HP, Paragliding, Homer, and Fishing Again

To those who are concerned: Sorry that I have not blogged lately. I have been super busy and the internet here has been shoddy. The reason that I have not blogged lately is not because I have gotten a tattoo of a bear or a salmon, as I understand is the current belief of some members of my family. I have an extreme fear of needles. I am not going to get a tattoo. And if I was, a bear or a salmon? Really? Yeah, on my lower back, tramp-stamp style. I’d like to think that I have expressed better taste than that. But whatever.

Last week I was afforded an awesome opportunity to go PARAGLIDING. It was so great. So Brandon (the cook) sweet-talked Wolf Eyes into letting me have the morning off so I could go with Emma and him and his

sister. Because prior to my trip I did not know,

paragliding is like hang-gliding, but you are sitting in a seat, not hanging on to a bar (like parasailing, but off of a mountain, not behind a boat). First you have to take a ski lift to the top of a mountain. Then you ride tandem with an experienced (and probably licensed or something) glider and they do all of the steering (which is done with a system of ropes and pulleys, not by shifting weight like in hang-gliding). They get the parachute all set up behind you, strap you in, and then tell you to run as fast as you can down the mountain (yes, slightly terrifying).

You feel like the parachute has opened and caught you, but it hasn’t so you keep running. Until they s

ay jump, and then you just jump off of the mountain and it catches you. So my guy shows up, he’s just finished a jump, and he is literally covered in opened wounds, still bleeding. Confidence inspiring, right? But he said I’d be fine, and so I went. And I was. Apparently he tripped and fell walking up the stairs to the ski lift. Go figure. It was completely amazing. It was a gorgeous sunny day and you could just see everything. Probably the closest to legit flying that we can get.

So after paragliding I head back to work. I went to the midnight premiere of Harry Potter the night before (It was epic. Amazing. I dressed up, the only one in the theatre to do so, which was disappointing. A young boy mocked my cloak. The jerk. But the movie was amazing. So intense. I cried through about 75% of it. Just sat ther

e behind my 3-D glasses (

I hate 3-D, but it was the only option; wasn’t that bad though) and sobbed.) and then woke up super early the next day for the paragliding, so I was completely whipped. But Wolf Eyes came in and helped me make sandwiches and then let me leave early. She’s actually been awesome lately. Except for I am pretty sure she thinks that I have autism, because I have started to time myself making sandwiches (1.76 minutes per sandwich today, new record!). “I just came in to ask Megan a question and she wouldn’t even look up at me until she had finished wrapping and bagging her sandwich and then wrote down the time! It’s adorable.” Uhh. That is totally not how that interaction actually happened. Pretty sure I don’t remember that at all, actually. Anyways.

So for our last weekend, Brian and I went to Homer. Homer is a small sea-side, artsy town, about 3 hours south of Cooper Landing. It was probably the best weekend we’d had so far this summer. We stayed in a cabin at Sea View Farms that looked right out onto the ocean. It was tiny and didn’t have running water, but it was so pretty and had a little wood-burning stove to heat it up. But it was so sunny and gorgeous that we didn’t need it. It was a pretty lazy weekend. Lots of eating (delicious pizza, seafood, and then Thai!), lots of lazing around, reading on the beach and going for walks. We walked around town, too and checked out a lot of the local art galleries. I found this one woman’s greeting cards with prints of her paintings of these crazy distorted people with bizarre “pondering” quotes. They are amazing. I bought nine. I was only going to buy eight, but I just couldn’t choose. I would have bought one of each, but that would be a little out of hand. I am going to cut out the print

s and frame them. So excited. Amazing weekend.

Fishing update: The second sockeye salmon run has started. And it’s big. First they travel through the Lower Kenai, then the Middle, then through Skilak Lake, and then to the Upper (where camp is). They were expecting between 700,000 and 1,250,000 fish. But the counts for the Lower and Middle (where they are now) are around 2,300,000. So they raised the limit on the Middle and the Lower from 3 fish per person, per day, to 6. And now they are allowing dip-netting on the Lower (which normally only natives are allowed to do). They should be flooding the Upper in the next few days. Brian, Andrew, and I went out the other night and had some success, even though it was getting pretty dark (which means the fish mostly stop moving). Our fillet count for the winter is up to 34 lbs, which is very exciting. Fish for friends!

Mount Marathon and King Salmon Fail

I have been seriously slacking in the blogging department. Mostly because we’ve had a lot of sunny

days these last two weeks and I usually want to spend my breaks outside instead of inside where I can connect to the internet.

Last week Shelby came back from a five day safari trip that she was driving. I like Shelby a lot; she is probably one of my favorite people here. She is tall and always loud and full of energy. She knows

a lot about cars and welding and she can beat most of the boys at pool. She has probably fifteen tattoos. If she and Brian got into a fight, I think I’d put my money on Shelby. Just saying. So she gets back, runs into the cache, steals the snacks I was refilling, and tells me that this weekend (last weekend) we are going to go to Sunrise (the only bar i

n town) on our Friday night, the Girdwood Forest fair on our Saturday, and then to Seward for Mount Marathon on Independence Day. Oh, you didn’t have plans yet, did you?

So we did. Forest Fair was fun.

It was kind of like a hippie-arts-and-crafts festival. Plus a beer garden. A lot of our staff members volunteer to do “Earth Maintenance” (i.e., trash pick-up) because that basically gets you unlimited free beer. They had a lot of really cool ceramics (Brian and Shelby both got mugs) and a lot of the artists did interesting prints. Although there was a lot of pictures of bears and moose and traditional Alaskan things that I thought were kind of cheesy though. And also a lot of state-fair-type food. Disgusting, yet delicious.

The next day we went out to Seward for their Independence Day street fair. Every year they have “Mount Marathon” which

is a race 3022 feet up and then down a mountain. The athletes

that run in this are just amazing. The first and second place winners for the women were both Olympic skiers, and the woman who won first place did it in 52 minutes. The manager of our company does it every year in about an hour and a half and the owner’s wife (who is fifty-four years old) did it this year in 57 minutes. The oldest person to finish this year was eighty-two. It was pretty amazing to watch. They have EMT stations staggered throughout the trail. On the way down the runners just leap. They are barely touching the mountain; every time they touch down they leap down probably fifteen feet. Some of the people who cross the finish line are just covered in blood from just tumbling the

whole way down. It’s pretty insane.

It was a fun weekend, but it was super busy. We were constantly travelling and on the move.

So this weekend we decided to just take it easy. We went King Salmon fishing (which required basically no work because it’s not fly fishing, so you’re literally just sitting there and because we didn’t catch any King Salmon). Brian and I went with Fish Guide Brian and Fish Guide Brian’s friend, Brian, and his son, Briar. No joke. Three Brians, a Briar, and me. It made me understand why we pack the fish guides twenty-five pounds of food every day. Because it’s so boring that all you do is e

at. Between the five of us,

we ate an entire block of provolone cheese. Not because you’re hungry, just because when you’re not catching fish, there is nothing else to do.

Time to go back to work. Promise to post again in a few days!

I talked to Ali the other day. We were talking about work and I told her that my manager was intimidating because she made very intense eye contact. Ali’s dubbed her “Wolf Eyes.” Which is hilarious. And the nickname stuck. Now half of camp is calling Rece “Wolf Eyes.” Things are generally improving in the cache. My sandwich making is basically perfected. And Lauren likes baking (although she is not superb at it), which is good because I never want to see another cookie again in my life. And we now use ciabatta bread instead of hoagie rolls, which is a dramatic improvement in both taste and pack-ability. Except for yesterday we had hummus disaster, which involved adding

farrrrr too much raw garlic and Nicole breaking the new hand blender. By the end of wrestling with it all of our stomachs were cursing us.

Last week, we had the Logging Road Party. Except for people were camping on the logging road,

so we moved it and made it the Next To The Cooper Creek Party. The theme was Predator and Prey, so I went as a dark wizard (preying on Katie, who went as a unicorn [for her sliver blood that I drink to sustain my life, duh, see book 1]). This is mostly because the HP final movie premieres July 15, so I had my costume on the ready. Nonetheless, I make a great wizard (JMHO). Other notable costumes included The Environment and an Oil Spill, a cat, a mouse, and cheese, and a bear victim. Our cook went as a wife beater and Wolf Eyes went as his 17-year-old pregnant wife. She went around holding her other baby (a brown stuffed pig) and saying that “the last one came out black.” Poor taste, much?

For our weekend Brian, Andrew and I went to Anchorage to run some errands. Anchorage is a

terrible city populated by dirty strip malls, liquor stores, and Fred Meyers. But we did go see X-Men, which was interesting (I had never seen any of them), and eat Indian food. I ate so much. It was delicious. Indian food is the #1 thing that I miss in Alaska. (Thai food is the #2.)

The next day Brian and I hiked to the Harding Ice Field. I liked the idea of this hike because of the word “field.” Fields are big and flat. As my spatial skills are negligible, I didn’t really understand what “four miles in and 3,500 feet up”

meant. Apparently it meant “not flat.” Also, that is the last time I trust someone with a BMI of one and a half (Wolf Eyes) to tell me

when I am going to be “freezing!” (I should have known that our body temperatures are vastly different, seeing as any day that the temperature drops below 50, she has to stand in front of the open oven.) I had to change into Brian’s shorts in the woods and then I had to carry about a million pounds of warm clothes in my pack. But the hike was well worth it because the views were amazing. Views of ice fields don’t come easy. Which is legit. The ice field was cool, but the best part of the hike was the marmot that I saw.

Marmots are very cute and very gregarious animals. It let me get very close to it so I could take 34 pictures of it (yep, 34, I just counted when I uploaded them.)

Tonight is the Girdwood Forrest Fair. In the day they have local craft-vendors come and sell the things that they’ve made and at night it is just a huge party. The weather is kind of gross, but I’m excited—it should be fun!