Friday, June 19, 2009

How we spent our summer vacation....
















Well, there's still alot of summer to go, but this was my week to be Mr. Mom while Jolene was in San Francisco for a NASA/SETI conference, so I took leave to watch the boys and take care of some things around the house. Spent Monday and Tuesday re-surfacing our driveway - it was only 2 yrs old, but had never been sealed, so I re-surfaced and sealed it. Took all day for the first coat to dry so I had to wait til Tuesday to put the second coat on. Then, Tuesday night I loaded the boys up in the truck and we headed off to the Kenai Peninsula to do some fishing for sockeye (red) salmon on the Russian River. Didn't get there til 11:00 PM and had to wait an hour to get a spot in one of the parking areas. Then, since the confluence of the Russian and Kenai Rivers are usually elbow to elbow with guys "combat fishing", I decided to hike with the boys up to the Russian River falls and fish the fishing holes in that area. I now know why not many people do that, it was 2.7 miles to the fishing holes with Grayson on my back in the backpack and Landon staying right by my side since it was dark on the walk in. The trail is nice, but too long of a hike carrying Grayson and all the fishing gear (waders, poles, gear, boots for all three of us, etc). I was pretty beat by the time we got to the fishing hole around 0230, and it was too dark to fish, so we waited til the sun came up about 0330. Unfortunately, the huge run of reds that had occured the weekend before wasn't a sign of things to come..instead, we think that most of this year's reds all ran up the river in the span of a few days and now there's not much left, so we didn't even see a fish in the river up towards the falls. We walked back to the truck along the trail (nicely kept trail...should have brought the stroller for Grayson) and saw a brown bear on the trail on the way back. The Russian River is famous for its salmon-eating brown bears, and they are pretty accustomed to people, so this one just glared at us and strolled off the path instead of chasing me like the one last month did. The last two pics above show the bear, but I didn't zoom in like I should have and the bear is pretty small in the pics....in reality he was an adult brown bear, and we initially mistook him for a person walking on the trail due to his shoulders/butt being so high off the ground as he walked. Will have to get Jolene down there when she gets back to have the professional photographer in the family get some better pics to post.

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