer. The racing fellow had been swept under and pinned underwater between two boulders while rafting a section of a fast river. It was a very close brush with death, but he managed to get himself out. He was pretty injured, so he used his sat phone to reach the one guy he knew would help him--He called Eddie to fly in and get him, which Eddie did right away.

So, anyway, I overheard a snippet of conversation between Eddie and the Rotary speaker from UAF. They were saying that nowadays a polar bear hide goes for just about $20,000, since they've been illegal to hunt since ? the 1970's ? The existing older hides have risen a lot in value. Eddie said anything over a 10-footer is worth upwards of $30,000, which meant he had a whole lot of value hanging on his walls at home. At this moment, I was so kicking myself. Seven years ago when I was planning to move to Alaska from my home in Minneapolis to start my B&B, I just so happened to see a classified ad in the Star Tribune for a legal, older polar bear hide that someone had for sale. It was listed for $2000. At the time, I decided to spend that money on things like sheets and towels and thought, wow, that would be so cool to have at my B&B, but I shouldn't spend money on that right now... Coulda Woulda Shoulda!

The parade of wildflowers

2008-05-31T14:59:00.001-08:00

There is a very definite and organized progression of wildflowers here in the summer. I imagine that it's almost like a bunch of older fussbudget ladies organizing the flower displays at the fair--that of course there's one way it makes the most sense, is the most attractive, and is the most practical. This is one of those Way to Go, God! things about our short summer season here. Everything is timed to follow one another exactly, even with the eventualities like cold springs or too much rain, etc.

The first to come on the scene in late May are the bluebells. They are delicate and fragile, a graceful first step into summer wildflowers. This photo was taken by guest Susan a few days ago. Then, shortly after and overlapping the bluebells are the pink wild roses, so you have a pairing of light blue-violet along with the blush pink. After these two have faded, in come the fields and roadsides covered in lupine and wild Alaska blue flags, which look to me to be the same as a purple iris. There is a large marshy area on the south side of the Palmer Hay Flats which is covered in wild iris. It's quite a spectacle next to the Glenn Highway. The lupine amaze me because they look like they would not be long-lasting, but they stand along the roadsides for weeks and weeks. They're very picky about where they'll grow. I've tried planting purchased ones in the gardens but they all die. Where they really thrive is in the worst possible soil: rocky and dry, or areas disturbed by road construction.

As summer comes on strong, the white wild daisies and orange poppies come out to compliment the blue colors of the garden flowers that do well here: forget me nots, lobelia, delphiniums, and blue poppies. The lushness of the summer blooms are intense in our short season--everything almost literally bursts open into full bloom. Hunting around in the woods, flowers like chocolate lillies and Jack in the Pulpet are easily found.

Right now both my apple trees and choke cherry trees are in full bloom, too. Mmm! What beautiful scents. Already the rhubarb is ready to bolt. The red currants, black currants and highbush cranberries have set their berries, and the bees are busy trying to keep up with everything else trying its best to bloom, flower, and produce fruit in the next 10 weeks before frost.

Eagle at breakfast

2008-05-20T18:39:00.003-08:00

The Wahl kids had eagle eyes to see this big fella in the tall dead birch tree while I was serving breakfast. While I hastily took these lousy photos, we saw him turn and look at us several times. The birch tree is just about 30 feet outside the great room windows in the back of the B&B.

Breakfast with Jeff Corwin and Animal Planet

2008-05-06T09:34:00.003-08:00

I had the pleasure of hosting the Animal Planet crew last night, including host Jeff Corwin. Nice guys. I think they might be a little worse for the wear after celebrating Cinco de Mayo last night in Wasilla. The place they ate is not known for its seafood enchiladas. We had the chance to chat a bit over breakfast this morning. They tried the reindeer sausage and a rhurbarb coffee cake, as well as eggs and fruit and yogurt parfaits. They go from here a half mile down the hill from my B&B to the UAF Experimental Farm where they'll film a segment with the moose who has a plug in its side which researchers can pull out. They look into the moose's stomach to learn about its digestive process and what it is eating. They'll go into Anchorage this afternoon to freight some equipment up to Kaktovik, then fly there themselves tomorrow morning. They'll be up there to shoot a piece on polar bears. This would be an awesome time of year to go see polar bears, with the end of winter approaching and long daylight hours. Here, it's light til after 11:30 now. On the North Coast, it must be light til nearly 1 a.m. already. They said this set of shows, some shot here at my B&B, will likely air in about July on the Discovery Channel.

Our Moose and other updates

2008-04-30T07:43:00.003-08:00

It's been a couple weeks since I've seen moose at the B&B, though I've seen them around our area a lot when I'm out on the road. Yesterday evening about 8, I got home from a Mat-Su Borough Assembly meeting and let the dogs out. Little Girl saw the female moose in the shrubs just as I did. She ran over to bark at her. I took video of them out in the yard together, but it twitches a lot on the video because I kept flinching when mosquitos were biting me.

When the female charged Little Girl, I wasn't sure which moose this was. The mama moose who I've had here for years doesn't look like this one, I don't think. I think this one is a two year old. This one also seemed mildly curious about Little Girl, whereas the mama moose has definite opinions about Little Girl and doesn't hesitate to let her know. I'm pretty sure my mama moose is still pregnant and hasn't calved yet.

I was at a B&B in Anchorage two days ago, Alaskan Frontier Gardens B&B, for a meeting. Rita, the host there, showed me her two moose, bedded down in the deep snow behind her house, about 20 feet beyond her windows. While we got about 6" of snow on Friday that melted by two days ago, Anchorage got pounded with nearly two feet of snow, up where Rita lives on the Hillside. Her two moose were a very pregnant mama and a yearling who was still kind of small.

I was kind of concerned about my moose last night--her ribs were pretty prominent and her coat looked kind of rough. I guess this probably is the most scarce time of year, waiting for green things to start growing. She was eating birch bark out by the tennis net.

Today is a little rainy, which is great. We need it. I see that the buds on the apple tree right outside my kitchen window are just starting to swell a bit, and htat more branches are newly "snipped" where the moose have been munching on the tree. I'll be glad if we get a drizzle rain today--it can help settle my pothole fillings. Yesterday, I filled potholes in the driveway by shovel, about 3 cubic yards of material. I'm sore today. My neighbor next door has exposed gravel outcroppings, so I took my 1969 F-250 over and filled up the bed, spade by spade full, then went up the driveway, placing rocks then sand then pebbles into each giant hole. I had a gravel company bring 7 dumptrucks of B chip gravel last year, and it's mostly "gone," either sunk into the drive or pushed off by the snowplow. I'm hesistating to do that again this year, not only because of the expense of covering a half-mile driveway, but also because it looks likely that construction will start this summer on the redo of my road, Trunk Road. It is just waiting for the Governor's signature on the state capital improvements bill, then they can start. She got slowed down a little by going into labor at a convention in Texax last week. The baby was coming a month early, so she gave her hour-long speech and quick scooted onto a flight home. She wanted to have the baby at our local Mat-Su Regional hospital, a mile down the road from me, since she's from Wasilla.

Enter Sandhill Cranes, stage left

2008-04-22T09:10:00.002-08:00

I was making breakfast this morning for guests and thought I heard something outside--it was the cranes! I heard their raspy clacking sound, something like a pepper grinder turning, and then I could see them below the B&B, rising up from a field. More and more of them started to come in, too. In a few days we'll have hundreds of sandhill cranes in the field. They'll hang out here for a couple of weeks. It's an amazing thing to go walking by the fields and watch them courting, doing the mating dance, feeding, males keeping watch over the females, etc. One of my favorite memories is being out early one morning when they were migrating through. It was chilly but the sun was warming the morning quickly. As the males raised their beaks straight up towards the sky to vocalize, the sounds came out with little puffs of steam above their mouths. That was so neat to see their breath like that, so close to them. I still haven't been able to get very good photos with my cheap digital camera--they always turn out looking like tan specs against a tan field of dead grasses. Maybe this year!

Peddling to Nome

2008-04-22T08:08:00.001-08:00

A gal I know just became the first woman to ride a bicycle all the way from here to Nome 1100-some miles, through the snow on the Iditarod Trail. She and her husband put on the Ultrasport Marathon ( http://www.alaskaultrasport.com/index.html and http://alaskaultrasport.blogspot.com/ ). Kathi Hirzinger-Merchant also had a nice article written about her in the Anchorage Daily News: http://www.adn.com/24hour/consumer/outdoors/story/383567.html . They have really great photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/23623775@N05/show/ --Can you imagine taking a mountain bike over that terrain in the deep of winter, through that terrain?? Great job, Kathi!

Welcome back, geese

2008-04-21T22:20:00.002-08:00

Today nearly 400 noisy Canada geese flew overhead and circled to settle on the field below the house. They have claimed a hay field, while the ducks have taken over a tilled field that grew potatoes last year offers more mud for the ducks. Hopefully it won't be long til the sandhill cranes return, too. I'm very excited because today Jeff Corwin and the Animal Planet team (on the Discovery Channel) reserved the whole B&B for May 5th for their visit. They'll be here to film at the Musk Ox Farm, and that's good timing, because the babies are typically born right before Mother's Day. Mother's Day at the Musk Ox Farm is always a free day (no charge) to go, and it's fun to see the rolly polly little bundles of shaggy fur running around on their bitty hooves and sturdy little legs.

Tax Day Blizzard

2008-04-17T22:24:00.000-08:00

We decided to take an impromptu trip. We were headed for the Mat-Su glacier, which Cass hadn't visited before. We had a nice drive out there, an hour from the B&B. The day was overcast, but it was still really nice scenery. We decided to keep going. The drive to Glenallen is so scenic, we kept just going. By the time we got to Glenallen, we had dinner at the Caribou Hotel restaurant (awesome half pound burgers), then thought there was plenty of time left in the day to scoot down to Valdez. Cass hadn't been to Valdez or Glenallen, so it was all new to her. It surprises me how many Anchorage folks don't get out into Alaska much! The weather turned to spitty snow, but light. It made it really ethereal and pretty through the dramatic high mountains of Thompson Pass. The last time I went to Valdez was 2 years ago, and in the late summer, so this was my first time to see the walls of tall snow through which the road was cut. We must have seen a half dozen driveways in which sat a helicoptor with its rotors covered in canvas shields to keep the snow off. At the driveway were signs that proclaimed this the home of a heli-skiing adventure company. Several times we saw people getting ready to go up in the choppers with their skis. It seems this sport was in full swing those days.

We got to Valdez about 8 p.m. I showed Cass around town, which takes all of about 10 minutes. I thought we might get out and give the dogs a nice long walk by the docks and down to the ferry terminal, but Cass was too cold to walk in the chilly rain. We thought about leaving town pretty quick, to make it back through Thompson Pass before the rain turned to ice or snow, but it also sounded good to call it a night and stay over there. Otherwise, we would have gotten home at 2 a.m. That would have been ok, but we were ready to be done driving for the night.

We got a good room for a good price at the Best Western, which takes dogs, likely the only time I'll be able to afford to stay there. I'm guessing summer rates are a lot more than the $89 we paid in this off-peak season. They had a nice continental breakfast in the morning. When we got back to Glenallen, Cass asked what the road looked like, going towards Canada. We headed off east for a few miles, then came to the junction with the Richardson Highway, which turns north to Fairbanks. That road looked more interesting, so we turned up that way.

Within the hour, we were into snow and the weather was getting worse. We marveled in the swirling storm about what we were doing out here on Tax Day in a blizzard. It got pretty thick. It was a gorgeous drive, though, and we were still able to go about 55 mph. I just love the quiet of Alaska highways where we can drive down the middle of the road and not meet another car for most of an hour. The area around Summit Lake was incredibly beautiful. We made it into Fairbanks about 3 pm, not bad time, and went for a late lunch. After exploring town a bit, we hopped on the Parks Highway and headed back home by way of Denali.

The weather on this side of the state was much better and the roads were clear instead of snow-packed. We got home right at the stroke of 10 pm and had a wonderful day and a half of adventuring under our belts!

The North Coast

2008-03-15T08:46:00.000-08:00

I think I've talked about this before--the increasing attention on Alaska's northern coasts. I keep seeing more and more in the news and from military friends about build-up that will be happening over the next couple decades, in the Arctic as new sea lanes open. It's anticipated that within ten years, and perhaps sooner, there will be commercial shipping over the top of Canada, signficantly shortening the trip from Asia to the U.S.'s Eastern Seaboard and Europe.

Just last week, I saw a fleece jacket with a logo that said The North Coast on it. The fellow wearing it probably worked on the Slope, but I didn't get a chance to ask him. It occurred to me right then--this will be the first time the U.S. has had a North Coast to complement the East and West Coast. In years past, the sea ice does go out from the west and north coast of Alaska, but not enough for ships to get through for a very long stretch of time. For most of the year, the distinction between land and ocean is blurred because it is all covered in ice.

With all the changes going on in the Arctic, a good place for information and resources is http://www.ipy.org --This is an International Polar Year, and more research, learning and discussions are going on during this year of study on the Arctic.

Dogsled mushing

2008-03-12T10:03:00.001-08:00

I went dog mushing for the first time yesterday and it was really fun. Our Palmer Rotary club has an exchange student from France here this year, a teen named Lorraine. Our club encourages us to get to know our exchange folks and do activities with them. I invited Lorraine to go mushing. Her grandparents live 15 miles from the town where I spent a year going to the University in Nancy, and she is bright, inquisitive, fun 17 year old.

We went up to Willow, just about a half hour north of my B&B, to visit the Dream a Dream Dog Farm ( http://www.vernhalter.com ), run by Vern Halter and his wife Susan, who between them have completed 26 Iditarods and Yukon Quest sled dog races. Vern first gives about an hour presentation about the race, his experiences in it, facts and figures about caring for the dogs, the food (human and canine), what to wear at -50, what has to go on the sleds, and more. He has a video told from the perspective of one of his lead dogs, Taz. There was a mom and college son joining us today, too.

After the presentation, we went out to the dog yard and met Vern’s 72 dogs. Vern’s assistants were getting them all hooked up. The picture here shows how they keep track of which dog goes where on each gangline, of the 2 sleds we took out today—voila! Magnets and a cake pan! What a great idea! You’ll notice that some of the names seem similar. This is because with each litter many mushers like Vern choose a theme for that bunch of puppies. You’ll see siblings which are all named after towns along the Iditarod Trail, or planet names, or types of cookies, or brands of cars or such. You can see in the photo that Vern has had an electrical littler (Amp, Volt, Ohm, Shock, Watt and Fuse), a Seven Dwarves litter (Sleepy, Bashful, Doc, Dopey, Sneezy, Grumpy, and Happy), and my favorite, the fastener litter (Toggle, Velcro, Snap, Tie) who are mature running dogs now.

We mushed about 13 miles on trails back through the woods and over a lake. It was exhilarating and not really has hard as I anticipated. I got the hang of steering and shifting my weight more easily than I thought I would, since I don’t ski or snowboard. Lorraine did really great and had a big smile on her face when I saw her sled go by.

Soaring on Thermals

2008-02-23T22:34:00.003-09:00

When I drove into Anchorage yesterday, at one spot along the mountains, there were one-two-three-four-five bald eagles soaring around in a tall cylindrical type of pattern, one "above" the other. Our warm weather (in the 40's for day-time highs) is creating thermal air drafts against the base of the mountains and near drop-offs like cliffs. We've lost almost all of our snow from the warm weather and we've got sloppy ice all over. What a bummer, only one week before the start of the Iditarod.

Hello mooses!

2008-02-05T21:06:00.000-09:00

It's been a couple weeks since I've seen the mooses. Their hoofprints are all over the snow on the lawn, in the brush, and in the woods, but I have had tons of catering work these past few weeks and haven't been around much. This morning, when I let Little Girl outside, she caught sight of them right away. They were in their usual spot, nibbling on the apple tree over by the tennis court.

Little Girl ran out with her tail wagging and barked and pranced from about 20 yards away. Clearly, she had missed them, too! I was glad to see mom and Junior, the bull calf. It'll be his birthday in about 6 weeks--he's almost out of short pants! He looks good--he's put on a lot of weight, which is great for late winter. This summer he had thin hips and narrow rump. Now his belly and hips have filled out and his chest is broader, too. It was grey light on snow and brush, so I couldn't make out if he'd lost his small rack. I assume so.

They put up with Little Girl approaching, sniffing their tracks, then leaping back, for about 10 minutes, then they decided to mosey on and walked back into the woods.

After I finished catering the weekly luncheon for the Palmer Lions club, Little Girl and I went for a walk, back on our trails in the woods. We saw lots of movement of all kinds of critters --moose tracks, bunny tracks, bird hop tracks, neighbor dogs on their rounds, and also a couple of snow-white ptarmigan on the ground.

Frosted trees, a world of whiteness

2008-02-05T13:52:00.000-09:00

Last night we hit -26 at the B&B--Or should I say B&Brrrr ?! I think that's the coldest it's been since I moved here 5 years ago. Usually our overnight lows might dip to negative ten or so, but this was just really dang cold! I know, it's nothing like Fairbanks' low temps, but we're nearly sea-side and are supposed to be temperate!

Our clear, cold temps have created a lot of beautiful hoarfrost, so everything outside is coated in whiteness. So gorgeous to look at from inside, next to the fire!

In this photo, coming up the driveway which is perfectly clean and white, Little Girl is hunting mice or rabbits off to the side.

Do you like the new website for Alaska Garden Gate B&B?

2008-02-02T11:50:00.000-09:00

Yay! This past week, we just completed a huge overhaul of my new website, http://www.gardengatebnb.com --Thanks to my old friend, Dave, and his snappy team at http://www.Catwired.com for all the great work! My pastor's son, Nick Hand ( http://www.nickhand.net ), is responsible for the new videos of all the rooms and the young-genius know-how to make all those web images and videos rotate and play.

New features include activities and excursions information for our area, recipes, a blog on Tips & Itinerary ideas, as well as this blog. There are many new ways for you to share your comments, whether about the B&B or about things to do in the Mat-Su Valley that will help other guests with their travel plans. Alaska can still be a bit of a mystery and a somewhat hard place to plan a trip to, so it's my goal to take as many headaches out of it for you as possible, by putting a lot of the info and tools you need in one place, on my website.

What do you think? Is it user-friendly for you? Can you find what you need? Does it tell you what you want to know about the B&B and what there is to do in our area? Did you encounter any problems or gliches? Don't hesitate to let me know--you can post a reply here or e-mail me at info@gardengatebnb.com

Nice legs!

2008-01-30T12:32:00.000-09:00

I'll spare you the photos of the hanging sides of meat, but here are the pretty forelegs of a yearling moose that we butchered last weekend. My church, Valley Harvest ( http://www.valleyharvest.org ) is one of the non-profits on the list to be called by Alaska State Troopers when a moose is hit on the road. There are approximately 250 moose killed on the roads each year in our area. Convicts go get the ones off the railroad tracks and salvage the meat for the prisons, but non-profit groups who give the meat to charity are used to move dead moose off the highways.

Usually, the call comes to one of our church guys late at night, typically between 10 pm-midnight on winter nights, when most moose-car collisions occur. Whoever gets the call will gather a couple more strong guys, hopefully someone who has a winch on their truck, too. Sometimes if a tow truck is called for the vehicle in the accident, the tow truck driver will help winch up the moose into the bed of a pickup once the vehicle is out of the way. Usually the kind of moose struck and killed is a cow. These females can weigh between 800-1400 pounds.

Either the guys or their wives call me to say we got a moose and to make sure it's ok to bring it over. The reason the moose come to my place is that I heat my large garage to about 38 degrees so the cars will melt, it keeps things like soda from freezing, and it's a perfect walk-in cooler for aging moose meat, too! The guys back up the truck into the garage. The use a Sawz-All to cut off the legs at the knees. If the animal is whole (and not too messed up from the accident), they generally take off the head. Then, making a hole between the tendon and joint above the knee, the guys a leg on each side of a meat hanger held down low by the animal. We have a cross-stud nailed between two trusses. With a come-along on a cable, winching the animal up, they raise it so all of it is elevated off the tarp or the bed of the truck. Once they have it hanging, they can pull the pick up out of the gargae and we can put down the garage door and heat the garage to 50 degrees or so, which makes it a lot easier on their hands as they work, to not be so cold.

We spread a tarp below the animal and the guys start to skin the moose while it hangs. That doesn't take long, as long as the animal hadn't frozen yet before the guys could get to it. Usually it steams while they take the hide off because the body holds a lot of heat for hours. If stranded in extreme cold while hunting, and you have a moose kill, it's possible to gut it and crawl inside the body cavity to use the moose's warmth to keep you from freezing.

Last year we were getting a big cow moose every Saturday night for quite a number of weeks. I hoped to save one of the skins that was in good shape. I happened to have a large box of Kosher salt. One fellow helped me lay out one nice skin because it was huge and heavy. With the hair side down, we shook salt over the whole thing then rolled it up. A couple of the guys hefted it to the side of my garage, where hopefully it would lay frozen until spring when I could figure out how to tan it and work it. Unfortunately, my husky and the visiting Iditarod team who came in March when a musher stayed here, really wanted at it. Dogs pulled at it and wanted to chew on it, so unfortunately I had to get rid of it. And, later I learned that no one really wants a moose hide for a blanket or rug because they're hollow hairs like caribou. They are more brittle and break off at greater rates than a more supple beaver or bear pelt, so they can be messy and "shed."

Usually the guys will leave a moose to hang in my garage for a week til the next weekend, so it can bleed out on a tarp and age the meat a bit. At that point, they'll come get it, take it to our church kitchen, and call in the troops to butcher all day. With a dozen people, you can butcher and package a cow moose in about 4-5 hours. I was surprised the first time I saw it hanging that it seemed so much like a side of beef to me. I wondered if it would be hard to see a noble and kind-eyed moose getting cut up in my garage, but it wasn't, and I love it about Alaska that meat isn't wasted--that the cycle of life here includes making good use of thousands of pounds of meat by giving it to people who need it.

It's amazing to me to watch the ones who know how to butcher and see how they know where to cut to separate the parts and take off good cuts of meat intact. I've mostly been put on rib-trimming duty, and even though that's tedious, it's neat to work with these huge brontosaurus-sized Fred Flintstone ribs that are over two feet long.

If I don't want the guys to take away the sawed off legs with the hide, I can keep them. I just think it's neat to be that up close and personal to a moose leg/hoof/fur. It's fascinating to see the ingenuity in how they are formed, such powerful hooves and sinuous, muscular forelegs. It's fun, too, if I have tall piles of snow berms pushed up by the snow plow to stick 4 legs into the snow, like a moose got rolled into the snow pile with its feet sticking out. That's always good for a second glance from guests. And, of course, they're fascinating to Little Girl, who loves to sniff at them.

One time last year, a pregnant cow was hit on one of the recoveries our church guys did. Unfortunately both she and her fetus died. As the guys gutted her on the road so she'd be lighter to pick up and move, one of the wives along for the ride spent some time looking at the calf in the womb. She said it was very nearly to term and was a perfect baby moose, all curled up tight in its placenta, with long eye lashes and fur that was already colored in the best tones to camouflage it. My cousin-in-law, Turia, loves studying nature and the biology of animals, so she and I enjoy talking about the close encounters I get with mooses, both alive on the lawn and about to become dinner, in the garage.

We generally butcher to the same cuts as beef: roasts, stew chunks, ribs, backstrap, tenderloin, and ground burger that we make some of into sausage, all wrapped up in butcher paper. As anyone who comes to our church mentions that they're in hard times and don't have grocery money, we give them frozen packages of moose. We use it, too, for our church dinners. The ground meat is easily substituted for beef in spaghetti sauce, for tacos, and in casseroles.

Rockin' the house

2008-01-16T14:08:00.000-09:00

11:00 PM AKST Monday January 14th, 2008

3.86 ML

in the Cook Inlet region of Alaska

My guest, Tracy, who is here for a month for work, gets a kick out of coming back to the B&B each night and looking up how many earthquakes happen in Alaska every day at http://www.aeic.alaska.edu/Seis/recenteqs_sub/index.html . The posting for this one, above, is one that gave a good shake, and she asked me if I felt it, too. The way this one hit, when everyone was in bed, was that it felt like the house jumped up about two inches and came back down. Depending on where the shock is centered, how deep and how big, going in which direction, each earthquake can feel different. Some feel like you're wobbling on Jell-O, some feel like something shoved the house and then it springs back. Some make the floor ripple all the way across as they roll, and some feel like you're in a bouncy truck on a bad road.

One good thing for my B&B is that the house is located on a small couple-acres plateau along the ridge of a terminal morraine. As the glaciers receeded from tidewater (3 miles away and 600 feet below me) to the mountains of Hatcher Pass (8 miles away and 3600 feet above me), they left behind half-moons of gravel and rock that stretch a half-mile-to-mile-wide and as much as 10 miles long. Most of the farm fields around me are located on the flat tops of a ridge, and it drops off on one side and rises higher on the other side. That drop off affords me the gorgeous, sweeping views I have of the Chugach mountain range and Knik Glacier to the south and east. The good part, though, in terms of earthquakes is that I'm sitting on hundreds of feet of gravel. That's advantageous in a quake because they shift and slip around and generally retain a calm top surface despite the action taking place deep beneath the soils. The chances of the B&B being split in two while two plates fight it out under the surface is very, very low.

Coincidentally, the speaker at this past week's Lion's Club luncheon was a NOAA scientist from the Tsunami Warning Center. His Powerpoint presentation talked a lot about the increased frequency of shocks and quakes in our area. Maybe we are warming up for a big one--we're overdue!

A good reason for non-digital cameras

2008-01-13T14:51:00.000-09:00

A huge bald eagle just flew past my kitchen window. I saw a large flying blob coming through the trees and had the instinct to run for my camera, but then remembered: the batteries are dead.

When I came back from church, the sun on the snowy trees was gorgeous, so got my camera from the house and came back outside. Every tree and every grass and wild rose is articulated, stems and branhes, in glowing white, kind of like how a spiderweb with dew looks in morning sun. It's -1 degree today (chilly!) and I haven't charged my camera in a while, so it died after about 6 shots.

It's recharging now. Lot of good that does me now. That would have been an awesome shot if I could have gotten him quick enough--a big fat male eagle, moving right along on his way to somewhere with huge, powerful wing strokes, and his path took him between the spruces and over the apple tree that is not even 20 feet from the house. Some days I think I should pick up some of those disposable low-tech, ratchety-winding cheap cameras at Wal-Mart so I have SOMETHING when my fancy digital photo equipment isn't cooperating!

Alaska B&B Hostesses of Iron

2008-01-13T03:10:00.000-09:00

Guests sometimes say, oh, you were so brave to move to Alaska by yourself. I don't see why. I drove a car with air conditioning and heating on paved roads and slept in a bed each night. It wasn't too rough. Then I moved into a house made of 2x4s and dry wall...No canvas tents of gold rush days. My toilets have pipes that run out of the house to a septic tank...No honey bucket to dump...

The part that's tough is to live up to is the role of being a B&B hostess in Alaska. These women up here are made of a stronger metal. This is something I discovered the first time I met some of the other B&B owners in this area. They are my heroes, and it's astounding, some of the things they've been through, these women. When I first met them, I wasn't used to everyone being so kind and being willing to share so much about their businesses, how to do it, what to expect, how to manage the operations.

There is Janet. She's got to be over 80. I hope that isn't rude to ballpark how many decades she has under her belt, but who am I kidding? She'll never read this. She's far too busy to sit down at a computer or the Internet. She's got three businesses that I know of, and is involved in everything. When I saw her yesterday, she was pressing the flesh, because she's running for the electric cooperative board, not that she needs more to do. She has volunteered for everything that needs done in Palmer since before I was born. Janet isn't afraid to share her opinion on things, and she has a long list of practical experience about why her way is very likely the best way.

And Helen. Helen is 4'6" and all energy. She's well into her 70s and is always on the go. She drives a land yacht of an old lady car and is barely home between pushing for a hospice house, reading to elementary school kids, and "going to play cards with the old people" at the Pioneer Home. She runs a B&B in the home that her husband accidentally built on someone else's land, when surveyors were hard to come by. He thought he knew where their corners were on their acres. Helen knows about hard knocks, isn't shy about speaking up for the underdog, and watches out for me like I was her own.

Donna doesn't do as much with her B&B any more, but she was instrumental in our B&B association when I moved here. She kept a lot of pieces going in the organization and I learned a lot about marketing a B&B from her. As I got more involved in the association a couple of years later, one time we had a board meeting or something at her house. As we sat around the table, another gal mentioned an injury she experienced lately. She lives 40 miles outside Palmer. She had accidentally touched her curling iron to her cornea, and the pain was immense. She had to put breakfast out for guests, bundle up her toddler, and drive herself into Palmer to the hospital for help. "Oh, that's nothing," Donna said.

And Donna proceeded to tell this story: Years ago, she lived in a cabin out quite a ways. She got up early to light the wood cooking stove in the kitchen, in the dark. The trap door to the root cellar was open and she didn't know that and fell right down into it. No one else was home since it was during hunting season. She blacked out then woke up on the dirt floor of the root cellar, in a lot of pain. When she had fallen, she reached and grabbed to stop her fall, and had broken the rungs of the ladder on her way down. This is likely why she had severe injuries, I think she said a dislocated shoulder and broken ribs. With no ladder, she had to pull herself out of that root cellar and walk to where they kept their vehicle near the road, then drive herself into town, all in that excruciating pain.

So I thought for sure that had to beat all. But then I heard what this other woman in our association did. I nearly passed out, listening about it. Her family doesn't have health insurance so she does what she can to take care of their needs. She has animals and is not shy about the practicalities of birthing, or cleaning meat from hunting or fishing. A good friend of hers is also a vet. This B&B lady knew that vets sometimes use Super Glue to close up some animal wounds. So, one time after needing some stitches in her eyelid, she didn't want to go back to the hospital to have them out. She took out the stitches herself and closed the remaining wound with glue. Worked fine.

Here's the part where I get oogy. Then, one time she had some intense, sharp intestinal pain. For a reason that made sense at the time, she had it treated surgically in Mexico. She came home to Alaska to recuperate, all stitched up, with a drainage tube coming out of her belly. A couple weeks later, she seemed healed up. She wanted the tube out, but didn't want to pay to have a doctor take it out. She decided to take care of it herself. The bath tub seemed like a good place to do that, in case there was any blood--wouldn't want that on the carpet! She didn't tell anyone else she what she was doing because they might have yelled at her. She got in the tub and began removing that tube, pulling on it. She said she could feel it, moving between or around her organs inside. She had pulled most of it out, but then it was stuck. Turns out it had been secured in place. She needed to use scissors to loose it, inside of her. She said it came out with a "plop" because of blood and other junk that had clotted or gathered around that end. She said she lost a bit of blood in this activity and had to just lay there in the bathtub to regain her strength a bit. She's doing great now! And I bet you $5 she'd do it all over again, if facing the same thing.

Besides the self-surgeries and the ones who dragged themselves to the emergency rooms, then the ones who are always there for anything anyone in town needs a volunteer for, these women are the stuff legends are made of. They're the ones who have had it rough and who have been through just about everything between them. This is what you buy into when you stay at a B&B in our area. It's all a very tall order for me to live up to, since I'm the junior B&B owner, only having been here or 5 years. And you wouldn't be able to tell that any of these women have had to deal with anything worse than to decide between beef or chicken for dinner. They are the most gracious, kind, and self-effacing women you'll ever meet. Though most B&B guests get to know the hosts a little bit, it's too bad to me that more don't get to know all the amazing things these women have been through.

Countdown to Iditarod

2008-01-12T19:36:00.000-09:00

The Iditarod Trail Committee just announced the ReStart of this year's Iditarod would begin in Willow again. There may not be enough snow in the Wasilla area to start the race in Wasilla. Willow always has lots of snow, and great weather for the Iditarod. I prefer the ReStarts in Willow. It's so beautiful there on Willow Lake. I just got a camera that shoots video, so this year I want to get some of the ReStart on video, how picturesque and heart-stoppingly beautiful it is there, so I can put that on my website.

I'm looking forward to hosting a musher again this year. Last year Iditarod musher Kevin Morlock and his family and handler stayed here. They drove up from Michigan in their pickup, pulling a horse trailer that had been outfitted for their dozens of dogs. Guests loved that--to get to ask them questions, see them feed the dogs and head out on training runs. We had quite a few dogs here while Kevin was out on the trail because he had to drop several of his dogs a few days into the race. Several females went into heat all at once and the whole gangline was going bananas trying to get at them. Bummer! His wife Joan and daughter Aliya, and their handler Danielle were all so wonderful to get to know.

Signing Up for My Free Money

2008-01-12T02:51:00.000-09:00

Well, it's that time of year again: Time to go to the State of Alaska website, log in, confirm my identity, answer a few questions aimed at proving I'm a rightful citizen of the Last Frontier. I'll let them know I'd like my free money direct deposited in the same account as last year, and hit Ok at the end.

The application period is open now for the Permanent Fund Dividend, a percentage of the profits from the state taxes on oil, paid to each resident, man, woman and child. The payout happens with much fanfare each October (or, "Dividend Days," as the TV commercials for new cars, big screen TVs, and airline tickets identify that month). Ah, Dividend Days and the PFD payouts are as fleeting as the fall leaves. Most people spend theirs within a few days, though a few put them into college savings funds since after 18 years or so, an Alaskan child can have a nice chunk of change to start college.

This past year, the payout amount was $1300 or so per person. What with oil hitting $100/barrel, you might think the checks would be for a lot more this next year, but it's a little more complicated than that. The profit is calculated on a schedule and formula that lags several years behind what the price of oil actually was in a certain year. And then you've got all those durned new people moving into the state. I think I heard they're expecting well over 700,000 applications this year. Unbelievable! They should have shut the door to the state right after I arrived five years ago! Hmph! Well, ok, maybe that is something that nearly everyone here says, regardless of if they arrived in 1995 or 1955.

Despite all the immigrants from the south (what you might call the contiguous U.S. and what old-timers here refer to as down in the United States), the next bunch of years could be banner years for the PFD.

Winter in the Woods

2008-01-09T14:14:00.000-09:00

It's snowing lightly, and I just got back from a walk through the birch and spruce woods behind the B&B. It's a still, grey day, very calm. Everything has a powdered-sugar cast of flakes on it.

Little Girl had been on my case to go for this walk. I've been chained to my computer for several hours this morning, and my head was starting to ache. It was the perfect half-hour stroll. The snow on the ground is a perfect consistency for walking. It crunches and smooshes a bit, the six inches or so that were on the trails in the woods. We could see the outlines under the fresh snow of where moose, our neighbor Lenny and her dog, bunnies and birds had gone before us.

Little Girl gets just silly on the trails--it's her favorite place to play. She races out in front of me at top sled dog speed for about 200 yards, then races back straight at me in a game of husky "chicken." I love to see her run. I love her stride, probably eight feet, that she gets from front paw print to front paw print one leap ahead. It's cool to watch her engineering, how huskies double up, then spring, then dig in with their powerful front-end-drive to zoom forward again.

She pointed out about six moose beds that I wouldn't have seen. She runs along sniffing, then turns and races into what is clearly a moose bed after you recognize it, to inhale deeply of those enticing stinky moose scents. Lucky for me, she saves rolling for times of retribution. Next she bolts off through the underbrush following a scent trail or just purely for the joy of running.

Fallen or leaning trees make for interesting shapes and constructions in the woods. I need to really get out there this spring and clear a lot of dead trees off the paths. It's a pain to have to sit on the branchy spruces or large birches and fend your way through and over it. I haven't ever run a chain saw by myself, but I there's a first time for everything. I did take down three birches that were obcuring my view this past spring. I used my two-foot hand saw. Each tree was about eight inches in diameter--not that huge of a task, but I was very proud to say that I had sawed down a tree by myself. Now I must surely be a real Alaskan!

Today, in the dull, flat light, things stood out in ways I rarely see. There was a moss or lichen on the north side of some spruce which looked like freshly zested lemon rind stuck on in a patch. Upon closer examination, I could see it was just bright greenish, but in that light it nearly glowed. We saw spots where bunnies had dug. I saw one white ptarmigan, off a ways, sitting quietly and undetected by the dog. The plants look neat in their winter hulls. Devils Club loses its folliage down to a stub about two feet tall, all spines. A glen of those make their own interesting little mini-forest. Many wild rose branches still hold a hip, orangy-red, the reason first humans could exist this far north. If not for wild rose hips and seal meat, both of which are very high in Vitamin C, humans couldn't live in the arctic without supplements or brought-in foods like citrus.

Also in this light, back in the house now, I see that my red currant bush outside the kitchen window recently got "whacked." It's a large, mature bush that routinely gets munched back to about three feet high, each branch cut off squarely even by a good set of moose choppers. It's nice to have the time in the quieter winters to just see what's around me.

Earthquakes, Tsunamis, and Volcanos, Oh My!

2008-01-08T19:53:00.000-09:00

Living here, near the Ring of Fire, I've gotten the chance to learn about all kinds of things that are new to me, since I grew up in the midwest. Tornadoes: ok; thunderstorms: thrilling. But, what do you mean the earth might split open and swallow cars and buildings? Or that the sea might come rolling in, close to where I live?

I got this quiz forwarded to me from a friend, http://www.nwcn.com/sharedcontent/features/flash/quake/during.html. Try it and see how you do! Guess what...I failed it! I only got 4 out of 10 right...Looks like I need to be more on top of earthquake preparedness. Another friend I know monitors earthquakes and he's always talking about "getting the lat/lon" and mapping the quakes.

I learned something on a catering job a year or two ago. I was catering a lunch for faculty orientation at the college nearby. An operations guy explained that if everyone heard this certain alarm, it meant to shut down computers immediately. That alarm is sounded when a volcano goes off and the wind is carrying ash this way. There are several active volcanos just across Cook Inlet from Anchorage. Volcanic ash is very abrasive and can severely damage a hard drive if it is sucked in by a computer's fan. Likewise, it can be damaging to run a car's engine and have that ash go into the engine. I've also been told not to run the windshield wipers if there is ash on my car, because volcanic ash is very similar to tiny glass particles which will scrape and gouge a windshield.

It's a very interesting to make a visit to the NOAA Tsunami Warning Center in Palmer. It monitors all the warnings and watches for the Pacific from Alaska, over to Russia, including Japan and Southeast Asia, then to Hawaii, and up the U.S. West Coast. It's neat to go in to their small office and see the seizmographs bouncing around on the paper, showing disturbances and earthquakes all through this Ring of Fire area. They also give very good tours on Fridays. There's usually an earthquake going on somewhere. We had two good shakers within one week on Christmas Day and a couple of days later, both which were 5's or higher.

Alaska Barbies

2008-01-07T22:35:00.001-09:00

Some of the references may be inside jokes that only Alaskans get, but I think you'll still find these humorous, too.

Anchorage Barbie:
This fit Barbie has a graduate degree in science, resources management,
and/or is an environmental lawyer. Comes with brand new Subaru with roof
rack holding skate skis and a kayak. Accessories include running tights,
cross-trainer shoes, a husky named Kobuk, and a cell phone. Boyfriend Ken
comes in seasonally employed climbing guide, fishing guide, or Girdwood
bartender models.
Sold at New Sagaya.

Wasilla Barbie:
This Barbie comes with big hair, country music CDs, a .44 Magnum and a
bible. Weekender Kit includes snow machine, 4-wheeler, and fishing boat.
Brand new duplex dream house and lake cabin are also available (sold
separately). Ken comes with a Ford F-350 Diesel pick-u truck with gun rack
and trailer, his own snow machine, 4-wheeler, boat, and .44 Magnum. Ken is
available every other two weeks when he is not working on the Slope.
Alternative Military Ken available by special order.
Sold at Wasilla Wal-Mart.

Fairbanks Barbie:
This graduate school Barbie kit includes a tiny cabin with detached
outhouse. This Barbie has hairy legs, hat hair, and a fleece jacket
covered with dog fur. Accessories include extra long johns, shower bag,
head lamp, case of Ramen noodles, and bug dope. Also available is a
beater, 1979 model Subaru, complete with plug-in, ice scraper, shovel, and
set of studded tires. Ken is either at the Marlin, the Howling Dog, the
Loon, out hunting, doing field work, or is long gone.
Sold at Big Rays.

Ketchikan Barbie:
K-town Barbie lives in an old leaky sailboat that is moored down in Thomas
Basin -- in a slip that is conveniently located just off the ramp directly
below the Potlatch Bar. For basic transport, she runs a beat up old 18'
skiff that has a rundown Johnson 30 hp outboard that leaks oil. She can
out fish most any old Norwegian bachelor fisherman; can cut down old
growth cedars faster than most any drunken old Swede logger; and can shoot
and skin black tail deer that foolishly wander down to beach at sunset
faster than any alcohol fueled Finn bushwhacker. Her Ken can be found
anytime, day or night, on the deck of the Alaskan Bar pontificating --
often with wild, exaggerated arm waiving and finger pointing -- as to
exactly where the Bridge to Nowhere is going to land over on Pennock Island

Sitka Barbie:
Sitka Barbie has most of the same endearments as K-town Barbie except she
recently shot her Ken in what is colloquially known as a Sitka divorce.
She took the life insurance money and purchased a brand new 26' Hewescraft
"Alaskan" with enclosed heated cabin and a 200 hp Honda outboard.
Sold only at a kiosk on the cruise ship dock during June, July & August.

Barrow Barbie:
This Barbie comes with blonde hair with dark roots, kuspuk and parka.
Accessories include a 650cc Skidoo snow machine, tiny ulu and baleen
carving kit. Ken alternates between being a whaling captain and working
for the North Slope Borough.
Available at the northern most KFC store.

Juneau Barbie:
This Barbie comes with membership cards for the Alaska Democratic Party,
AFSME/AFL-CIO and Alaska Conservation Voters, little red X-tra Tuff boots
and an un-used fishing outfit. She lives in tiny apartment above an
obscure bar and works as a secretary in the State Office Building. Drives
rusty Subaru Forester, but has peeled the "Forester" lettering off because
she feels that logging is evil. Ken claims to be a fisherman, but actually
he is also a secretary in the State Office Building.
Available in gift shop at the Baranof.

Bethel Barbie:
This Barbie has a teensy little substance abuse problem, but she has
admitted that she has a problem and is working on it. Comes with just two
outfits, both from Value Village in Anchorage. She likes to shop, but
since this entails buying a ticket to Anchorage, it's not much of an
option any more. Comes with a house consisting of a cardboard refrigerator
box and 2 sleeping bags. Ken lives in the box next door.
Available on special order from Costco in Anchorage

Ft. Yukon Barbie:
This Barbie comes with a Honda Big Red, a 24 foot boat with ancient
outboard that would better be kept in the Evinrude Museum, hip boots,
little marten trapper hat and snogo suit. She lives in a nice little log
house and goes to all the basketball games. A lot of her groceries are
flown in too, but she is outfitted with a selection of knives and knows
how to cut fish, skin a lynx AND pack moose. Ken is not in town much. He
claims to be on the trapline or at fish camp, but someone saw him in
Fairbanks.

Valdez Barbie:
This Barbie was not born here, comes with an Alyeska modular or a brand
new cookie cutter house by Stan Peterson. This Barbie is best
accessorized with an Alyeska husband. She drives a brand new Chevy
Suburban, or other large 4x4 vehicle, needs it to get her over Thompson
Pass when it has snowed 5' overnight. Has 2.5 children and runs all over
town shuttling them from event to event. She typically does not mind the
snow or rain, but is always complaining about the weather regardless.
Valdez Barbie also spends her weekends shopping in Anchorage although she
could get the same thing at the Prospector or so the ad says.

Kenai Barbie
Kenai Barbie is just a weekend Anchorage Barbie that fishes.

Homer Barbie
Homer Barbie spends summers on the Spit and winters going from protest to
protest, also hears voices in her head.

Copper Center Barbie:
Lives off the grid, hauls water in a huge tank on the back of her vintage
Ford pickup truck. Most often accessorized with Barbie's friend Midge, no
need for a Ken doll, but enjoys having Allan, Skipper, Scooter, Francie
and Ricky around to play cards on those long dark winter nights. This
Barbie owns a 4-wheeler, solar panels and sometimes grows pot in her shed
out back. She enjoys mushing dogs, and actually prefers them to people.

Does Anybody Here Work?

2008-01-04T20:12:00.000-09:00

I had a coffee date with Bonnie today, on Friday afternoon. She's the director of the Mat-Su Convention & Visitors Bureau, where I'm the president of the board this year. We went to the beloved Palmer watering hole, Vagabond Blues. There were probably 20 people who came in for coffees to go or to have a bite to eat and sit for a while. Of those, I knew more than a dozen of those folks. My pastor and one of my fellow church-goers sat and caught up. City Council member Mike stopped in, sat down with a steaming cup, and read the paper for a while. The gal from the group trying to make a larger, better museum in Palmer came in for a meeting at Vagabond Blues. A couple department heads for the Borough came in for a refreshment.

I don't get to hang out at Vagabond Blues very often, but each time I'm there, I'm left feeling like, does anyone actually work in this town? I guess I mostly get there in the winter, when I have down-time, too. I love how social and personal Palmer feels, how it is so much on a first-name basis. And how being connected to each other an in each other's lives is vital and part of how we spend our days.

Planting Season

2008-01-03T11:04:00.000-09:00

Now that the holidays are over, it's time to hit the seed catalogs. Our days are getting a little longer, which makes me feel more ready to think about spring and all the flowers I need each year for the B&B's gardens and baskets. While I am still technically open in the late winter months and enjoy a lot of guests coming for the Iditarod at the end of February/early March, my mind starts to shift over to the upcoming summer season. It starts to feel exciting, the dawn of a new visitor season. It's fun to sit down with the seed catalogs and plan out hanging basket schemes and colorful annuals to accent the perennials in the garden beds and rock gardens.

This year I think I'm in the mood for colors that zing. A lot of our native Alaska flowers and those that do well here are cool blues and violets--delphiniums, blue bells, blue poppies, iris, lupine, lobelia...My rugosa roses are mainly pale pinks and rubine/fuscia tones. Last year I could not find any sunflower plants for sale. I take that back--I found a few and paid $5 per plant for 10 one-foot-tall sunflowers which I put on the backside of a fence, to come up behind the roses. They had a complete failure to thrive and stayed one foot tall. I took those darned things right back to Wal-Mart, I was so mad. This year I'll grow them myself.

Let me tell you, I make the rounds each spring to every local grower, greenhouse, landscape company, and then also our new big box stores, Lowes and Home Depot, and also Wal-Mart. Sad to say, I've had about equal success, or lack thereof at each place. I think my success rate for getting perennials through a winter and coming up the next spring is about 60%. And they are expensive here! Ouch!

Three years ago, I started my own seedlings and used those. I guess I've been gone the past two springs for several weeks so didn't undertake that task. I'm looking forward to doing it again this year, starting all the flats, feeding them, turning them in the big windows, and growing them through May when it'll be time to make up the 30 or so baskets that go around the house and on the decks, and then once we get into June and past the last freeze, it'll be time to add more perennials to the beds.

News about the News

2008-01-02T17:18:00.000-09:00

In the news last week about Channel 2 (NBC affiliate) in Anchorage: Zaser and Longston bought KTUU and a sister station in Fairbanks for a reported $4.6 million in 1981 from a company run by Bramstedt's father. The company led Channel 2's move into broadcasting of programs on the same day they were shown in the Lower 48. Previously, most programming was shown in Anchorage a week or two after being aired in the rest of the country.

...It was not so long ago that we moved into the modern age in Alaska! I thought of this news item when guests this weekend made a remark. They were 4 couples up here for a friend's wedding, and they were all from Texas. Because of the time zone difference, they were always up and wide awake at 3-3:30-4 a.m. On New Year's Day, when I got up to make their breakfast, the guys were all in front of the TV in the great room, cheering on Texas Tech in one of the bowl games which was being broadcast that early. This was new for them, they said, watching football before breakfast, before sunrise.

How Alaska Garden Gate B&B Began

2007-12-12T17:05:00.000-09:00

Everyone's story of how they came to Alaska is unique and usually quirky or odd. A number of times it involves running from the law or from lost love. I suppose my story is along those same lines, minus the legal or relationship issues.

In January of 2002, my pastor did a sermon on "It's the New Year--New You. What needs to be new in you?" Right away, I heard a voice in my head say, "You should move to Alaska." I thought was the craziest thought to come out of my head in a long time. A couple months went by, and that thought was still nagging at me. Still crazy! At the time, I wasn't aware of God's direct influence on my life; we didn't talk all that much. What the heck would I do in Alaska? As I started to ponder that, it became clear that my career in communications and newspapers wasn't as likely to be a fit in Alaska. Well, what else could I do for money? I like staying in B&Bs, I thought...How would it be to run one? I started my research.

At the time, I was working full-time at a Minneapolis newspaper. Getting on the Internet at work, one of my first searches was for bed and breakfasts in Alaska. The very first one I looked at was for the Mat-Su B&B Association. When I opened that site, it alerted me that they had a workshop coming up in one month called How to Run a B&B in Alaska. God works in funny ways.

I flew to Alaska for this 2-day workshop, and my fate was sealed from there. The members of Alaska's Mat-Su B&B Association were so wonderfully warm, welcoming and sharing. I set my goals and decided to move to Alaska the following winter.

Plugging away, the next thing on the list was to come up with a B&B. At first, I thought I'd build one--something like a big, gorgeous log lodge, one with perhaps as many as 10 rooms and bathrooms. I bought 2 acres north of Wasilla, in the foothills of the Talkeenta Mountains, rugged, with great views. I had asked my realtor if she thought I needed to do a perc test. No, she didn't think so. Well, it turns out that piece of property was very wet--there was groundwater nine inches down. Ouch. I learned a lot about the state of the state when talking with legal council. It turns out that there are very few laws on the books to protect buyers. It's still a "Wild West" in many regards when it comes to real estate. I had been used to an environment where my realtor was my advocate in Minneapolis, where I had owned a home, and it doesn't work that way here. So, ok, I put that piece of property back up for sale since I couldn't get the sale undone.

Next, during the summer of 2002, I decided that I was probably a better candidate for buying an existing home, since I don't know that much about building one, especially long distance from Minneasota. With Realtor #2, I found a large home set on a couple acres with nice views. It was advertised on the flyer as "Great potential for B&B!" I asked the realtor if there was any zoning I needed to know about. She said there wasn't any zoning in the Valley--everyone could do what they wanted to. I had my cousin, Mike, come with me on one trip to Alaska to look it over structurally, and ended up buying that home in the fall. While in Minneapolis, I had been collecting furniture for the B&B and decided to freight it up to Alaska. I had nearly a full 40' container, enough for a 5 bedroom B&B. First, it went by rail to Tacoma, then by ship to Anchorage, then by truck to Palmer.

Just after New Year's of 2003, friends threw me a going-away bash, and I struck out for Alaska in my 1996 Ford Escort station wagon. I had driven the Alcan in this car for the first time in 1996, coming to Alaska on vacation with my grandmother. This time, it was me, my two Siberian huskies, Hans and Little Girl, and the china. It was a full load! January was a gorgeous time to drive the Alcan. It was below zero in parts of British Columbia and the Yukon. Those nights, I set the alarm in my hotel room to get out of bed a couple times a night to go out to the car and start it up, to run for a while.

We got to our new home and received the shipment of furniture and set about getting ready to be in the B&B business by spring-time. I also undertook quite a bit of remodeling, to make some rooms better suited for guests. By asking around, I found a contractor and his son who were very involved in one of the big churches here. This father and son team were very scrupulous, hard-working, and talented remodelers. As the visitor season approached, I made a post card inviting neighbors to come see the new B&B. I didn't hear much back from them. A couple of weeks later, I had a call from another woman in my B&B association. She said she didn't know me well, but from what she'd heard at the beauty shop, she thought there might be some trouble with my neighbors. I went next door to see if there was any truth to what I was hearing. They confirmed that they had said that it seemed like there were a lot of men coming and going from my house. That's just great--not exactly the way you want your reputation to start out in a small town. And they confirmed that they were seeking Borough action to have me cease and desist. According to them I wasn't allowed to run a B&B from my house due to zoning which specifically did not allow businesses, even home-based businesses.

Again, guidance by legal counsel suggested a direction that I would not have anticipated. Indeed, I had landed in one of the few homes with specific no-business spot-zoning applied to it. And again, it looked like there was little recourse with that real estate agent who had casually said I didn't need to be concerned about zoning. The lawyers I spoke with in Wasilla said that I could fight it, but it would be long and costly because I would be setting precedent in that area--no one else had gone up against the real estate lobby in these legal areas. Their advice was to sell the house and go on and have a good life. I put the house up for sale and called two previous employers in Minneapolis to see if I could get my job back there. Maybe I just wasn't cut out to be in Alaska. It's still kind of a gold-rush kind of place where some people win big, and others lose it all...

It was fall in 2003. I'd had one B&B summer and it went well. I was packing up to probably move back to the midwest. This had been a fun experiment but it looked like I was going to lose my shirt, trying to sell this large home. I saw the farmer in his field, next to my house. We had met earlier in the year when I moved in. I went out to say goodbye, that I'd be leaving. He suggested I come to see his brother's house, which was for sale. I said, no, really, real estate and I didn't seem to be a good match in Alaska. He talked me into it. It was set on 10 acres and was a much larger investment--there was no way a mortgage company would give me, a single woman with not even a year in business, a mortgage for that much.

Well, the rest is history. Everything came together far more perfectly than if I had tried to make it come out this way. God lined everything up, many complex pieces, and it all just fell in place. The other house sold for a small profit, and everything went smoothly for me to land in this new home, which has become Alaska Garden Gate B&B. It has been such a blessing to have found this spot. The views are breathtaking, every day is beautiful, the serenity of the acreage around me is soothing, and I love all the wildlife in this spot, surrounded by woods.

The rest is history! It's been an honor and very, very fun to welcome visitors from all over the world to my bed and breakfast. I've learned so much and made many friends, getting to host so many wonderful people.

You saw it here first

2007-12-04T15:20:00.000-09:00

I would have been leading the annual two-day planning retreat for the Mat-Su Convention & Visitors Bureau if I were at home and not with family in the Midwest today. I’m sorely bummed to be missing it, since I’m the new president of the MSCVB board, and we have exciting ideas on the drawing board for the future of the organization.

Here's my very first President's Column I wrote recently for the MSCVB members' newsletter:

Ever get phone calls from big-city folks who want to book with you and are in a hurry? They get off the phone before you can give them directions. Then, when they get here, they wander around lost because they thought they knew how it would be in Alaska, from MapQuest or whatever. Like them, we don’t always end up where we anticipated in our advance planning. I love maps. I’m crazy about them. An artist friend gave me a piece of calligraphy on a map that reminds me that in life, The Map Is Not The Territory.

I was a big-city person, before I moved here 5 years ago. Immediate gratification and the quick “get” were paramount. I’ve had to learn to slow it down here, and that’s been a good thing. That’s when we can actually get to know what’s under the surface. So many of our visitors zoom through on their way to Denali. They miss a lot of the wonderful people, naturally beautiful features, and off-the-road experiences of the Mat-Su Valley because they didn’t get past the surface, past what they could see at 65 miles per hour. The past couple of years, many of us have had banner years in our businesses, but from the numbers we know that we are barely scratching the surface with the million-plus visitors who travel THROUGH the Mat-Su in the summer. We have yet to capture so much more of the potential market.

The MSCVB is plugging away at the job of getting the word out about the Mat-Su Valley. The other day, I reflected with Bonnie Quill about how the organization has matured and how many strong foundational pieces have been put in place, since first board members developed the vision of the MSCVB, since Bonnie became the Executive Director 7 years ago, since Tammy Bruce joined the staff over 5 years ago, and since I joined the board. We are on the verge of so many big, BIG pieces in this moment because of all the work that has been done to this point. Each year, we put more pieces in place to reach visitors and help them more fully know what this place is that they’re coming to, what the heck a Mat-Su is.

In the four years I’ve been a board member, it has strengthened my patience bone. From the beginning, I wanted more winter marketing and a more thorough and interactive website presence, and I wanted it now. As I’ve gotten to know the “territory,” there have been good reasons for why these things have not come more easily or quickly.

For example, we could do a slick brochure or website for winter tourism, but to this point there has not been a good means of distribution. Reaching those specific people interested in coming to Alaska in the winter through mass marketing and media in a cost-effective way has been challenging. That’s changing year to year. More visitors who have come in the summer are considering winter and requesting winter information. The number of people coming for the Iditarod is surging by leaps and bounds. ATIA is growing its reach to winter visitors, which opens distribution avenues for us through their leads. The new Denaina Convention center in Anchorage is expected to significantly add to shoulder and off-season tourism business starting one year from now.

MSCVB’s marketing and website committees are working in these trend areas to meet “visitor need” with “product”—finding the right avenues to get the word out to those travelers. It’s not fast, but it is deliberate and comprehensive of changes in markets, political climates, and technology. Step by step, we’re making tracks.

Another project MSCVB’s board has started to think about is one which stands to have a tremendous impact on tourism in the Mat-Su Valley. It’s one that I’m passionate about, but also about which I’m going to need to exercise patience and help to lay solid groundwork.

As you know, the visitor center which the MSCVB operates is now in the shadow of the hospital and in the hubbub of the Glenn-Parks interchange. It is much less visible, and visitors using the VIC are down 50%. I thought, why can’t we have a VIC at the most-used entrance into our Borough? Like a gateway center, welcoming them to come within our borders, like at state borders in the Lower 48? A year ago, the board started to explore this concept. We have an idea and there have been some good first steps.

Last summer, we had shared preliminary ideas with the Assembly during a work session, and it was received enthusiastically. Next, the board drew up a resolution in support of a Destination/Gateway Visitor Center for the Mat-Su Borough. It lays out potential locations, such as near the Knik River exit off the Glenn Highway, and names potential partners we might approach such as DNR, Fish & Game, and the Glenn Highway Scenic Byway. The notion is to create an experiential, multi-faceted center which is a pace-setter among visitor centers.

A good model is being developed in Fairbanks. The Morris Thompson Cultural and Visitor Center ( www.morristhompsoncenter.org ) broke ground this spring, and is the product of many organizations working together with local, private, state and federal funding. Early on, I joked that we could name ours the Sarah Palin Visitor Center if that would grease the wheels of funding. This long-term vision may not be realized by the end of her run as Governor, however. The Fairbanks center was over ten years in the making. Certainly, ours will not be completed by the time I finish my term as the MSCVB board president, but I’m excited to start the process.

We adjust our course as we go. Most recently, this new resolution was brought forward to MSCVB members at the annual meeting a few weeks ago. We asked members present to make an advisory vote on whether MSCVB should move forward with this goal. Good points were made, information were shared, and members asked a lot of questions. This was all very helpful as we start on the ground floor of this project. The motion to support this effort carried unanimously.

What we have mapped out is not necessarily the territory we’ll be in a couple of years from now. The vision could look totally different, the political climate might shift, and where the money comes from will always be a question. But we’re putting a tack on our “map” as the starting point. I hope that you will journey alongside the board and staff as we venture down this trail.

At the Airport

2007-12-03T15:18:00.000-09:00

I’m flying back to where my dad lives because of a sudden death in the family.

Here’s something so Alaskan: I bumbled my way into the security line after trying to forget my boarding passes in the little print out kiosk and cursing my daft choice of luggage that I pulled from the bowels of my closet at 5:15 a.m. I was still sleepy and not really looking at who was around me. Then, scooting along through the roped lines opposite me was Senator Lyda Green, the president of the Alaska Senate. She’s represents Wasilla, and she knows me because she eats my food often when I cater events. She asked where I was going. I said a funeral, but mumbled and didn’t enunciate since I was only half-awake. She said Juneau? She was off to Ketchikan. I nodded and smiled. On the next passing when our lines intersected, I rubbed a few brain cells together and asked if she was going for meetings, for Senate business? She said yes, about the Ferry. “That’s so important to them, you know,” she said. The Alaska Marine Highway ferry schedules and routes do indeed constitute lifelines for residents of the panhandle. The ferry loses money each year and its budgets are always on the chopping block. This little encounter is how it is here—our elected officials stand in line like the rest of us, are our neighbors, and work on issues that have real-life consequences to constituents in small-town ways.

I got Eat Play Love at the airport bookstore to read on the plane. I must be the perfect target market of the airport bookstore. I don’t know how that could be—I’m not a frequent flyer. But I always see about 6 books I’ve been dying to read and don’t run into in my daily go-rounds in Alaska. I’d been wanting to read Eat Play Love—it was recommended by my guest Susan Brooks, a customer service specialist and motivational speaker from Phoenix, a few weeks ago. She said I’d love it, and indeed I do. I love how travel makes us contemplate what we have chosen as “home” and what other places offer which differs slightly or greatly. The author wrote from Rome about the choices she’d made in life, the choices her mother had made, and where they both had sacrificed. It made me wonder about what I sacrifice in my life. Nothing much came to mind.

The 5 ½ hours to Minneapolis went the fastest it has gone by today. I’ve been hustling so much on catering jobs that I was exhausted and apparently slept the first two hours of the flight, though I could swear I just had my eyes shut and heard every noise uttered the whole time.

I was glad to arrive in Minneapolis. It’s been a long time since I’ve had the opportunity to hear the words “Cedar Rapids” announced over a loud speaker. On the plane, I read the Northwest Airlines magazine. I almost forgot, but then checked the staff box. When I worked in journalism in the Twin Cities, I used to always read who was on staff first, before any articles, to see who had changed jobs, gotten a promotion, etc. I’m glad I didn’t forget today. It showed me that the company I used to work for now publishes NWA’s magazine. I saw my former boss’ name, the one who hired me for $14,500 after the first newspaper I worked for had gone under. And the name of the gal who I had replaced when she decided to stay home with a new baby—that was my big break into the world of art directing-- and several others I worked with and new well. That was nice.

One of the art directors is no other than my old pal, Geoff. He was the one who gave me the idea to go to Alaska in the first place. One summer in their youth, he and a couple high school friends drove a Chevette from Virginia, where they’re from, to Alaska along the Alcan. They recorded tidbits of their trip on cassette tape, punctuated by belching contests. In 1996, I took 3 weeks off my job as an art director to drive to Alaska. He and our friend Terri (now Mpls.St.Paul’s Art Director) walked me to the parking garage and wished me bon voyage, since I was headed for Winnipeg right from work. Somehow he slipped a mixed cassette tape into my car without me noticing until later. It was a “best of” compilation from his trip, kind of like a podcast before its day, and I got to hear 90 minutes about the adventures they found along the way.

Coming through the airport was nice moment of realizing how things have changed. Not only have my old friends done well at my previous company, but several other indicators pointed to how many of us have “arrived” or at least matured. I was pleasant surprised to see a French Meadow bakery along a concourse. That used to be the funky place my friends worked in a run-down but gonna-be-hip-one-day neighborhood while they worked at getting their writing or baking careers off the ground. It all feels so familiar here that I can’t believe how little I’m in touch with the goings-on here, but it points out that Alaska is So Far Away. My life there is so distant from these hip shops with their ultra-cool style, trendy colors, and (new to me) menu choices and products. Before leaving home, I jotted a quick e-mail to the gal coordinating our B&B Association’s Cookie Contest this weekend, which I’ll be missing. I won’t be able to be a judge, now that I’m on my way to this funeral, and I copied the Palmer Chamber director on that note to say I had wanted to volunteer the rest of the day for our annual Colony Christmas festival in little downtown Palmer, but I wouldn’t be able to. Coming down the driveway this morning at 5:45 a.m., I had to stop the car and move a fallen, rotted birch tree that was too big to just drive over. We’d had a pretty good windstorm last night. These are the things of my every day in my farm community of Palmer.

Feeding an Army

2007-12-01T15:18:00.000-09:00

While I was preparing food for The Children’s Place board, which was having a day long planning retreat today, they asked what I was doing—what was that sound? It was my electric knife, carving turkeys. They asked why I was carving 8 turkeys, and I told them about tomorrow’s big dinner for the National Guard. Marion Romano, who does Economic Development for the Mat-Su Borough, said, “You’re making enough to feed and army!” And indeed I was! We had a good laugh about that.

‘Tis the Season for the Company Christmas Party

2007-11-28T15:17:00.000-09:00

Just a quick note tonight—this is the highest revenue week of my year, and I’m super busy. I’m catering 6 large corporate or group functions this week. Yesterday was a large day-long meeting of 50 hospital leaders. Tonight was a dinner for 35. Tomorrow is a Business After Hours for the Palmer and Wasilla Chamber in conjunction with our B&B Association, where one B&B dresses up really nice for Christmas to show what our B&Bs are like. For that one, 13 of our B&B Association members are bringing food. I’m donating a big pan of Swedish meatballs and one of Artichoke Dip and bagel chips for the 100 or so businesspeople who will stop by after work. Friday is an appreciation dinner for one of the large home builders here; Saturday is a day-long retreat at my B&B for a non-profit which looks out for children. Sunday is the piece de resistance: a huge holiday dinner with all the trimmings for 150 National Guard folks and families. That one I’m gonna need a helper on. I’m mid-way through roasting the refrigerator full of turkeys to feed the guardsmen, and tomorrow I’ll get 4 more done in the ovens. So far my feet are holding up well to all the time on them in the kitchens and serving. I’m just dead tired but so grateful for the bounty that is carrying me through the “slow” season.

And if I wasn’t busy enough today, of course, when it rains, it pours! An assistant in the Mat-Su Borough Assembly (like our local congress or governing body) called to book a retreat and catering for them, so I tapped out an e-mail quote and menus to her while turkeys were roasting. Then, a reservation agent called about taking 4 rooms for several nights during the Iditarod. What a day!

A Pineapple Express with your Thanksgiving Ham?

2007-11-22T15:16:00.000-09:00

We had a green Thanksgiving. It was so disappointing. A couple of nights ago, the winds picked up. A storm was blowing in off the Gulf of Alaska. The weather changed all evening from temperatures in the teens to being in the mid-40s at night. Weird! All of our glorious snow, tufted on the trees, packed in clean white strips up the driveway, and sparkling across the lawn, melted, dripping, and gone. Sometimes we get one of those around Christmas, but it seems like there have been more the past few years. Those warm winds are called a Pineapple Express because they’re carried in with the currents from around Hawaii.

I’m getting more calls now for reservations during the Iditarod, and people in the Lower 48 always ask how the weather is here. They’re shocked to hear that it’s 10 or 15 degrees warmer here than where they are in Pennsylvania or Michigan or Montana. Obviously, it’s not always that way, but we’ve been getting warmer and warmer here for sure.

In that vein, I’m getting excited about the Iditarod. I host a musher each year, and I’m curious to see who’ll take me up on my offer to stay here super cheap with their handlers and their dog teams (since I have plenty of space for dog teams to get staked out) before the start of the race. It’s a neat way for guests staying here to be able to interact with a musher over a couple of days and learn about how they feed the dogs, get ready for training runs, etc.

Joy

2007-11-16T15:15:00.000-09:00

I talked with a good friend last night; she asked how I was doing. I said great! She said, you’re always in a good mood. I had just been thinking of that earlier in the day—that if I’m not delighted or joyful, it’s a sub-par day. What a wonderful blessing in life, to have that much happiness in my days. There’s so much about Alaska that makes it easy to look around at our surroundings and just smile or want to clap my hands. Way to create extraordinary scenery, God! Good job!

Yesterday was particularly nice because I took a fun little trip to Talkeetna. I had a short meeting at Talkeetna Air Taxi. We could have done it over the phone, but I’m happy for any excuse to road-trip to Talkeetna. It’s a 75 mile drive that is breath-taking even in bad weather. I’m at home now, and an eagle just flew by the living room windows. My point exactly!

So, yesterday, I was driving along at 9:30 a.m. The air was clear and cold. My car thermometer said 11 degrees. The trees were frosted with hoarfrost and the road was frosted a bit, too. It was pretty much me, a couple beat up pick up trucks headed into town to the store and back, and a few double-long semi trucks hauling loads to Fairbanks.

As soon as you get north of Wasilla about 10 miles, there are several places on high rises of the road where you can see Denali. It’s too bad that so many visitors come in the summer—the best views of Denali are more often in the winter. The air holds so much more moisture in the summer, obscuring the view more often. It never ceases to amaze me that I can see that 20,000+ foot mountain from two hundred miles away. That’s a really long distance (you can see it from Anchorage, too, nearly 300 miles away). Think about it in terms of standing in St. Louis and looking at the Chicago skyscrapers or in Washington D.C., looking at New York City’s tall buildings—that’s how big this mountain is, that you can see it from those distances. Pretty amazing, taking into account humidity, curvature of the earth, cloud ceilings, and all that.

But I digress yet again. It’s such a thrill to crest a hill while driving and see Denali--boom, right there in front of you. It takes up the majority of the space of the windshield at some of those vistas. It’s like that out my living room window, too, seeing Pioneer Peak, but “my” mountain is only 33 miles away from my living room and is only 6600 feet tall. As the soft morning sun hit Denali, it was soft shades of pink, like cotton candy and ballerina tulle skirts and soft blushes. It never fails to just seize my heart, how beautiful that is.

So, I’m rolling along. In my peripheral vision to the left I saw something—an animal. I clenched the steering wheel and thought about evading it. Before I could think about a potentially deadly moose-car encounter, I saw that it was a wolf? Dog? Dogs! It was a dog team that came hurtling out of the woods on a trail and came within several feet of the highway, but instead of coming onto the highway, deftly swung Haw (Left) onto the trail parallel to the road. It was smooth and natural and graceful. That was a thrill, to see the team work so beautifully in motion. Then I thought, I know them! It was Vern Halter, an Iditarod race veteran who lived a couple miles from there, out on a ride. I called to Little Girl in the back seat to look that way, to see the dog team. She loves watching other dogs, especially Siberians. She’s a huge flirt around other huskies. That was really fun to see them “on the job,” out for a run.

Closer to Talkeetna, I saw small strings of smoke here and there. Rolling down the window as I drove, it smelled good. It was birch wood being burned for heat in the area cabins. A lot of Alaskans still use wood for a primary heat source. There is so much wood all around us, “utilities” only exist in the core, populated areas for the most part, and a lot of people choose to live “off the grid,” too.

In my meeting, it was nice to catch up with my friend Sandra who has worked for Talkeetna Air Taxi since 1996. She’s such a neat woman. We were looking through TAT photos, and she showed me some of last summer’s company party. They had always talked about doing this, and they finally got around to it: they took the all-year and summer staffers up to Base Camp on Denali for a pizza party! I’m no expert on Base Camp, but this had to be one of the first times boxes and boxes of pizza were flown up there! She showed me the Beaver that ferried them up, eating with Base Camp personnel who came to join them, and then playing in the snow for the afternoon. Neat, huh? What did you do this year for your company’s summer picnic?

Perhaps you can see why it’s so easy to be in a good mood in Alaska on a day like this.

Mama Ain’t Happy

2007-11-10T15:14:00.000-09:00

I’m dogsitting a church friend’s sweet pit bull, Pete. He’s two! He’s still a pup with a lot of energy! Little Girl, my 9 year old Siberian, is glad for the company but at the same time mostly annoyed with him. When he prances up to her and paws at her nose, to induce playing, her thoughts on the matter have not been kind. He clearly does not understand Husky life. He just thinks he can go run in any door without waiting for her to go first, that it’s ok to drink from her water bowl, and that gasp—he should just play all day! You can see her thinking, WHAT are we gonna do with this dog? He has no manners regarding pack order and submitting to her as alpha female, no respect for what is clearly hers, and waaaay too much energy.

I let them out first thing this morning, in the dark. I put Pete on a 40 foot cable from the front porch because earlier in the week he discovered the neighbors have chickens! How fun for him! He’s one of those dogs where you can end all of his thoughts with “and that was so exciting!” Little Girl walked out slowly, then sat down in the driveway, looking toward the rose garden. Pete started barking his head off, whether he sensed anything or not. Then after his bark-off, I could hear rustling by the apple tree by the garden. I brought Pete inside, not to annoy the moose/s.

Little Girl moved in closer to the moose, sniffing areas 50 yards away or so, quietly. The mom moose was not in a docile mood this morning. I could hear branches being ripped off the apple tree. Sigh. Those apple trees have to work so hard to exist up here. From the front porch about 100 yards away, I could hear her munch and snort and “maw” softly which made me think the boy bull was around. That was kind of neat to be in the dark, concentrating on just their sounds, the plodding of their hoofs along with the crunchy sounds of frosty grass and downed leaves. We have about an inch of crusty snow still on the ground from last week’s bigger snow.

Mom moose thought Little Girl got a little close so charged her. They leapt back and forth from each other for a little while. Mom moose moseyed toward the house and apparently had her heart set on black currants for breakfast. Little Girl didn’t want mom moose that close to me, since the black currants are only 10 feet from the front porch. I felt pretty protected because the porch is raised and has a sturdy railing/fence, and I could slip in the front door very easily.

A lot of days, the mooses tolerate Little Girl being outside with them, barking at them or roo-roo’ing in their general direction, and they have a known repor (? Spelling?) with each other—how close is too close in each other’s personal space. Today, though, I think Mom moose was just not in a good mood. She threw a fit like I have never seen. She ran Little Girl off a couple times, then I think Little Girl sensed this wasn’t joking around and made herself scarce. Mom moose was still on a tear. She snorted and growled and huffed. She banged her head through the branches of the chokecherry tree to rattle them. She kicked and bucked and swung around fast. She ran across the yard, to nowhere, kicked and bucked some more, and completely turned circles, having a big tantrum. She ran straight back at me to the black currants, which was fine with me. Little Girl wasn’t around and I was safe. She ran up to her bush where she wanted to eat, yanked a bunch of branches off and chewed loudly, I swear smacking her lips on purpose. Then just seconds later, on no cue I could sense, wheeled off and ripped out of the yard, back into the brush. Well, ok! I guess she showed me!

Can you Hear Me Now?

2007-11-07T15:14:00.000-09:00

Kind of related to the past two days’ posts, recently ACS (Alaska Communications Systems), which is Anchorage’s phone company, announced a deal with ATT to string a cable along the ocean floor from the rest of civilization to Southcentral Alaska. What do you suppose that costs? That’s a long way. I think that would be a neat project to work on.

I’m curious to see if that will improve our phone call lag time—that thing where in a call Outside to family or friends, we end up talking over the top of each other, similar to an overseas call, because, well, we are overseas, I guess. Being posted to a military base up here is considered an overseas assignment.

But, regarding phones, it can be hard to keep up regular business communications, since our small, co-op Valley phone company has whoopses and outages not infrequently. With so much housing growth in our area and lax to non-existent Borough requirements for building (permits may soon be required for home building, what with all the resultant problems of letting anyone build anything), it’s no wonder that so many DIY homebuilders on caterpillars back into utility poles or dig through phone lines. Then there are things out of the phone companies’ control such as sun flares and problems with satellites. Apparently, we’re at a bad angle compared to folks at lower latitudes, depending on the day/time and where the satellites cross over or triangulate with each other. Just when I start to feel like I’m living a “normal” life, in a “regular” drywall and siding home, driving on paved roads, then I’ll try to get on the Internet and find out that it’ll be out for several hours due to atmospheric interferences and that I actually do live near the edge of the earth.

I also saw a program on PBS a couple nights ago about a bunch of scientists way outside of Fairbanks getting ready to send up rockets into active displays of Northern Lights, to gather more data about those bursts of energy. They want to see how the light and heat from those disturbances might contribute to issues with telecommunications and things like airplane navigation systems. Northern Lights season is upon us. I’ll keep you posted!

To the Ends of the Earth

2007-11-06T15:13:00.000-09:00

Another Today Show item for the blog…This is the week when Matt, Ann, and Al are at the “Ends of the Earth,” reporting on issues in the arctic, equator, and Antarctic. They talked about how Russia planted a flag on the sea floor in the far north seas recently, and how coastal mapping and underwater mapping are becoming a bigger thing. I know several folks locally who do that for work. There was a segment about the ice pack at the north pole receding and the possibility of a sea lane being passable over the top of Canada in the summers in as little as a few years. So much about Alaska is unknown yet, but I hadn’t thought about “new” territory opening up in the sense that it used to be ice, and now it’s on the verge of being travelable, navigable water which must be mapped and explored.

Matt Lauer is reporting this week from Greenland, which was “settled” by the Danish. I’m a big fan of Knud Rasmussen and Peter Freuchen. They may have been the first white guys to dogsled along the top of North America from Greenland all the way to Alaska, in the early 1900’s, near the end of the great age of exploration. Today, the age of exploration is back on. The military is busy strategizing about how to defend this new area and to provide protection for shipping around the pole. Businesses and non-profits are working like crazy to get to know the vital statistics of this area of the planet, since it’s been largely ignored for most of the last century. A number of newer, smaller oil exploration companies have leases to look for old standby’s like crude but also natural gas, coal-bed methane, tar sands, and other fuel sources that have not previously been cost-effective to retrieve.

Those reporting on the arctic for the Today Show noted that the time of the arctic is nearly upon us. I wholeheartedly agree. With oil at $96 a barrel right now, large deposits of natural gas off the coast by Prudhoe Bay, and Southcentral Alaska being nearly out of natural gas in Cook Inlet, I am pretty sure that within 3 years Alaska will be in the middle of another “boom” period. We’re on the verge of building a new LNG (liquefied natural gas) pipeline down from the Prudhoe area. A couple more pieces of state legislation, and hopefully we can get that project going. The Anchorage Daily News had a graphic about population growth. It showed that the state’s population hadn’t been much more than 150,000 into the 1950’s. Now, at nearly 700,000, it looks like we’ll be over one million before 2020. We know that every week, eight new families are moving to our little Valley. Indeed, my area, the Mat-Su Valley stands to grow 78% from 1990-2020.

Three Channels, and Nothing to Watch

2007-11-03T15:12:00.000-08:00

Living here in Palmer, near Anchorage, we have the privilege of receiving between 3-6 channels on free, broadcast TV. When we get severe winds, it can disrupt broadcasting. Also, sun flares can be problematic for television and phone connections because of our angle to satellites. Recently a couple stayed at my B&B. The man had been born in Anchorage but hadn’t been to Alaska since his family moved out when he was five years old. He was watching the Today show before breakfast, and they were reporting on something that had “just happened.” I reminded him that everything broadcast nationally is tape delayed, since we’re four hours behind East Coast time, so that press conference we were watching had happened several hours ago. That brought back to him that as a little boy, they had TV, and some of it was locally-produced programming. There were times, though, when there was no program on—just fuzz. At that point, the national network programs and news reels were put on an Alaska Airlines flight from Seattle and flown up for broadcasting each evening up here. If weather prevented the planes from going, from time to time there was nothing on TV.

Prints Lead to Thief

2007-10-30T15:10:00.000-08:00

The moose have been in the yard every day lately: mom and Junior with his cuuute little wrack of antlers, and then yesterday, Junior’s yearling sister who I haven’t seen all summer. I think it was her. I have yet to get the forensics back, but her behavior pointed towards her as the culprit. Of course, on this occasion my camera memory card was full!!!

I had noticed yesterday that suddenly my full, beautiful flowering kale, which I had left in my front planter box, was gone. I have a waist-high planter box 3 feet wide and 6 feet long about 4 feet away from the front porch, next to where guests park. This year, I left the plants in it at freezeup, to see if they made interesting shapes for the snow to settle on. The big, broad head of the ruffly flowering kale was splendid at two feet tall and nearly a foot across. Then when I got home from errands yesterday, I thought, hey, wait a minute…something’s different…And sure enough, in that bed, all 3 kale plants were chewed off with stems about six inches tall left in place. That was bold for the moose to come that close to the house! And sure enough, Little Girl found their hoof prints in the snow on the parking side of the planter, neat little teardrop shapes about the size of my palm, stamped into the snow.

Little Girl wanted to sit outside and watch the moose eat from the apple tree yesterday afternoon, so I let her. After a while, I slipped out the front door onto the porch with my camera, too, to watch them with her. It was mom and Junior in the apple tree. They swiveled their ears towards me but went back to eating when I sat down on the porch. Then the more petite female came from the side of the house. She slowly walked straight towards me. She got halfway across the parking area to within about 10 yards of me. She halted and sniffed and eyed the planter a few yards in front of her. She looked curiously at me and sniffed. I’d been baking cookies. I know they love the sweetness of berries and apples and wonder if the scent that had come outside with me appealed to her.

She slowly walked straight towards me. I quit fiddling with how to delete pictures off my camera to make room to take video of her so close up, and started to plan my retreat if she kept coming. She stopped eight or ten feet in front of me, sniffed, and eyed the flower planter right by her. She could have been on me suddenly, so I weighed whether to stand up and look big, but thought that might startle her into charging or kicking. I wanted her to come closer out of curiosity, but that wouldn’t be good to encourage my mooses to think of people as the source of something yummy, because that could get dangerous for me or guests in the future. I sat still on the top step of the porch, then started staring right at her, dominantly and aggressively. She jerked her head back, her ears twitched back, she snorted a bit, and she turned to the side and walked off. Huh. She decided the choke cherry tree looked pretty good, so moseyed over there to browse. Of all the times not to have room on that memory card!

Pre-Halloween Treat

2007-10-29T15:10:00.000-08:00

Really, more people should come to Alaska during the winter. It’s sooo pretty, with thick, puffy snow on every branch of the spruce trees and the grand, white mountains outside my big, picture windows. This will be the first year in several that we have snow for trick or treating. It makes gorgeous, ghouly shadows outside.

It surprised me two nights ago to go from my bedroom to the kitchen in the middle of the night and see whiteness outside the windows—moon glow on the snow. Each year, I forget that snow means that on nights that we can see stars or the moon, that it won’t be “dark” outside. The moonlight on snow makes it light enough to go outside and play or do basic outdoor tasks. It’s pretty much just the months of September and October when it’s pitch-black outside: sunlight hours are reduced, and the brown of the ground doesn’t reflect any light before snow cover. Everyone is always so afraid to come to Alaska ‘in the dark” but the moonglow off the snow makes a lovely and very different light by which to be about all the things we do in the evening and night. Snowmachining (snowmobiling, to most of you, or snowgo, for native Alaskans) at night is ethereal and thrilling. We just need about a foot more of snow to get out on the iron dog!

Men In Trees in Vail-DEEZ

2007-10-26T15:09:00.000-08:00

Are any of you into the TV show Men in Trees on ABC? I really enjoy it. It’s near the top of my list of favorites, of which there are many. I love watching lots of TV in the winter. I’m a sucker for romantic plots. It’s even kind of cute, how they try to make it seem like Alaska, even though it’s a pretty lukewarm version of Northern Exposure. You’d think they could get one of the basics right, though: calling real Alaska towns by their correct pronunciation. Nothing says “filmed in Vancouver” like talking about the ride down from Val-dezz. C’mon! It’s not like the town which is the terminus of the Pipeline was founded by Cortes. We don’t say it like it’s a Spanish mission; we say it like we have no idea that it’s said any different than Vail-deez anywhere else in the world. And we’d thank you very much for doing the same.

Taking Care of Business in Palmer

2007-10-25T15:09:00.000-08:00

Today was Rotary lunch day—every Thursday at noon, Palmer Rotary Club meets. I was able to go today. After the lunch, I had a few errands to run: I went to the bank, where Sue from Rotary is the manager. I went to the copy shop, owned by Rotarians Stacie and Mark. Then I ran by my dentist’s office, Rotarian Dr. Tony, to pick up my mouth guard. Yesterday, Debbie from Rotary was at a board retreat for the Alaska State Fair, which took place at my B&B. At this visioning session, they brainstormed. Rotarian Sara, who works for the City of Palmer, would be so happy: her idea of a drive-through giant cabbage was brought up. I’m kind of into how business happens in our little town. We all see each other fairly often, doing volunteer work for a service organization or on a board or pitching in on a community event. Not only is that fun, but that’s how things get done in business in Palmer.

Going Up!

2007-10-24T15:08:00.000-08:00

Downtown Palmer has been under construction for the last year. Several building owners have been spiffing up, improving facades, putting up new awnings. It meant that this past summer, downtown felt a little “empty” since several shop tenants had to move out during extensive overhauls. This next summer though, there won’t be a more glorious place than downtown Palmer, Alaska. We might get a new restaurant. There’s a fancy new women’s clothing boutique. The bookstore is expanding, and the Palmer Arts Council has established a tiny little office. And guess what? Palmer is getting an elevator! About time, huh? The new “mall,” a strip mall that has been converted to a larger, two-story structure. I bet on the first day it’s open this spring, there will be a line to try out the new elevator. For me, that’ll have to do until I get the chance to take a plane ride up to Barrow to ride in the world’s northern-most elevator in their public service building.

Late Night Snack

2007-10-20T15:07:00.000-08:00

I let Little Girl out for a last potty at 10:30 p.m. and she was gone forever. I went outside and heard rustling from the pasture grasses and figured she was sniffing rabbit scents. I was going to give her another ten minutes or so. I went back out the front door again. She was on the porch and went down from it, onto the lawn not wanting to come in. Then I saw the large, dark shape on the white snow of the front lawn (last night was our first snow fall of a couple inches). Little Girl slinked towards it on the lawn but kept her distance. As my eyes adjusted, I could see it was Mom Moose, making her way to the chokecherry tree just off the Forget Me Not Room bathroom. Moose just plod along slowly and don’t deviate often from their intentions. Little Girl went over to within about 10 feet of her. Little Girl sat down in the snow and just watched. I did, too, from the porch. It was so still and silent. The air smelled good, fresh, and a little wet, from the snow. I could hear not only the leaves being ripped off, but also lip-smacking sounds, and the pits of the cherries being ground between her teeth. I stood and waited. Yes, there it was. There’s a certain blip-blip-blip when she puts her mouth around a branch midway up, then zips down it, stripping off all the leaves and cherries. She pulled hard on one branch and it ripped its bigger branch closer to the trunk. It was a sharp sudden crack. That startled Little Girl who got all up in the moose’s face, barking her fool head off. She chided that moose and decided it was time for that moose to go. Mom Moose disagreed and kept eating. I was a little worried about Little Girl waking up the guest downstairs. Little Girl will have good dreams tonight, letting out little muffled woofs and paddling her feet as she sleeps on her dog bed.

Go Moose!

2007-10-14T15:07:00.000-08:00

The Palmer High School Moose are headed to the state football finals! Congratulations to the team and Coach Christiansen. The Palmer High coach got his 100th win, joining the other 3 coaches in Alaska who have accomplished this record. Why so few? Remember, the great number of people up here is a relatively new phenomenon, the vast majority of us having lived here 30 years or less.

With the state volleyball tournament being held in the Valley in November, I recently sent out brochures for our B&B Association to invite teams and families to stay at our B&Bs. Another member who has kids in sports put together the list of Athletic Directors and high schools for me. I sat down to do that mailing, and it’s only 13 schools! Not counting our three Valley high school teams or the Anchorage schools (since they are only a half-hour travel time from us), that’s how many schools in the state are large enough to have a football team that can afford to travel up to 1000 miles to “away” games across the state…I take that back—I should also add in Barrow, where they proudly built a football field at land’s end, next to the sea ice. Their high school football team is now two years into the program, but it just isn’t feasible for them to fly out routinely to play in the regular conference of teams on the road system (plus Juenau who can ferry or fly in).

It’s a good time to be a blue Moose! Go Palmer, beat Juneau!