Grizzlies WHAT?!

The Legners are here! Ryan and I picked Kristen and Jeff up last night in Anchorage and spent the night in the city so we could have a scenic drive back to the Kenai Peninsula. On the way down, we took a 5 mile hike on the Winner's Trail which led us to a hand tram over a gorge. Being afraid of heights, it took a lot for me to get on the thing. It's basically a cage that will take you across the gorge but you have to pull yourself across by pulling on a cord. Ryan, being the gentleman he is, pulled all the way across and back. Once again, words can not describe how beautiful the sights we saw on the hike were.

We also had the opportunity to see bison, caribou, reindeer, moose, black bear, and brown bear on our way down. The brown bears (which are the grizzly and the more dangerous out of the two bears) striked poses for me. Don't worry, they are actually "rescued" bears at the Alaskan Wildlife Conservatory. It was bizarre how photo ready they were! They really could have made it in the modeling world. :) All of the bear at the conservatory basically lost their mothers when they were cubs and could have never made it alone in the wild. It was awesome to be an arm's length away from these magnificent animals.




 

Would You Eat This?

The past few days have been uneventful, we've been trying to catch as many reds as we can before the run is over (dip netting ends on the 31st). Now most of the reds have the gnarly snout. Kristi, the beautiful picture on the right is for you! ;) They are not as pretty as they were earlier in the run. But the meat is just as tasty. :) The next type of salmon we'll be able to catch off our fishing platform are silvers (coho). They're supposed to be more fun to catch. Which means that you actually use bait or lures to catch them instead of trying to snag them like the reds. I didn't realize that fishing actually takes muscle power! Today I was the one to get skunked and Ryan caught 2. They were the biggest yet!

On a different note than fishing, Zephyr found this beautiful mushroom while we were playing fetch. He didn't know what to make of it, so he crept up and then decided it was the scariest thing in the world and ran away. I tried to look up what type of mushroom (yes, I have that much time) and I think it is a fly agaric.

The Legners will be here on Thursday! Kristen and Jeff will be here on Thursday night so we'll head up to Anchorage to pick them up. I will also do some much needed retail therapy during the day. I hope that the weather is better for their short but sweet visit, it's been cloudy and rainy since Laurie left!

Reds Have Become an Addiction

I woke up this morning to Ryan's voice calling his mama to see if she had a good flight. Her flight turned out to be next to a not-so-fun person and American ended up losing her 40 lb box of fish and suitcase. What a bummer! Especially because we caught, cleaned, filleted, froze, then food savered, then froze all of those fish individually. I am thinking that this is like an early Christmas for the baggage handlers and they know how yummy the fish are. So they "lose" the fish. :) Sarcasm aside, I'm sure the fish will come in tomorrow and they'll still be frozen and just as delicious...hopefully.

We then hopped out of bed and immediately headed for the outdoors to smoke the salmon I caught yesterday and to start working toward our limit of reds for the day. I hit my limit (but two of them were pretty beat up, one had someone else's hook and line already in its mouth and another had slashes maybe from a boat) and Ryan caught 2. I have to give him credit though because the ones he caught were pretty huge (they are the two the left). That is Ryan's hand just to give you a frame of reference for how big these fish are. When they are snagged they fight so incredibly hard! My arms are so sore.

The salmon run has been slowing down in the past few days and we feel an obligation to get out there everyday and catch our limit. We'll probably end up with more salmon than we can eat but there's a sort of satisfaction in having food that you've caught yourself. :) They've also started to change a bit..and are looking a bit prehistoric. When the salmon hit the freshwater, their snout starts getting gnarlier and their bodies turn red. One of Ryan's big ones had the beginning of the gnarly snout...ewwwwwwww.

Jane - 3, Ryan - Skunked

It seems like everyday I'm seeing or doing something exciting or neat. This morning on our random trip to Captain Cook State Park we got to see Mt. Redoubt (active stratovolcano) throwing out some steam. How cool is that?

Our awesome landlord/neighbor is always teaching us something new and yesterday Dale taught Ryan how to smoke salmon. Pictured are the smokers. It's actually easier than I thought it would be. First you brine the salmon fillets overnight, in a mixture of soy sauce, brown sugar, garlic powder, and black pepper. Then you put them in these containers on racks and put a little pan of alder chips and a handful of hickory chips on the bottom. The smoker itself doesn't get too hot at all. After about 8 hours you get pure deliciousness.



I also had the opportunity to catch more reds today than Ryan. It was pretty awesome! :) Ryan got skunked (which means he caught nada). The more I am exposed to fishing and the duties that go with it, I am getting less squeamish. In the picture I am "bleeding" the fish by cutting a vein under its gill. So BRAVE! hehe But Ryan is still the gentleman and does the filleting. Maybe eventually I'll get to that point...but not soon.

Laurie left tonight from Kenai in her puddle jumper plane. It was fun to have someone here to share experiences with without Ryan around. Best M.I.L. in the world!! Here she is getting on her plane.

Reds

Ryan's weekend of non-stop work finally ended and we went to the backyard for some salmon fishing. Ryan of course caught some right away. The way you fish for sockeye (reds) salmon on the river is interesting. You put a piece of yarn by the hook and cast upstream until it (hopefully) catches the fish in the mouth. If it snags anywhere else on the salmon, you have to throw it back.

It's really startling when the fish bites because they are such powerful swimmers. It really catches you off guard. I've only managed to actually get 1 salmon in and the other 6 have either broken my 30 lb line or became unhooked.

Laurie and I went Moose sight hunting over the weekend while Ryan was at work. We finally saw one on our way out of the Kenai Wildlife Refuge. They are so big! And they totally look like Bullwinkle the Moose
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First Alaskan Blog

Hi everyone! This is it. I've finally set up our blog, which is really very easy to do, and am sitting down and writing about the adventures we've had in the past two weeks.

We officially arrived in Anchorage, Alaska on July 3rd at 11:30 pm. The sun had just set and it was still light out! We bought Ryan's vehicle the next day and headed down to Soldotna, where Ryan will be working as a Hospitalist for the Central Peninsula Hospital for the next year.

In the past two weeks we've discovered a bit of the Sterling Highway, checked out Russian Falls and some salmon jumping up the Russian river, Resurrection Bay on the Kenai Fjords Tour where we saw a sea otter, humpback whale, porpoises that look like baby orcas, puffins, and various other birds. We also hiked to an exit glacier of the Harding Icefield. We've also trekked about 80 miles south of us to Homer, which is the port of call for the Time Bandit on the Deadliest Catch. The Homer Spit is very beautiful and filled with tourists.

Ryan's mom Laurie is visiting us and we've been doing a lot of salmon fishing together in our back yard. She's already caught two fish while I've managed to let 5 get away. Catching a sockeye salmon is not easy for the beginner. Once you catch it, you have to club it on the head to kill it and then cut a vein in their gills to bleed it out so the meat is tastier. Laurie and I have a system down where she bonks it and I bleed it. The first time she caught one we didn't know what to do so I ran up the stairs and grabbed Oscar, our neighbor. He was awesome and killed, cleaned, and fileted the salmon for us. Ryan's been missing from the catching salmon adventure because he currently works on the weekends, from 7 am on Friday through 7 am on Monday. He's in the hospital all the day gets called throughout the night. He is really enjoying the staff and working at the hospital.