Fall Fun

Since the end of the tour season, we've been lucky enough to have mostly fantastic Indian summer weather - sunny with clear, blue skies and warm temperatures - perfect weather for doing all of those activities we'd talked about doing all summer long.

We spent several days doing some work around the house for our landlady. Mostly, this involved splitting wood (with a magnificent machine that does the splitting for you with a big chisel) and, of course, stacking the split wood.

We also learned how to drive the 4-wheeler and had some fun driving it around the neighborhood.


Once we finished our duties at home, we did some wonderful hiking and really enjoyed the reds of the alpine tundra, the golds of the aspens and devil's club plants and the deep greens of the evergreens.




We were invited by one of Michiel's many employers to join him fishing. Jason owns and operates Angle 45 , a local fishing guide company. He took us out in a row boat to go driftboat fishing on the Kenai River. As we are both pretty sick of eating salmon (imagine that!), we were thrilled to discover that we would be fishing for Dolly Varden and Rainbow Trout. With Jason's expert guidance and excellent gear, Michiel got a trout within 2 minutes of leaving the boat put-in. Unfortunately, the trout was actually too large to keep (to Michiel's surprise and dismay). Jason released it and we spent the rest of the gorgeous day catching our limit of Dollys (1 per person) and trout (also one per person) and trying our hand at catching silver salmon (no luck). The day ended with a great boat run past a large brown bear doing his own fishing and swimming in the river. Many thanks, Jason, for a super day!

Michiel cooked up the fish beautifully that night and we had a truly gourmet meal of freshly grilled fish with sauteed green beans and basmati rice. YUM!

This month also featured an extremely high tide in the Turnagain Arm so a group of us did some canoe and kayak paddling from the Seaview Bar parking lot at sunset. We certainly surprised many of the locals, who'd never seen paddlers in the Arm - as it is known to have very dangerously strong currents and quicksand-like mudflats.