Copilot

Three of the six sweaters selected for my summer wardrobe have the word "Antarctica" on them, which has prompted a lot of conversation.  I don't want to be that guy that always brings it up and tells stories about the one same thing, but it's cool when you're meeting someone and they're excited to hear about it.  And a lot of people up here have a friend who's worked there or are scheming to get down there themselves.  It was nice to find out the guy who runs the flight-seeing tour desk and I have a mutual friend.

It was even nicer scoring a last-minute unsold seat on a plane!  My friend did all the work, calling and sweetly repeating our names almost hourly in the hopes we might get to fly on the clearest day we've yet had.  You can see how happy I was, as this is post-eight-times-barfing (in under 90 minutes!), and I want to do it all again:

This is not Denali, but another gorgeous snowy peak on the way:

I don't know if it was sitting copilot, having eaten three forms of peanut butter, the increasingly swirly low clouds, or just too sensitive an inner ear, but that was a lot of heaving.  Ok, since you read that gross sentence, here's another picture:

Into the Woods

Local fungi anecdote: apparently somewhere "south of Fairbanks" are acres and acres of morels.  Like a lower-level mafia figure, a guy appeared in an old pickup truck at the cafe and without preamble offered to sell us these delicacies picked by a woman he knows from around there.  Just making his way down the highway, over a hundred miles or more, hoping for deep-pocketed mushroom enthusiasts.  My boss sprang for a pound at $20, not too shabby.

And...I finally made it into the park!  Remember that car every other kid had in high school, a ten-year-old Toyota with faded paint, a million miles, worn out brakes, a tiny middle front seat?  That's our company car, used to shuttle employees up to the other restaurant we run up at the canyon.  If there's space, we're welcome to tag along.  I got dropped curbside, hustled past the busloads of tourists, and started hiking the easy paths by the entrance.  There are about fifteen miles of trails with little elevation gain, including one that intersects with the scenic railroad.

The wooded areas are pretty similar to what we have out back of our place.  Now that I've got the lay of the land, I'll tackle the peaks and more involved trails.

It could be coincidence but it seems the increase in traffic has caused our neighbor mooses (meese?) to retreat back into the wilderness.  I went with a friend on one of my regular hikes today, past the at-first-alarming-but-now-reassuring-signpost moose leg.  It just so happens that she has a coworker who collects bones, putting them to decorative use about her employee housing in a non-serial-killer fashion.  You be the judge:

Order Up

It turns out the more nonstick omelet pans you jerk around, your skills might just slightly increase.  I continue to pass off B+ eggs in whatever fashion possible.  Next time you're at a restaurant and it looks like the bacon is just casually draped over the edge of your eggs, or the potatoes are piled gracefully -- distractingly -- while nudging your yolk, know that it is not chance.  No, it's artifice, and it's hiding a mistake.  Wow, what a generous amount of raisins on your oatmeal!  (Please don't realize that the oatmeal itself is aging, gluey.)

And it makes me feel better when someone who's been cooking for many years, experienced with the idiosyncrasies of our grumpy, always-way-too-hot oven, burns the bacon just as often as I do.  This I can master, though, with the super technology of the timer.  Its one flaw: needing to be set.

Now I just have to quell my murderous Pavlovian reaction whenever the horrible dot-matrix ticket printer blipscree-spits out an order.

Walking off stress is pretty awesome in this place, though:

Even when the mountains are foreboding and you can't see an inch into the murky river, at least you don't have to worry about toast being sent back.

Settling

It's been a bit of a food time-warp for me.  Way too many years ago during a semester in Italy, I lived by a menu that was both cost effective and tasty: roll for breakfast, pb&j and apple for lunch, and linguini with carrots, broccoli, and tomato sauce for dinner.  Once a week I'd change it up, sauté thick slices of potato in olive oil and top them with parmesan.  My friends across town had me over for ravioli-making dinner parties, and one roommate occasionally presented us delicious veal-and-eggplant dishes.  Ok, sure, I ate out some as well.  But for four months, night after night, it was me and my pasta.

So, here history repeats itself, and cooking simply for myself on the cheap = lots of pasta, of which I will never tire.  Or, after a ten-hour day of egg cracking and potato frying, I might just dip apple slices into a jar of peanut butter.

One big difference is there's lots of great beer in Alaska (though I do miss those 2-euro bottles of chianti).  The query of my trip to "town" today is now chilling in my fridge, ready to effervesce a bit of pleasure into any day.

I got to town on another group bonding trip: dishonoring nature's beauty be tearing through it on ATVs.  Here you can see me (surprisingly) in pink, coaxing my death-wish vehicle over a small stream.  Driving over uneven, rocky terrain?  Forget the seatbelt -- just hold on tight to those handle bars, and hope against a neck injury.

In other news, I switched rooms.  Being beside the slamming door, next to the staircase, underneath evening-shifters that play darts and smoke lots of pot was not a good recipe for sleep.  Let's hope the new digs are a  it quieter.

Fun mistake: when I told the 19-year-old dish washer I was a quiet old lady, he guessed I was 23.  

MAIL!

Two awesome things today:

1. I got a mailing address -- and I love writing letters.  I might even draw you a little picture on a card.  Please drop a line!

Claire Veligdan
PO Box 488
Denali Park, AK
99755

2. I saw two more moose; they crossed the road and scared me into walking along the highway instead of into the woods.  It's nice in among the trees, but from the road you can see this:

Blazin' the Trails

Greetings from up north -- if I understand latitudinal distances (nowadays the internet does my math), I'm about 1,200 miles north of my familiar northern Michigan 45th parallel.  Tonight the sun will set at 11:15pm, and it will still be dusky enough to see fifty yards or so into the trees at the darkest hour.  It was really quite lovely the first few days, 60s and sunny, and then we had a flurry of heavy snow yesterday, beautiful and hushed, which melted after a few hours.

Usually (in my now-4-day experience) things look like this:

Creekside is aptly named, situated next to swift, chilly Carlo Creek.  The woods are dense but crisscrossed with countless ATV byways, hiking paths, and game trails, and in most places you can blaze your way through springy (now sponge-soaked) moss-and-lichen-covered little hills.

It smells amazing here.  A green, cedary-piney, robust, Alpine-cowherd-yodeling-with-joy kind of smell.  The mosquitoes are big but dumb, easy to clap against my (sort of) white wall.

So far my projected diet of nuts and grains has been supplemented by castoffs from the cafe.  I'm not sure who purchased several large freezer packs of chicken wontons or why they neglected to consume them, but they've made for a few tasty lunches already.

There's not much to report about work because I've barely done any.  We had an actually constructive and fun team-building/ice-breaking day white water rafting through a canyon; the first day of work was thirty minutes of HR policy and paperwork; then I came in for a few hours of burger pattying and vinaigrette whisking; and yesterday we scrubbed out the coolers and I continued down the list of salad dressings.  WHEW...now it's time for three days off.  And what happens on one's day off?  I saw two moose!  Those gals were enormous, like horse-dinosaurs.

And Now the Other Direction

Hi people!  Back by popular demand a few people's encouragement, I'm going to keep writing about cold places that start with A.  I last wrote about my first Antarctic sunset and awaiting a big ol' vacation.  I saw innumerable indelibly beautiful places throughout New Zealand and Thailand.  I swam in a sulfurous hot-spring river and petted elephants.  I ate lots of cheap noodles and drank out of a coconut bigger than my head.  It was pretty fun, and though I was often deeply sad about getting divorced, the time spent traveling allowed me to sort some of my thoughts in a way I hadn't managed while redirecting angst at steaming pans of for-institutional-use-only meat.

Island Hut Hotel, Koh Mak, Thailand:

And now in just a week I'll go to Alaska (where roughly 17% of people trying to recall where I've been take a stab at guessing since Antarctica is too implausible).  Seven degrees shy of the Arctic Circle, just a few miles from the entrance to Denali National Park, I will flip eggs -- and pancakes! -- at a small "lodge," really thirty or so little cabins with a restaurant next door.  It's still early spring and near-freezing at night, but the summer season will ramp up quickly as thousands of people flock to the remote area to be frightened by bears and eat acceptable omelets.  

With three days off a week, I should re-learn French, perfect my fly fishing...I'm open to suggestions.  One fun thing is I mostly have to procure my own food and cook for myself, an interesting prospect as the grocery store is a few hours away.  I'll bring in a good amount of staples, but it would be awesome to forage for mushrooms and berries and pork tenderloin.

So I hope you enjoy dispatches from up north.  I'll return to regularly scheduled Antarctica musings in October, but with the inside view as science cargo admin (but don't worry, I'll still keep abreast of the latest in food folly).