Seward has
gotten its first official snowfall of the winter, and in a bit of impeccable
timing, I managed to be out of town when it happened. I am currently in West Virginia, visiting
family there for a few weeks, before returning to Alaska for six months of
winter. Perhaps this is only fair,
since I missed out on winter entirely last year (I was in New Zealand, so I got
three summers back-to-back).
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| Iceberg Lodge girls |
The Iceberg
Lodge is all closed up for the winter, and ready to slumber under the snow
until next spring. I spent the end of
September helping a local dog kennel clean up after a flood. With this particular flood, it wasn’t so
much the water we were cleaning up as it was the gravel and rocks that the
flood left behind. The stream that
flooded contained a lot of glacier debris – silt and rocks, mostly. And a lot of those silt and rocks got washed
into the buildings from the force of the water. I spent a lot of time shoveling rocks out of
the building, with the help of a few small bulldozers. Some of the rocks were pretty large – I found
it amazing that water could move something that I had trouble lifting with a
shovel. Sometimes, the work felt a little bit like
excavating Pompeii. Or what might
happen if you pissed off someone who works at the Metco gravel lot.
Fortunately,
my car survived the flood just fine – we were concerned about our cars when we
saw on the internet flooded-out pictures of the building across the street from
where we had parked them. Fortunately,
the water didn’t get high enough to damage anything.
Comparatively
speaking, the Iceberg Lodge did very well during the flood because the water
didn’t actually threaten any of our buildings.
(A few of them leak, but we've known that for a while.) And the plant life around here can deal with
the weather just fine. Our forest’s moss
carpet will take the worst rain and ask for more. We have puddles and mud holes on our roads, (basically,
wherever we have build and cleared things), but the forest itself never looks
like it’s gone through any hard rain. The moss just
soaks it in like a green organic sponge.
The little pools in the forest get bigger, and creeks get wilder, but the plants still seem pretty happy. But I think the rain must be rough on
the bears. I didn’t see any bears at all during
the Iceberg Lodge's closedown period, which is unusual. However, we did get a bear ceremonially seeing
us off at the Point on the day we left, as well as the day-of-departure
rainbow. Both of these are becoming
Iceberg Lodge traditions.
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| A rainbow over Pedersen Lagoon |
The
other interesting thing about the shutdown week is that there has been a huge
increase in the amount of trash that washed up on our beach. I think the tsunami debris is beginning to
arrive in a big way; if this continue over the winter, the beaches are going to
be pretty coated by the time we get back in the spring. Mostly, the trash on the beaches is a big
pain to clean up, but there is also always the opportunity to find cool stuff
mixed in with all the Styrofoam flecks and empty plastic bottles. I found a few small fishing buoys this year,
and every year I find at least two ball caps over the course of the
summer. The prize for the best sea
debris this year definitely goes to our maintenance guy, who found a bag of
Zodiac emergency gear carefully tied off to a tree, which had been uprooted and
washed up on our beach. There was a
flashlight in there, with extra batteries, pumps, blige spones, and some things
that looked like part of a boat repair kit.
We hope that whoever lost their gear, they didn’t actually need any of
it.
