Morning Activities: This morning Tess and I slept in until about 8am, then I woke up and made some lovely strawberry pancakes while she chewed on a plastic bottle. I think she’s trying to tell me that she wants more food for breakfast, but I am choosing to ignore her attempts to overeat. After breakfast we packed up the truck for an overnight “car camping” trip and headed out to the Kenai Peninsula for an adventure.
Notes on the Drive:
Most of the drivers in Alaska are, as you would expect, from Alaska, however, once and a while I will pass a car from out of state. When that happens, I feel a certain camaraderie with the driver. Sometimes the license plates are just from Washington (which is not all that impressive to me). Or sometimes the license plates are from places like Florida or New York (those impress me because it means they drove even further than I did to get here). But, today we passed two RV’s, in a caravan, from Colorado. My People!!! I sped up and got in front of them so that they could see my license plate was from CO as well. I even secretly wished that I had some sort of flashing neon blue lights that I could switch on to illuminate my license plate. In the end, I’m not sure if they even noticed that I was from Colorado, but I, for one, know that I felt like hugging them!
Most of the cars that I\we passed on the drive had coolers and dip nets strapped to the top of their roofs. Once again, I was jealous of the dip netter’s inevitable advantage over my attempts to catch red salmon with a fly rod.
We passed through Cooper’s Landing on the way to our campsite. That view is amazing. The water is a crazy turquoise blue, and the river is wide and powerful. So cool. So impressive and intimidating and yet inviting all at once
Our Hiking Adventure for the Day:
After we secured a campsite at a campground near Cooper’s Landing, Tess and I headed off to the Resurrection Pass Trailhead near the Russian River. The hike that we decided to take is a gradual ascent over a pass. The trees are pretty thick, so you don’t get to see as many vast views of mountain ranges as you do on the Johnson Pass Trail. However, I didn’t mind the thick trees because they force you to focus on the forest foliage and the views that are 20 feet in front of you instead of 20 miles away. Fireweed (a tall pink/purple flower) lined the trail, along with ferns, aspens, birch trees, and various patches of wildflowers. There were also a couple of creeks babbling alongside the trail at various points in the hike, and an occasional break in the trees would allow you a short, but beautiful glimpse of the Kenai River winding through the valley below. Tuffs of cotton spun down from the cottonwoods and landed in snow like pillows of white on top of beds of pine needles. But, my favorite part of this trail was rounding a corner to find the sun shining down just right through a dark and shadowy section of evergreens. The contrast was so stark. The dark of the forest reaching 30 feet up, but powerful streams of light beaming down through the branches making the pine needle path almost sparkle. It made me feel like I was witnessing something magical.
When it was time to head back down the path (after about 90 minutes of hiking North), Tess spied a chipmunk and went crazy. These are the moments that I know she wishes she wasn’t firmly attached to her stubborn momma. She would much rather tear down the ravine after that chipmunk, instead of being held hostage by a woman who is absentmindedly snapping pictures of ferns and cotton balls.
Our Campsite:
After we completed our hike, I took Tess back to the campground, hooked her up to a 25ft tie out, and then I sat down to relax and read a book. The first thing that Tess did was head straight to one of the mud flaps on my truck. She started licking it. Since she doesn’t normally do this, I just chuckled and kept reading. However, after about 5 minutes I looked over and Tess was still obsessively licking it. It was only then that I remembered that I had unfortunately clipped a little road kill with my back right tire on our drive today (don’t worry; it was already dead by the time that I hit it). Yeah. Guess which mud flap Tess was licking? N-A-S-T-Y.
Needless to say, after I realized what was going on, I adjusted Tess’s tie out cable so that she couldn’t reach the mud flap anymore and then I went back to reading. Tess, on the other hand, started to play a little game that I like to call “Cleaning up Camp.” Apparently the people who camped at the campsite the night before had steak for dinner. They also decided to just chuck the bones into the various bushes around the campsite instead of throwing them away. 1) That’s just rude. 2) That’s idiotic in bear country. Luckily, Tess was all over clean up duty. She sniffed out anything that smelled remotely tasty over the next 15 minutes. Granted, she started to get a little pissed at me because every time she found a bone or piece of trash I would take it away, but she continued playing the cleanup game anyway. At one point in time, I decided that I would try out her “tracking” abilities and I took one of the bones and chucked it into some thick shoulder high bushes to see how long it would take her to find it. Um yeah. I guess Tess has mad tracking skills after all because she emerged from those bushes with that bone in less than 10 seconds. Seriously. She’s good.
When Tess was finally satisfied with the cleanliness of the campsite she sat down, made some mulch (chewed on a stick for about 10 minutes) and then passed out in the dirt by my feet. It’s always a successful outing when your timid dog is so exhausted by the end of the day that she’s sound asleep and snoring instead of whining in fear about the new surroundings.
The campsite was very pleasant. I made a little beef stroganoff for dinner and Tess had some dog food. There was a little breeze, which meant no mosquitoes, and all of the other campers had very well behaved, and leashed dogs. All in all, it was a perfect evening, with the exception of a brief period when two brothers were pumping water at the water pump next to my campsite. At some point, one of them pinched his finger in the pump and proceeded to scream in the most guttural manner for two minutes straight. Don’t get me wrong. It looked like it hurt, but he was screaming so much that I was about to go over and look for a missing digit on the ground. I think his brother was equally concerned due to the pure volume of noise that was coming out of his injured brother’s mouth. But, when the non-injured brother finally got to take a look at the “injured” finger, and saw that it was just pinched (not even broken), he just dropped his screaming brother’s hand, looked him dead in the eye and said “You are such a baby.” Ah brotherly love. Otherwise known as tough love I suppose. It worked like a charm. The crying stopped instantly and the injured brother started pumping again like nothing had ever happened. Mental note for if/when I have boys: apparently heckling is not only allowed, it is effective.
Wildlife Sightings:
Chipmunk: 1
Bald Eagle: 1
Bones: 6
Road Kill: 1
Water Pumping Baby: 1
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