Nefarious plan overload
posted in Alaska, Fall, Mushrooms and Fungus, OmegaDotter, OmegaMom, Photography, Weather |So. I have taken the dotter hiking Saturday. And Sunday. And today.
Ahem.
Well, look. We live in an area where when it starts to rain, it rains and rains and rains and rains. Not hard, mind you, just a continuous dingy gray drizzle that makes everything soggy and the moss grow and mushrooms thrive and my mood sink. So when we get Nice Weather™, I feel duty bound to actually get out and do something.
Yesterday’s hike was on a trail alongside the Mamahuska River, starting out in Small Town Alaska. Looked easy, looked interesting, so I printed out the file from the borough recreation site. Then things started going wrong. Firstly, I confused north with east on the map (no comments from the peanut gallery, please), so thought that taking Large Raptor Street to the end of the road was what I was supposed to do. We did that, parked, got out, started walking towards the river beside the high school, only to discover that the path we were on just died out at the top of a very steep bluff.
Um.
Okay, so we head back to the car. I get out the map. I read the directions. It says “the intersection of Large Raptor Street with The Big One Street”. I drive back towards the highway on Large Raptor Street. We find The Big One Street intersection. There is no path leading off; there is, instead, a large 2.5 acre vacant lot that is for sale. Riiiiight. We continue on a block, and behold, a path leading off north. We park. We head off that path. It leads up and into a beautiful meadow filled with tall grass covered with sun-ripened seedheads and fireweed fluff. But the river–our destination–is far off to our right. Surely this is not correct? So I march us to our right…And we find ourselves at the top of a steep hill overlooking the aforementioned 2.5-acre lot, through which a faint track wended its way. So we slid and tiptoed and bounded down the hill to the faint track and started following it.
It led us right back up the bluff to the other side of the track which we had just been on.
Luckily, as I was standing there wondering what we were going to do, and why the #@!$*% the borough recreation department hadn’t marked the damned trail, our dawg and another dog started getting close & personal, and I was able to ask the owner of the other dog where the heck the trail was. Once we got our trails sorted out, he pointed us in the right direction, which turned out to be on the other side of the wide meadow down where we had been.
I loved the trail. The dotter didn’t. We thought it would be down by the river banks and sunny; instead, it was up on the bluff and deep in the shady trees. It was mysterious and dark and smelled damp and rich and filled with greenery and vegetation that was mouldering away, and there were oodles of mushrooms and fungus. We could see glimpses of the river between the trees, with the sun sparkling and dancing off the lacy braids of water zigzagging across the riverbed. The excitement of the trail was when some horseback riders came along–I pulled the dotter and the dog off to the side of the trail, to avoid the dog getting over-excited by the horses, and this turned out to be a mistake: the horses, thinking the dawg was a bear, went into a panic. Luckily, all we had to do was step out into the trail so the horses could see that we were not carnivorous monsters.
The end result: dotter wanted to be down there, not up here. Sigh. And, since she really, really wanted to be able to play in the water–any water!–I drove us down to the Kmik River for a bit of wading around in ice-cold water.
The view from the darkness:
Some bright white berries that caught my eye:
Some beautiful bright white mushrooms popping in the darkness (they were huge!):
A clump of mushrooms displaying their undersides and looking voluptuous:
The dotter playing in the water:
Today’s hike was to Eklutna Lake. The lake is utterly gorgeous, and this hike was bright and sunny, and easy, and fun. There were certainly a lot more people on this hike than our other two, because it’s so near Big City. But I think I’ve overloaded the girl with hiking. Maybe I’ve overloaded myself with hiking?! Anyway, I think it’s time to do other things for a while!
The lake:
Some sunny autumn color:
And some more sunny autumn color:
Playing at the water’s edge at the lake:
Many thanks for all the compliments on my weight loss pics. I must admit, I chose the least flattering pic of me from our summer trip, so that may have helped make the difference more noticeable. And, as Blog Antagonist asked, I am petite–5′2.5″–so a small weight loss looks bigger on me. (The converse is also true: a small weight gain looks bigger, as well.) I will keep plugging away at it, but will only update once in a while on the ol’ bloggeroo. The goal is another ten pounds, I think.
