Eagles and Salmon and Bears, Oh My!

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Happy Independence Day, dear readers!  As for the Midwesterners, congratulations on making it this far with all the storms with which you have been plagued.  I wish you a long dry spell and no more home damage.

Last weekend, Wil, Kayla, Zach, and I went for our midnight hike--because why not, when you have 21 hours of sunlight every day?  We climbed about 45 minutes up Cordova's aptly named Ski Hill and arrived a few minutes before midnight.  Official sunset was about 1:15am, which was about the time we reached the bottom of the hill again...and even then it wasn't all that dark :)  Besides the fairly typical hordes of mutant mosquitoes, it was so beautiful!  We could see out to the Sound and the Gulf of Alaksa, as well as the numerous mountain ranges all around us.

 View of the Sound, Gulf of Alaska is visible on the left

 View of the mountains from Ski Hill at midnight

More recently Wil's AmeriCorps supervisor visited from Juneau to check on all the southern Alaska AmeriCorps volunteers.  Wil had just hiked a road on the opposite side of the lake on which we live, and suggested that we drive along the road and see the first round of salmon swimming upstream.  That was a pretty amazing sight--go little salmon, go!  They weren't quite jumping yet, but it's a bit early in the season for that.

You can do it!!

 One of the glacier-fed streams running by our path

Gorgeous view of the river valley from higher up on our path

And now the biggest excitement about they day, or last week in general--I saw my first grizzly bear!  We rounded a bend and there we was, in the middle of the road.  He immediately loped away, we think he was scared of our car.  We followed him down the road for a minute or two (very slowly) until he went off into the woods on the side of the road.  We figure, since he looked like a gangly teenager, he was about 3 or 4 years old, not full grown yet.  OH MY GOODNESS IT WAS AMAZING

BEAR BEAR bear bear bear

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