This Summer has been a blast. Alaskans do go go go in the 20 hours of light. There is so much to do! and we have only scratched the surface.
Here are some of the highlights of the rest of our summer since my last post
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Wild Alaskan Blueberries!
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Castle Mountain. Very strange,
close up it looks like concrete solidified billions of
smaller rocks. |
Watching the Blue Angels at the air show
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My eldest sister Jami and her husband Chris
came up to visit us! |
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| Jami was the first of my sisters to see Darius |
Home Life Fun
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| I want to eat!! Darius is 5 months old. |
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Our own garden patch! Baba's hard work
paying off--he turned up the turf while I
was recovering from birth. |
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"I want my hair ALL SPIKED mom!"
Chadd bought this outfit for his nephew
while he was in Peru 7 years ago with the
thought "some day my son's going to
wear this. And now he is! |
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Our little helper painting the strip outside
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Salmon with blueberry cream cheese sauce and
Alaskan yellow zucchini |
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Flowers from our own flower patch
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| That nose is just so cute everyone loves it! |
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| This was interesting...in downtown Anchorage a Christian Russian group on the left was singing songs & holding signs that informed the reader how lost you are, while a punk group blasted their boombox and shouted jeering comments. I don't think either group achieved their desired effect. |
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My charting helper after 5pm at work trying to finish up
to go home. |
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| Homemade popsicles with Cyrus' friends from church |
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| Hanging out in our backyard |
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| Hanging out with our neighbor Maia |
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| Fresh salad entirely from our garden! |
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| Salmon and home-grown yellow squash |
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| Helping Daddy work on the fourwheeler |
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| Cyrus' first hand at paddlel boarding at a friends place |
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| Our friends have a jet ski and gave Cyrus a ride |
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| Yes, it does get hot enough to go swimming in Alaska |
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Ok just one more, Salmon Coulibiac.
Absolutely delicious! But took way too long with a baby
and a preschooler :) |
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| We have such fun neighbors!! |
One Week Man Moose Hunt
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Chadd and Brandon, a guy from his work on the first attempt
of their one week moose hunt expedition |
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Moose and her calf. It's only legal to shoot a bull with
a rack over 50 inches or a spike or fork--unless you have
an "Any Bull" tag or a cow tag. |
No contact with my husband for a week. Praying for safety from bears, and they did see a grizzly chowing down on a gut pile.The first day with the horses resulted in two pack horses taking off, losing all the smoked salmon, and spending an hour loading one horse into the trailer....So...they decided to drive the horses ALL the way 2 hours back and taking the wheelers instead.
They saw many moose, even over two dozen bulls,
but none that were "legal." And you have to be careful, if the troopers or Fish and Game catch you with an illegal moose, they take everything that you used in obtaining that moose: guns, fourwheelers, truck, even airplanes.
Family Moose HuntThe next weekend we headed out on our first Family-of-Four moose hunt/camp/fourwheeler trip. Kids and camping can be quite fun and interesting...but back country moose hunting with kids? an exponentiation of all.
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| Mmmmm, dirt! |
It wasn't all fun and games. Namely, right about the area of aptly named Suicide Hill.... imagine thigh deep mud and slosh covering two or three overly rutted ATV paths on an incline so steep if your wheel or foot slides off in the wrong spot it or you will go tumbling end over end. I have never seen anyone muscle two heavily laden Honda Fourmen's up such impossible terrain... My husband is incredible. Meanwhile I struggled to carry a stiffly bundled baby and drag a tired 3 year old over the spongy muskeg that's worse than walking in deep snow, interspersed by rushing to lend a winch hand. Talk about exhausting!!
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SO--MUCH--MUD
This is the beginning of Suicide Hill |
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| A Tundra Mountain Lake. See the beaver lodge? |
But the views, wow.... I could not capture the best ones on camera because we were quickly descending on our journey home. It feels like you are inside a national geographic calendar image. Brilliant yellow blanket of trees covering hills crescendoed by freshly snow capped mountains. A feast for the eyes and soul.
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| Wow, that is the biggest liver and heart I have ever seen. |
Well, moose season was over,but our friends Richard and Mariann got a spike,we helped them process it and they wonderfullysent us home with tasty portions!
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Hamburger!
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| Four moose quarters hanging from our back porch |
The very next day after close of moose season Chadd got a call at 11pm and just happen to glance at his silenced phone ringing. "Hi is this Chadd Yoder? This is the Alaska State Troopers..." He wasn't in trouble as his initial thought, some hunters shot an illegal moose and we were next on the Roadkill List! Woohoo!!! Gutted, quartered and bagged, some even already vacuum sealed, we got our first moose!!
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| Our awesome friends and neighbors came over for a meat cutting party! |
So now are freezer and fridge/freezer are full of meat. What a wonderful blessings. God is you are so gracious! Chadd sure worked for it. If he had shot a moose on the first hunt he would have had
less effort than all the hauling, fourwheeler unstucking, horse finagling, and hiking that he did do in search of that legal moose.
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