Biking, hiking and eating - a wonderful combination!

As if the last few weren't bad enough, I waited too long and too much happened in between so this post is going to be even longer than some others in recent history! Rodney and I helped park cars for the Fireweed 400, a 400 mile race from Sheep Mountain to Valdez and back. http://fireweed400.com/ It started out as a cool and damp day and they even had one guy drop out from hypothermia. There were a lot of different brackets, including a couple of HAND racers! This guy was doing the 50 mile race but there was one that had started earlier that was planning to go all the way to Valdez! 200 miles!

This was the start of one of the "just for fun" races, I believe the 50 mile "beginners" race.

The 400 mile race had actually started the day earlier as they expect it to take about 24 hours. The winner this year (Eric Christensen below) finished in a little under 24 hours, down from the record (I think held by him) of about 19 hours.

It turned into a lovely day so we stopped to check out the Glacier park on the way back. It's right down the road and we'd never stopped there!

Rodney spent part of one of those lovely summer days painting bed liner in the back of the truck. It looks AWESOME! In this picture Oksana is tattling on Ellie who is trying to climb out of the truck window.

So I took the energetic little monkeys off for a little walk out to the air strip to see the horses in their summer pasture. Ellie thought she might kill one if only I would let her off that leash!

Todd and Jared brought some more horses out while we were over on that side of the lake. Or maybe they were rotating horses. We didn't stay to find out.

We took a little hike in our back "yard" one Sunday afternoon and ran across all sorts of flowers out now. Some variegated dogwood.

The Larkspur (much like Delphinium) is blooming.

It wasn't cold. Oksana had just covered up as we went through a lot of patches of Cow Parsnip which can cause a rash.
Waiting for Sergei to show up with the naughty Basset. She must have taken a short cut home though because we never saw her after this point but she showed up almost immediately once we got back home.



A moose wallow.

This week's hike was around Caribou Creek but not until after I stopped at the church to wait for the fruit truck that comes up from California with fresh fruit all summer. YUMMY peaches! :) The church has a lovely wildflower garden out front.


The Caribou Creek hike was nice, but not a favorite. LOVED this little stream flowing down the mountain!

And the view of Fortress Ridge was lovely.

So was the view of the Caribou Creek valley overlooking the Glenn Highway.

Caribou Creek is really running this time of year.


Some people were panning for gold in the creek. You can just see Fortress Ridge in the back of the valley in this picture. That's basically where we hiked out to along the top edge of the creek.


Naughty Ellie continues her naughty ways. We suspect that she steals the rabbits from the lynx occasionally. This one she buried in my potato patch and then retrieved after it got to smelling just right. Or wrong depending on your opinion. She desperately wanted to bring it in the house, but the mean old lady wouldn't let her.


But she sure loves a boat ride. If we engineer this correctly, we may be able to use those ears as sails.

While we were hiking Caribou Creek, Andrei and the current group of camp cooks were slaving away in the kitchen preparing dinner. They had arranged a cook off with 4 teams. They had a bunch of rules - things that they could or could not use and then had to come up with a main dish, a salad and a dessert. All of the dishes had to have rhubarb in them. Here Andrei is adjusting the temperature on the chicken that Pepper is cooking. Andrei, Linda and Pepper were team 4.

Jake fried his chicken. He and Brianna (below) were team 3.



Adri and Jonathan (Sunshine) were team 1.

Gene and Blaine (Archimedes) were team 2. It's hard to see in this picture, but the bowl contains John Deere Egg Salad - colored yellow and green eggs with a stalk of rhubarb stuck in the middle. All of their dishes were John Deere themed.


This is most of the hungry judges who didn't eat much all day in anticipation. They had to taste every bit of every meal made. Left to right are Rachel Cote, Derek Kolb, Kay Woodwyk, Ali Ruisch, Mulan (camp name - I don't know her real name) and Chelsea Meeuwsen.

The cooks wait for the results. Hmmmm... They are fraternizing! Jonathan (Sunshine) is under the arrow. I missed him in the kitchen.

And the results! Adri's team won but Andrei, Linda and Pepper were only 2 points behind! Most importantly, everyone had a good time, including all the diners!