Personally, right here, I'd barely know there were any fires nearby except for a slight brown tinge to the cloud cover.  It rained almost all night and has been sprinkling a little bit today.  Air near the ground looks clear, feels cool, and breathes okay.  There's no sunshine, just overcast as far as I can see.

I checked the BLM's daily wildfire report.  It says that statewide there are 45 active fires now.  Eleven of them are in our area, where almost 10,000 acres have burned this year.  Of the 45 active fires in Alaska, 30 are "uncontained and unstaffed" meaning they are just being allowed to burn themselves out, I guess.  They concentrate the firefighting resources around populated areas.  Burning is healthy for the forests, but not so for people.

There was one fire report that triggered some laughter from Doug and me:

All fires currently burning in our area were caused by dry lightning.   We are really glad to see the rain.

How was yours?

My days almost always start slow.  Getting my body in gear takes time.  Today, I never quite got going.  Just when I had a few things started, we had another power outage, about four hours.

This day is nearly over for me, and I have done little other than breathe in and out.  Hey, that's not a bad thing.  There is still some smoke in the air, but they must be containing the fires because it is much better than it was Thursday and Friday.

Maybe if I sleep tonight, I'll wake up in a new world tomorrow.  Ya think?

UPDATE:
11:00 AM
It's raining!  Suddenly, with some of the ash washed out of the air, it looks like daylight out there.

In case you missed last night's post about the smoky atmospheric conditions on our water run yesterday, here's a picture Doug took from the top of the bluff by the spring:

Late last night, as the solstice sun was hanging over the horizon, we got a respite from the smoke when the wind shifted.  For a few hours, it blew from the east, down out of the Talkeetna Mountains, the only direction in which there are no fires now.  With some clear sky overhead, I could see the big plume of smoke rising high into the sky in a swirl over the Trapper Lake fire, and a lower, more diffuse plume over the Susitna River.

By the time I awoke today, we were in the smoke clouds again.  Doug's voice was hoarse as he went off toward his bed a few minutes ago.  My throat is scratchy, my eyes burn, and I can feel the tickle of an impending sneeze.  I have to keep reminding myself to take a deep breath occasionally, because I'm instinctively breathing shallowly.

The Su River fire is west of the river, we are east, and it hadn't jumped the river at the most recent report I found, from The Frontiersman, four hours ago.   People around Trapper Lake were evacuated yesterday, and some buildings had burned, but mostly what is burning here is the forest. 

Yesterday some tankers of retardant out of Anchorage were diverted to the Valley from the Kenai Peninsula, where a big fire at Caribou Lake is still spreading.  A fire crew from Fairbanks flew down to the Kenai to fight that one.  Ten Hot Shot crews from the Lower 48 were ordered up here yesterday, and are probably on the fire lines right now.

I know it should be full daylight now, but not much light is getting through, lots darker than yesterday.  I just stepped out into an open area to scan the sky, and couldn't see any bright spot to indicate the sun's position.  It's eerie.  I hope some of that is cloud cover, not all smoke.  Weather guessers give us a 40% chance of precip, but with an expectation of only a minuscule amount of rain.  It isn't very windy, which I'm sure the firefighters appreciate.

Later....

This week's subject is suggested by Sherrytwinklz.

Funny Faces

For me, "funny" comes in degrees, evoking anything from a smile to a belly-holding, floor-rolling giggle session that leaves me hiccupping breathlessly.  I don't think any of the faces I have ever photographed would fit that latter category, and you'll have to decide where on the spectrum these lie for you.

"Funny faces," immediately when I read the topic, brought clowns to mind and I remembered these two shots I took about thirty years ago on one of the most creatively satisfying days of my life.


I was running The Beanery, my natural foods booth at the Alaska State Fair.  Lily and Sepp (top picture, with blue noses from the nuzzling lady clown--the second shot is my old friend Mountain Mama and some unidentified clown she met at the fair) were working in other booths with friends of mine.  They decided to get married at the fair on the last day, Labor Day.  I volunteered to provide their wedding feast.  With help from another friend who showed up with three big king salmon, I turned out a real feast at short notice.

That year, The Pickle Family Circus, from the SF Bay Area, was performing in their big top out in a field not far from The Beanery.  That night as they were taking down the circus tent, I sent someone over to tell them that they were welcome to come to the wedding feast and help us clean up the food.  After an exhausting day of cooking and serving, I received a standing ovation for it from the Pickles.  It was the first and only standing ovation of any of my careers.

Doug gave me my first digital camera one Christmas near the turn of the millennium.  Very soon after that, he was very tired of having it turned on him.  The next photo shows his reaction.

By the time the next one was captured, he had gotten used to being my favorite subject.  This day, he was supposed to be washing dishes, but instead was playing around with some biodegradable packing peanuts and discovered that when wet they would stick to skin.  He walked up behind me and said, "Mom?"  After my laughter subsided, I said, "Hold it right there."

This one works, even though it didn't go according to plan.  We knew that Bagel (Suzy Creemcheez's sister) belonged in this post because her natural markings give her a funny face.  She had another idea, however, and decided to look fierce instead.

Cats can make me smile, just by being themselves.  In this shot, I caught Greyfox's kitten Cecilia in mid-sneeze.

Koshare, below, another of Greyfox's cats, has a face that is sweet and funny at the same time.

While I was photographing his cats, I told Greyfox it was for the weekly photo challenge.  He volunteered to make a funny face for me.  What can you say when your darlin' soulmate makes an offer like that?

Well, that one seemed more scary than funny, so what I said was, "Try again."  He said, "Huh?" and I said, "Make a different funny face."

Okay, that's it.  My work here is done.

Doug and I did a water run this afternoon, and stopped by a local general store.  From our firsthand observations, what we heard at the store, and the local news on radio after we returned home, here is the situation:

Last night's heat lightning sparked 14 wildfires in the Susitna Valley.  It was probably also instrumental in the system-wide power outage that lasted from just before midnight until almost four AM.  With Xanga down and the power off, I really felt disconnected, kept waking up and asking Doug for updates.

Some of the smaller fires have been contained.  The largest fire, north of here at Trapper Lake, now covers about five thousand acres.  Another one, west of here near the Susitna River, cannot be reached by land-based fire-fighting methods and is being doused with river water picked up by helicopter-borne buckets.

We don't have enough local resources to handle the situation.  Fire crews are being sent up here from the Lower 48.

No matter which way the wind blows, or if it grows calm, we are going to be living under a pall of smoke for a while.  Health authorities are advising the elderly, small children, and people (like me) with heart or lung conditions, to remain indoors with windows closed, and to avoid strenuous activities.  Now that we have a supply of water, I can stop doing strenuous stuff for a while, but I don't think I could survive the heat if we closed the windows again.

We were parked at the spring for half an hour or less, and in that time an observable coating of ash accumulated on the car, including some pieces like inch-long strings and flakes as big as sunflower seeds with the shells on.  It looks like this out there now:

UPDATED AT BOTTOM

Yesterday was sweltering hot here.  The good news/bad news is that it hasn't rained for a while, so it's not a steam bath, but due to the fire danger the borough has had to issue a complete ban on open burning, except for cooking and campfires in approved areas.  The last few evenings, between about six and midnight, we have had thunderstorms without rain.  Heat lightning has started a few little wildfires within a few miles of here, quickly controlled, but the real danger is people, stupid careless ones as well as arsonists.

Even though it has become common in summer, it still gets my attention when I hear thunder rumbling.  Lightning and thunder used to be so rare here, that oldtimers said it never happened.  I was in Alaska for fifteen years, and five in this valley, before I experienced lightning and thunder here.  Then it was weird:  a little black cloud, alone in a blue sky, rolling and rumbling along, crackling with lightning.  It took less than 5 minutes to travel from north to south across my field of vision.

With just a couple of weeks to the Fourth of July and fireworks, I'm praying to Tlaloc for a good soaking rain.  As it is, Doug and are I having to make more frequent runs to the spring than usual for water to keep my plants and tadpoles alive.

I missed Xanga yesterday.  The denial of service attack made me lose the latest episode of my memoirs when I tried to post it.  That hasn't happened in years.  It worked to my advantage, however.  I forced myself to rewrite it, and I think the new version is better than the original since I recalled a few more details as I went along.  It's in a protected post just under this one.  If you don't see it, and you're old enough that your parents won't get me in trouble, and broad-minded enough that you won't flag me, tell me and I'll add you to my protected posting list.

UPDATE:

Lightning last night caused a wildfire about five miles from here, and right now the smoke is thick around here.  We are off to the spring for water soon, and I'll take the camera with me.  The light is weird, as it always is when filtered through smoke.

I cheated just a tiny bit in declaring it summer.  During breakup, I decided to accept Greyfox's pronouncement about what constituted the beginning of summer.  He said it's when the fireweed blooms.  That's just one of the traditional signs, but nearly everyone agrees that summer will be over when the fireweed "tops out," when the last buds at the very tops of the stalks open.  This fireweed isn't in my yard, but it is in the neighborhood.  It got a head start on the other local Epilobium because it is in a rock garden, and the rocks hold the heat during the cold nights in breakup.

 

Buds on the fireweed in my yard haven't started opening yet.

I met a dandelion wearing a tophat on my walk around the block today.  All the way around the block is farther than I usually walk.  Some of my woods walks are as short as half a block away and back again, and none are more than about a block and a half away, three blocks total.   The woods are right out there, starting at my yard.

 

I went that far today, because last time Doug went out there, to the mailbox, he picked a wild geranium and brought it back to me.  I went out today to capture wild geraniums, and found a lot of other flowers that aren't growing back here on the more heavily forested end of the block.

I have not seen any wild iris growing in the muskeg this year, where it was always plentiful before, but it is now plentiful on the grounds of the RV park, where it never grew before.  Hmmm....

Shasta daisies are plentiful at the RV park now, too, but they have been there for over twenty years.  When Doug was still a preschooler, I started a bunch of daisy seedlings, had more than I needed, and sold my surplus to Lucille Allen, who, with her husband, Pete, built the RV park and the motel on the next block by the highway.

A dog I hadn't met before accompanied me for part of my walk.  There's a picture of him, and more flower photos, both wild and cultivated, in my photoblog.  I gotta try to round up Doug and get a window open before I cook dinner (it's not a simple job -- there's a screen that's too small, has to be duct-taped in place after we push back the drapes and move the block of styrofoam that's been insulating the window behind the monitor all winter).  Too hot in here to cook now.

The town trip was relatively non-traumatic.  Someone asked how often I do this -- go to town.  I go just as infrequently as I can get away with.  My car is not performing well, one of my tires has a slow leak, gas costs money, and chronic fatigue syndrome is a bitch, too.  If that wasn't where the supermarkets and my husband are, I might not ever go.  That's probably an over-optimistic overstatement, because a few times each year, things come up that require a trip to town, but if I had my druthers... and if there wasn't all that gorgeous scenery between here and town, I'd go a lot less often than I do.

I got my feet wet and my clean socks muddy before I ever got there on Saturday morning.  Kashwitna lake was just too pretty to pass up without taking pictures.  I left the highway turnout, and went through the trees to get a clear shot across the lake.  That was when I noticed the wild Calla lilies growing at the edge of the lake.  To get close enough to get a shot of them through the thick grass, I had to get out on the spongy none-too-solid ground.  I sank in an inch or so.

It was hot, dusty, noisy, and all that, at Felony Flats, but I sold a bunch of my junk and had some time to spend with my Old Fart.

That is Greyfox, ArmsMerchant, my old fart -- with the accent on MY -- not an OLD fart, nor an old FART, but MY old fart, my darlin', my soulmate, my sugar daddy.

Before I even had all my stuff unpacked, a train of sightseeing cars from one of the cruise lines stopped at the siding there to change crews, giving me a decent photo op.

I was too tired and all beat from the wind and sun at the end of the day to drive home, so I slept in my car.  Greyfox offered me his little bed but it's not as comfortable as my reclining car seat.  With the help of a pair of earplugs he gave me, I got some sleep.  I have no idea how much because I don't know when I crawled in there, when I crawled out, or how much time I spent awake.  It's not getting dark now (Land of the Midnight Sun, y'know?) so night is a nebulous concept.

After breakfast at IHOP with Greyfox, and some separate shopping in the same stores -- it's quicker and less walking, if we split up -- I headed back up the valley for home Sunday afternoon with not enough stamina left to unload the groceries or fix myself anything to eat.  Doug took care of me, and in return I shared the groceries with him.  I love the way my family works.  We're functional, as a unit, even if the individual members are none of us quite all there.

Today, I spent hours cropping, PhotoShopping, and uploading pictures from the town trip and from the most recent woods walk before I went to town.  If anyone out there knows, please tell me whether the orange stuff below, which floats off on the breeze every time a little gust comes along or something bumps a branch of the spruce trees, is the tree spreading its pollen or some kind of blight spreading its spores.

I'm resting.  Really.  I am not procrastinating... okay, maybe I am.  That I had to ask myself if I was, is sorta suspiciously suggestive.

I can't rest here too long, anyhow.  There is a plastic camp shower bag full of warm (and cooling) water waiting for me.  I need to get my shower, then air up a flat tire and hit the road to Wasilla to set up my yard sale tables.  Greyfox has volunteered to watch them for me while I do some grocery shopping.  Otherwise, the grocery shopping might not get done, and that is not acceptable given the echoing hollowness in our fridge.  Last time I did the yard sale, I was so tired afterward I couldn't do any shopping, and I pulled away from the gas pump on my way home without taking the nozzle out of my tank.  I'm considering staying over in town tonight if I'm too tired to drive home.

I am tired, so tired.  This is really early in the day for me.  My energy spurt doesn't usually hit until midafternoon, and then is gone before evening.  Already, today, I have done as much walking, stooping, reaching and lifting as I do on any ordinary day.  All that was just the preparation for the town trip:  heating water for my shower, pouring the water from the eggs I boiled for Greyfox last night onto my newly-planted rhubarb, gathering stuff to take to town....  I hope I find some stamina somewhere.

Heading out the door to the outhouse a few minutes ago, I heard a woodpecker knocking on a tree, then another, beating on a different tree that sounded bigger and more resonant.  There was some back-and-forth drumming, with the more resonant thwacks coming less often than the lighter, sharper sounds, before I realized that it wasn't two birds on two trees, but three of each.  All were generally south of here, out in the section of woods where I walked the wolf trail last week.

I stayed in the outhouse longer than I really needed to, resting and listening to the woodpeckers.  Then the mosquitoes found me and I decided I could just as easily rest here and listen to NPR.  I might not learn as much from listening to the woodpeckers, but they are a lot less disturbing than the news.

Gotta go. 

Until recently, I usually viewed the muskeg on the other side of the road we live on from its edge, either by walking through the trees just across the road or going down the road to the cul de sac for an unobstructed view.  A couple of years ago, at this time of year, it was flooded and looked like this.

A few times, in winter, I was able to walk out onto the ice to get shots like this.  Now, it is dry and I can walk across that part that is water in the first shot and a flat expanse of snow in the second one, to get to the area between the flat snow and the tall trees in the background, where those low bushes are.  Never having been there before, I'm finding things I'd never seen before.

I don't know what these flowers are.  Their shape is like that of shooting star, but they are tiny, with the petals folded back along the stem, growing not in clusters from a rosette of basal leaves like shooting star, but singly out of the ends of woody stems with opposed pairs of leaves, and the flower stalks are only an inch or two long, the flowers about 3/8 of an inch.

The tiny pink flowers are just one mystery I encountered on my last walk out there.  I found dozens of old silvered stumps, with the trees cut and just left lying on the ground.  This had to have been done years ago, before we moved in here in 1998.  Unless I find a neighbor who knows who did it, I may never know the motivation, but I have a theory. 

These are spruce trees, and probably had been killed or at least infested by spruce bark beetles before they were cut.  Maybe someone heard the  State Forestry Department's warnings about the beetles and the advisories about eradicating them by destroying infested trees.  If that's true, they missed one essential part of the advice.  It is necessary to burn the felled trees promptly, or the beetles reproduce and infest more trees.

I'm pretty sure I have solved the mystery of the boulder holes out there, but it puzzled me at first.  There are a lot of holes out in that brushy part of the muskeg, between the grassy area and the forested part.  The most logical explanation is that they once held the roots of trees that died and then fell, when the area was flooded.  The picture above shows the top of one of those holes, spanned by a downed tree, in the foreground.

The POV of this shot is near the lower right corner of the one above, looking down into the hole.  Boulders about the size of my head and larger line the bottom of the hole.  There are many holes out there with no rocks, probably about three or four times as many holes without boulders as there are ones with boulders.

I wondered about it, puzzled about how the rocks got into some of those holes.  One thought that occurred to me was that someone put them there, but I couldn't think of a single good reason for it.  Then I noticed that only the deepest holes were showing any boulders, and that in some of them I could see rocks half-concealed around the edges of the holes just above the level of the boulders.

Those rocks were left there, I'm reasonably sure, when the glaciers receded, 7,000 to 10,000 years ago.  The layer of peat and vegetation above the rocks is about two to three feet thick.  The raised areas adjacent to the annually flooded, marshy areas of the muskeg are built upon the eskers and drumlins left behind by the receding glaciers.

I am without a solid theory for what caused the five-foot-long split, cut or crevice in the peaty ground, extending diagonally from lower left to upper right of the picture below.  If it were solid ground, I'd think it was an earthquake crack, but this is a spongy, mossy mat.  If it were the result of a root having been pulled up, it would have had to have been an extraordinarily straight root, and it would have raised and curled back the edges of the split.  If someone cut it with a knife or machete, why?  If it was made by an animal, how? ...and why?

A closer view of part of it extends vertically across the middle of the next picture.

At one end of it is a cluster of holes that might have been made by insects or small rodents:

The other end of the crack, cut, crevice or split, which is deeper than the length of my hand and almost ruler-straight, with little or no deformation of its edges, disappears into a thicket of blueberries, spirea, and labrador tea bushes.

So, I found four mysteries and solved one, leaving me some things to investigate and think about.  While I was out there, I'm pretty sure I heard a bear back in the woods.  First, I heard a heavy snap, not a twig breaking, but a limb or whole fallen tree.  Then I heard a big "whuff" that was very bearlike, followed by a grunt that might have been a pig, but as far as I know there are no pigs out there.

I had been singing my "dum-de-dum" song to let the bears know I was there, but I figured that when the bear started vocalizing to let me know it was there, it would be dum-de-dum for me to stick around, so I turned for home.  On the way, I saw some of the prettiest, greenest, moss I'd ever seen, so I stopped for one more picture.