-
Bushwhacking Sam Houston National Forest | Round Two
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed by email! Thanks for visiting! A few weekends ago we went bushwhacking in Sam Houston National Forest again. You may remember our hike last year while attempting to look for the Bartonia texana. It was coming up on blooming season for them again and we hadn’t been hiking in quite a while (and haven’t been hiking since!) so I mentioned to Chris that we should try once more. This year the weather was warmer and the sun was shining. Forest was a little more upbeat for this hike than last year since he was already familiar with…
-
Humpback Whales & Mola Mola | Wildlife/Wordless Wednesday
-
Thunderbird Falls Trail | Eagle River, Alaska
Jumping ahead in our Alaska adventures (mostly because I wanted a simple set of photos to edit. I looked at Denali photos and the billions of bear photos and thought that was too much at the moment!) we’re going to hike on the Thunderbird Falls Trail just outside of Anchorage in Eagle River. We’d arrived in Anchorage that morning via the Alaska Rail into Anchorage, rented a car, checked into the hotel, and headed for a few hiking adventures on the outskirts of Anchorage in Chugach State Park. Since it was Labor Day, the trailhead was rather busy. In my assessments online it seemed like this was in a quieter…
-
Post Early Freeze In The Garden
Eastern Carpenter Bee, Xylocopa virginica Last week we had our first freeze, about a month earlier than is typical. Last year we had a mid-November freeze, which was also early and then we warmed right on up again through December and didn’t freeze again until January, I believe. Some years here we freeze in December, one year I remember not freezing until January. I liked that year. But this year we got it early which meant Chris shuffled his orchids and bromeliads in and I moved a few plants from the potting bench to the back porch. I didn’t bother covering some things in the edible garden and it looks…
-
Life Lately | November 2019
Thinking: How about a short series of photos from the last month?? Of course there was Halloween last week. We kicked off with our tiny community’s hayride event, which Forest went dressed as a dinosaur! I tested out my feeble face painting skills and T-Rex got 2nd place! Well, we actually kicked off the night before at a fall festival at his school where there were games, food, and friends. Then there was a Halloween party at school and Halloween night trick-or-treating as well. For both of those he wanted to dig out his almost-too-tight costume from last year and be Spider Man again. *shrugs* Chris started working on the…
-
Atala, Eumaeus atala | Wildlife Wednesday
Over the last week or so I’ve been deep diving in our backup hard drives. The goal is to look for certain photos for my friend Eliana but as I’ve been sifting through photos I’m finding all sorts that we never edited—especially photos Chris took. Along the way I’m shuffling over files that I want to edit but I know I’ll be going back through the drives to pick out favorites and revisit some items. One of those sets were these handful of photos you see above of an atala butterfly and several larvae. We had seen them at Mounts Botanic Garden in West Palm Beach in March of 2008.…
-
Time, Friends, and a Cozy Cabin
We’ve been friends for 21 years now. As we sat around the picnic tables at Fort Boggy State Park, we reminisced about the past and how we met up on the T/S Texas Clipper II during the summer of 1998, trying to piece together the other friendships and acquaintances that led us all together. While our friend group is a bit broader than the three of us, over the last several years only three of us have gotten together to spend a weekend together. First we included all of the kids, five between us, and then we moved to an adults only weekend since at least two of us aren’t…
-
Flora, Fauna, & Fungi on the Carlanna Lake Trail
Because I take too many photos these days I’ve broke down the Carlanna Lake Trail into two posts, with this one focusing on the flora, fauna, and fungi we found. This was seen not far from the trailhead parking lot and honestly, I’m not sure what it is. iNaturalist suggested cotoneaster and the closest one I think that would be is Late Cotoneaster, Cotoneaster coriaceus. It is native to China and so I’m thinking this is an escapee from the neighborhood nearby. Again, not 100% certain on the ID. Large-leaved Avens, Geum macrophyllum Slugs, so ubiquitous in the temperate rainforests–I think this one is an Arion sp. Oxeye Daisy, Leucanthemum…
-
Carlanna Lake Trail | Ketchikan, Alaska
When we woke up on Wednesday of our cruise we found ourselves in Ketchikan. We’d been there for a bit it seemed though I don’t think we were supposed to have been there until 7am but we had clearly been tied up at the dock for a while. Though, as we came to find out when we left port later that afternoon, the crew had everything down to a science and we were out of port within 30 minutes of the final call to board the ship. Our dock was just west of the main area in town and there were already tour buses ready for those who were preparing…
-
Through the Inside Passage
The day and a half we had sailing the beginning of the Inside Passage was one of my favorite parts of our trip to Alaska. Ok, the entire trip was pretty much my favorite part of the trip (hah!) but what was pleasant about this time was that we didn’t have to be doing anything. We could lounge in the room, sit on the deck watching the water, sit inside the Garden Cafe (aka: the buffet) and watch the water while eating a dessert or sipping coffee. So, that’s just what we did. Leaving port during those early evening hours we got glimpses of Canadian islands from the Inside Passage…