ENOUGH

You look at that river pic I took at sun up yesterday and you'd think that there's something eerily beautiful about our Forrest Fires... I suppose there is but I think I can speak for all of Alaska when I say we're real, real tired of it all. The reality of it all is more like this pic below.

I spent all of yesterday indoors. It seems somehow or another in my social security years the asthma that I had as a child has returned and the air quality has been horrible on my lungs. I've done all the pulmonary tests and we've decided that it's an environment induced asthma that rekindled when I burnt my lungs with chlorine in Mexico. Now I seem to be hyper sensitive to smoke, dust , pollen which is really just every day life....jeez...Just for the sake of this report for any of you non Alaskan's : the Swan Lake Fire whose western front is 25 miles from Mile 14 is now a stunning 140,000 acres making it bigger than all the fires burning everywhere else in the states combined. It's in the Wildlife refuge and they were excited for more Moose browse when it started over 2 months ago...well gentlemen, you got moose browse up the ying yang now. At one time they had 400 people on the fire. Then they decided it had gone about as far as it would go and removed all but a dozen firemen and in true Alaska style our drought continued and then the wind came....OK, call the fire fighters back ! Did I mention that it's still unnaturally hot here and hasn't rained in over a month. We have 3 fires locally now and the Willow / Talkeetna area is under attack by huge devastating fires...

MP's gorgeously lush yard is browning up nicely in the drought. In our attempts to save everything we watered so much that it drew our well down and filled up the system with sand. We are far from having a first frost and all the birch and cottonwood trees are dropping their leaves trying to go dormant. As for the spruce trees the situation is code red...we already have a spruce bark beetle infestation going on and now that the trees are stressed from no water they're dieing by the day....we must have at least 40 new ones on the property, I hate to go look. In the second pic the tree on the right passed away about 2 weeks ago and the one on the left is on death watch...to bad because that tree is a favorite of our Bald Eagles. Any of you that need easy firewood, give us a call here at Mile 14 on the world famous.

And Fishing you say ??? Well, that ain't normal either. The silvers seem to be just OK, not good , not bad. In the valley they are saying that the low river and warm water are impacting the coho's upriver movement. It makes sense and I suspect a certain amount of the same is at work here. Here's a pic of Ernie with his catch the other day....rather photogenic ain't he ? 

And here's my pro guide tip / public service announcement for this edition of Mile 14...If you're to cheap to hire a guide don't be so cheap that you want to split your boat rental fee in as many ways as possible... you could drown.  If you have so many in your rental boat that the boat plows and won't plane...you could drown. If you don't wear your life jackets....you could drown. If you've never operated a tiller handle boat in an Alaska Glacier fed river running at 7 mph...you could drown.  6 people......way tooooo many.

I hope you come back next week and we'll do more fishing, I promise. In the mean time help us out with the rain dance eh ? As we walked and talked this morning MP had an observation about one of my pet conspiracy theories , you know the chem trails we all see behind airplanes on clear days. She said " where's Monsanto when we need them ".

And yes...that's a haircut you see.