Category Archives: Alaska

The Quasimodo Pile Goes Down—Son of a Birch!

I’ve been taking advantage of our cold weather to split the most ugly, cantankerous, gnarly, and twisted pieces of wood that you can imagine.

Boy, have there been some tough ones. I wrote about the glory of winning in battle over these mean, twisted, miserable chunks of firewood last winter. It’s still one of the truly wonderful parts of our -30 to -40 F cold snaps. The added brittleness of the wood usually makes these stubborn pieces of firewood split fairly easily.

But this year I have one tree that is just killing me. Every damned piece of this thing has been a fight.
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Breaking Trail

We had a good dump of snow last week on top of rain (it should not rain here in January). Behind that weather system came normal cold—cold that felt abnormal because it’s been so warm this season.
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Crossing Paths

I put the book down and brought my head back into the 21st century. I’d been reading 19th-century correspondence about explorations in the far Northwest by some of the most important people to document the biological diversity of Alaska and western Canada. I’d just finished a long letter from 1864 by Robert Kennicott to R. McFarlane, a Hudson’s Bay Company factor.

This was in William Healy Dall’s 1915 biography of Spencer Fullerton Baird, who was the first curator at the Smithsonian Institution and later served as Assistant Secretary and then as Secretary.
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Snowshoes in the Boombah

What a great Thanksgiving weekend we’ve had. For me, the magical qualities of the woods behind our house (the Boombah) held the most fascination. We had good, high-quality snow over several days. So more in pictures than words…

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Republicans Dying to Worsen Health Care

Who would have thought we’d be at it again, with Republicans in the Senate pushing another “Let’s-make-health-care-worse” bill. Frankly, I have things I’d much rather do than address this, but it is important. Bottom line: the Graham-Cassidy bill may be the worst Trumpcare bill yet, and while some details are still flexible, overall it is terrible. Call your senators to oppose it, and urge them to work together to improve the nation’s health care. Here are some of the details…
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