the youngest researcher

ok, i've got exactly one day between field trips to get this post out before i'm on to new adventures, so forgive anything here that may seemed rushed! we just returned from St. Mary's, a Yup'ik village on the Andreafesky River, a tributary to the Yukon in its lower reaches near the mouth.


















"We" is a gang of 4 doing some research on local knowledge of salmon: me, Tori, Catherine, and her daughter, Savonnah, the 4th and youngest member of our crack research team. Savonnah is about 14 months...i'm dying to knit something for her now that i've spent a week with her. cute as a bug and 'full of beans' as her mother says!




that's the little stinker reaching for freshly hung salmon fillets - more on those later...











St. Mary's is a cool little place - about 550 souls - that combine subsistence and commercial fishing (for salmon) to make a living. we got there during the first pulse of salmon to enter the river. so we saw a lot of this:






cutting fish by the river bank









and this:


stretching salmon fillets that have been scored to hang and dry for winter use


















and this:


salmon strips hanging in a smokehouse to dry - pictures do not do this sight justice. salmon strips literally drip oil as they dry and are among my favourite foods...















we also saw a lot of net repairing going on. St. Mary's residents catch most of their salmon using gill nets, and specifically drift gill nets, where the nets are set out of a boat in the middle of the river and the net and boat drift downriver with the current for a spell before being hauled back in, hopefully full of fish!

















ever wonder where the fish you buy in the grocery store comes from? chances are, if you're buying fresh Yukon River king salmon, this is where! this is the dock of the Boreal Fish Processor in St. Mary's - many of the commercial king salmon pass through this dock.

with dirt roads and a little rain, a village can be a muddy place. we found this sign on an elder's door - i'm thinking of making one for myself! now, if i could only teach Nuchie to read...

unfinished projects

i've been thinking about unfinished projects - some are easier to deal with than others, so these are my most beloved unfinished works. the baby sweater, now claimed by Kimmie for her most beautiful daughter, Mara Brodie Wuhs Coles de la mancha...

















baby pants - for baby Anna Kay. these were a suprise until i was stupid enough to leave them out for her mom to see. all done, 'cept sewing in the elastic at the waist.


















a hat - for someone i won't name yet, since i still have a hope of keeping this a secret!


















a blog on unfinished projects wouldn't be complete without a picture of Cobbie's unfinished project: the "19 year sweater" - you know, the one he started during the Reagan administration? yep, Cobbie knits, and knits beautifully, if slowly. he's almost there - the body's done, one sleeve is done, and he's nearly there with the second sleeve! Go Cobbie! now he's just looking for someone who it will fit (i had him size the sleeves on my arms just in case...).






















then there's mystery #1: close to done...

















and mystery #2: not yet started, but destined for great things...

rock star

last monday, i attended an event that was a knitter's version of a rock concert. when i say rock concert, i mean one of those great big huge venues with cool light shows and smoke and big sounds, or maybe i mean a small, intimate venue where you can see whether or not your rock star is sweating or merely glistening - depending on what you like. the point is that it was big. HUGE. it was the Yarn Harlot.

the Yarn Harlot, aka Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, is a knitter who also writes books about knitting - very, very funny books about knitting. i've been a fan for a long time, primarily through her blog . which is cool and funny. very, very cool and funny (are you getting the idea that i really love the Yarn Harlot?) she's currently on tour launching her new book and she came north for the FIRST TIME (except that sh'es actually from Canada so she might already know a thing or two about the north). so, without a second thought, i trekked down to Anchorage ('what?' you say? 360 miles just to see a knitter? did i mention that it was the Yarn Harlot???), and Tracie and i went to see our rock star.

now, the Yarn Harlot is not just any old rock star - she's a socially conscious rock star. we were instructed to knit hats if we had time - the hats would be collected and donated to a local Anchorage area charity - a homeless shelter, a domestic violence shelter, etc. Tracie and i both knitted hats:




















although Tracie was a little concerned that hers was more of a yarmulke than a hat really. i think it's odd that without even trying Tracie and i both knit hats in shades of purple and yellow. hmmmm.... anyhoo, after a short wait in line and a slightly longer wait in our seats, the Yarn Harlot came out and delighted us with her wit and humour. and let me tell you (i think only another knitter will understand this) how cool it is to sit in a room with about 100 other people who are all KNITTING. we might have even been swaying together as one to the sound of her voice holding up our needles instead of lighters. it was cool.

afterwards, she signed copies of her books and i had my picture taken with her. upon seeing my picture, both Cob and Mia noted just how positively giddy i look standing next to the Yarn Harlot. i was so giddy, i barely remember the experience! to top it all off, as i put my camera back into a running sock which doubles as a high-tech camera case, she jumped up and took a picture, exclaiming that it was the best use of a commercial sock she'd ever seen! the Yarn Harlot took a picture of me! ohmygod - how cool!


















the green sock i'm holding is a sock that travels with her around the country and figures prominently in many of her pictures - this sock has a better life that me, i say! anyway, unless you follow the Yarn Harlot, you have no idea what a thrill it is to hold the green sock. giddy doesn't even begin to describe it!

toy forest

last week-end, we planted trees. oh, did we plant trees! see, when our house was built, the contractor did A LOT of dirtwork - apparently trees get in the way of this endeavor. so this year we thought we might try to re-establish a few of those lovely trees. our effort started in Nenana, about 60 miles south of Fairbanks on the road system, at the Woodland Farms, a really cool tree and reindeer farm (only in Alaska) full of beautiful pines, spruce, birch, etc. we planned to get about 12 trees but the sight of all those baby trees got to me and i selected 15 before Cob cut me off. i tell you, baby trees are almost as cute as baby animals. but less mobile. not really a bad thing, though. we selected our baby trees in early May, and when the farm called to tell us that the ground had thawed and they'd balled up our trees, well, we high-tailed it down there to be reunited with our little forest and bring 'em home! (this required a not-so-bad 14 ft U-Haul rental).




Cob and Stumpy taking a rest after we spent the evening moving around members of our toy forest to figure out their permanent homes. i think Nuchie is after a mosquito...









our friend Dave came over early to help us get the first ones in the ground - that's Cob and Dave consulting over one of two chokecherries that now stand tall (or at least about 5-6 ft tall) in front of kitchen windows. i've been obsessed with having a chokecherry ever since i tasted a friend's chokecherry bounce, a wonderfully purple sipping alcohol. if any of you see that in your future, you're now looking at the very beginning of what i hope will be a long and happy relationship between me and my chokecherries.


















then of course, there was beer.

















then more trees...


this is Stanley, a lodgepole pine. Stanley is about 5 ft tall - check out his little pine cone beginnings. now, i don't know much about pine reproduction, but i think these are spores - see that little cloud of yellow dust? so cool! you just gently nudge his little pine cones, and poof! yellow pollen or spores or something! i did this about 25 times until Cob suggested that i leave Stanley be. sigh.......................





in case you're wondering, they all have names. other than Stanley, we also are home to Sylvester and Adrienne the chokecherries (Cob calls this our Philly corner); Steve, Julia, and Olga (2 pines and a birch) in the front; Gabriel, Fidel, Ruby, Leo (Cob says short for Leonid), and Josephine (3 pines and 2 spruce on the front slope); Bert and Lucia, the birch and Siberian larch off the deck; Fanny and Bruce (a spruce and a pine along the driveway); and Amythyst, the lilac in the built-in planter. ask me in 6 months if i remember any of these names, but they all have funny stories behind them, i assure you!!




that's a little herb garden at its base!


















and then more trees.




Kristin and Jeremy came by to help us plant half of our forest (can you believe they're still talking to us after the Denali debacle?) that's the group planting Lucia and Bert the birch.










all the while, Nuch made sure to keep the dirt pile from walking off. its' a tough job but somebody's got to do it.

















ok, i admit it, this doesn't have much to do with tree planting. but, it IS purple and look how pretty! whoever decided that chives should have perky, puffy, purple flowers - genius! total genius.

and how does Nuch sneak into every picture???

Type II Fun

a few weeks back, friends P & C invited us along on a memorial day bike trip on the Denali Highway. the Denali Highway is an unpaved road, approximately 130 miles long, that connects Cantwell to Paxson, south of the Alaska Range. seemed like fun, P & C are fun, biking is fun, memorial day is fun - what was there to say "no" to?

after tempting us with such fun, P & C were unable to make it, so we invited other friends, Kristin and Jeremy. after some negotiation, we modified our trip to two days and 60 miles, which seemed ambitious enough, and headed south. and yes, we checked the weather: partly cloudy, scattered showers on Sunday, highs near 60F both days. but, this is Alaska where weather can change on a dime and the last thing you want is to be in the middle of nowhere with no dry clothes.

we decided to bike from the Tangle Lakes campground to the Susitna River, so the boys shuttled a car in while Kristin and i busily packed the bikes, or maybe we took naps. Kristin's impersonation of a blue tarp burrito:

the weather looked a little less optimistic than "partly cloudy with highs near 60" but we were confident until we hit this:

biking in a cloud.

as we climbed up to the 4,000 ft. MacClaren Pass, we stopped to put on another layer. then we stopped to put on a third layer. then a rain jacket. then panier covers. then rain pants. and still we climbed. oh yeah, and there was wind. once we reached the top of the Pass, we faced the long downhill - cold, wet, windy. nothing like a screaming downhill in those conditions! we reached MacClaren Lodge none too soon and warmed up with some hot chocolate.

with hypothermia no longer knocking at the door, we were able to come to our senses and ask for shelter. unfortunately the lodge was full but they offered us the musher's cabin; there was no heat, but at least it was dry. Cob, a man i'm now convinced knows EVERYTHING about fire, reassembled the small woodstove and had it cooking in no time. so, now we had dry AND warm. it just doesn't get any better than that!

the next morning, we faced another rainy day, which might explain why we weren't motivated to leave the lodge until noon. while my socks dried out over night, i couldn't afford another long day of wet feet, so some plastic bags between two pairs of socks kept at least some of the rain and mud out the next day.

with 35-40 miles in front of us, we set off, climbing out of the valley and up a hill that pretty much didn't stop until what felt like 35-40 miles later at the car. it pretty much rained the whole time except for that brief, shining moment when it hailed slightly. we stopped for lunch under a bridge to get out of the rain.

Jeremy modeled Kristin's pink hat (she was wearing his):

and then we set off again. now, i've biked/run/canoed/hiked in the rain - rain doesn't bother me. what bothers me is to be in one of the most beautiful places on earth and not be able to see more than 50 ft in front of me. which means no expansive vistas, no looming mountains, no magestic glaciers. but we did get to see mud - on our clothes, our bikes, our water bottles, our faces. mud everywhere.

at one point in the day, it must have warmed up to about 50F, which felt downright balmy, and the clouds lifted enough to see this:

now, just imagine that as an entire mountain range in the distance. that's what we missed. but what we did have was good company, and good fun - "Type II fun" as one friend called it (the kind where you're glad you survived and feel damn virtuous for it) - but fun nonetheless.

p.s. on our way out, we added one more precipitation to our experinence - snow.

Ruby Tuesday

last week, Lisa Kangas, intern extraordinaire, and i traveled out to the village of Ruby along the middle Yukon River that cuts through interior Alaska. We were doing fieldwork, conducting interviews with Ruby elders and fishermen about their local knowledge about non-salmon fish species like pike, whitefish, grayling sheefish, and others. i've been doing this kind of work for the AK Dept of Fish & Game for a little while now, and it's the best part of my job! Lisa came along to help out because not only is she super-duper cool, but she's also from Ruby. so, we got to visit with her dad as well as her aunties, uncles, grandmas, grandpas, cousins, and friends. very cool.

this is the village of Ruby as seen from the bluff just down-river of the village. Ruby is a community of about 200 people with a pretty diverse of history of gold mining and subsistence hunting and fishing. the little white things closer to the bottom of the frame is left-over ice from the river break-up a few weeks ago. the river is mostly clear of debris this year and the water is really low, which is unusal at this time of year.














most of the work we did consisted of interviewing elders and fishermen and mapping significant fishing areas, habitats, and placenames. whiel i've been working with interior folks fro a long time now, i'm always excited by these conversations - it's so cool to learn about an area from the people who've lived there for their entire lives and have some intimate experiences with the land.



mapping old spring, summer, and fall subsistence camps












that's Lisa with elder Zeta Cleaver, showing us a fish netting needle made by her mom, probably back in the 1930s.





while we mostly worked, we did have time for some fun:

checking out the budding leaves of a birch tree (I get sucked into spring everywhere around AK!)














tooling around Ruby on a 4-wheeler:

where we saw bear tracks and so went the other way...

then found a much less scary fishwheel just waiting for the summer season. these are neat contraptions - they are put in the water close to the river bank where the baskets are spun around by the river current scooping up fish along the way. they were introduced to the river way back in the early 1900s.





















and finally, Lisa's dad took us for a ride up the Poor Man Road, an old 42 mile mining road that ends near the Sulatna River. PoorMan offers access to some of Ruby's richest mining histories - and we heard about 4 hours of old mining stories from Lisa's dad - he had us in stitches the whole time! this is a picture of one of the placer mining spots he worked as a younger man:

















on that trip, we stopped at Long Creek, where Lisa remembers spending time with her family as a kid. these guys came out to greet us:










see how these two beavers seem to be swimming in opposite directions? they're actually swimming in a zigzag pattern towards us - curious llittle guys!

at the swift

yesterday it rained. actually, if you were on top of Ester Dome (as Lisa and i were on a weekly trek up the hill), it snowed. yep, it snowed. it might have even hailed a little since the snowflakes seemed to be bouncing off us at one point. i don't think snowflakes bounce, do they? at any rate, yesterday was a great day for what we had planned (except for the run): meeting Cara, Lynne, and Mia at Inua (our local yarn shoppe) to help them pick out yarn for their new projects and the getting them started on said projects.

Lynne couldn't make it to Part II of our plans, but Mia and Cara showed up fashionably late with Stevie in tow. our first activity: the swift. the swift, for all you non-knitters, is simply the coolest thing ever.

coupled with a ball winder, the swift transforms twisted hanks of unruly yarn into neat adorable little balls. balls that are squat and flat on both ends so they sit on most surfaces (a table, a couch, your husband's thigh as he sits next to you - wherever you're knitting) and obediently stay put as you pull yarn. most of all, a swift liberates us from asking our partners to hold the yarn between their outstretched arms while we laboriously wind a ball by hand. they don't like it, we don't like it. the swift saves us. it is a wonder. really, the eighth wonder of the world. plus, it's cool looking. mine has taken up residence at the end of the dining room table, in eternal vigilance against the chaos of magazines, paperwork, and the general detritus that my husband brings to the table. it is a beacon of creativity and hope shining over us all.

Mia and Cara also like the swift. in the interests of time, they wound only one ball each (save some for later, i say), so that we could get started with the cast-on. 96 navy blue stitches for Cara and 112 green/yellow sts for Mia that reminded me of a frog, in a good way. (check out the swankin' new poncho Mia made for herself, and the extremely cool green felted slippers she made for Cara!)

in no time, they were off, casting on and knitting! the pattern, a freebie from Lion Brand, is a painfully cute little baby hoodie, all in garter st. all 4 of us will knit the same thing for 4 different lucky babies.

Norma came to offer some moral support (and to pick up her knitting instructions that she left here the other day) and spread a little love around while she was here. That's Nuchie, the love hound (when he's not being the 'bad dog.') Nuchie also ran up Ester Dome in the snow. i think he's pooped.

while all this creativity and creating was going on, this is what the boys did:

who can blame 'em?