Mostly cloudy and foggy early, becoming mostly clear with lingering light fog over the water. Temperatures into the 40s.
Today was the first of nearly a week forecast to have sunny skies and temperatures in the 40s. It’s an unusual combination for this time of year. If the forecast holds, it will be a remarkable stretch of weather.
Sunny weather often drives increased outdoor activity, and today was no excpetion for me.
I went for a walk around the park while on a call this morning. I had hopes the fog might linger in the trees as the sun was shining through. It didn’t work out that way, but I enjoyed the views while walking along the beach.
Gull numbers are increasing, but I didn’t find any unusual ones in the flock at the park.
This afternoon I went out to Silver Bay. I had loaded up my bike with some thought of biking the Heart Lake-Thimbleberry Lake-Sawmill Creek Road loop.
There had been a rock fall since the last time I was out this way (which I guess was yesterday). It was big enough to break up the concrete blocks. I later saw the Alaska DOT had posted on Facebook that the road was closed early this morning due to the rock slide (and initial concerns that more rock might come down). They had it open again by 9am.
I first went by Sawmill Cove. There was too much activity there for me to go down on the dock.
I saw a road closed sign on Blue Lake road which initially dissuaded me from doing the loop. I started back towards town, but decided to turn around and get pictures of the rock slide.
Since I had headed back, I went ahead and did the bike ride.
I couldn’t make it up the steep hill below the stream crossing on the Heart Lake side. When I got into the snow, even less steep sections weren’t rideable for me. The snow wasn’t deep, but it was enough that my back tire spun out.
I did more pushing going up the hill from Heart Lake to the pass over into Thimbleberry Lake. There I crossed paths with a bicyclist coming the other way. He told me there wasn’t much snow beyond the bridge (which wasn’t far from where I was). With it mostly downhill, I was more concerned with being able to maintain control, but I managed alright.
Since the light was nice, and it looked like it might have a bit of the filtered look in the forest, I made a side trip to take some pictures from the seawalk and Totem Park.
It wasn’t as filtered in the forest as I hoped, but it’s still a nice view.
My next destination was Mosquito Cove trail. I wanted to revisit a lichen I had observed back in 2019. The person who gave it an identification today also commented that the one it was growing over also looked interesting.
Although the coordinates were a little rough, I was pretty sure I knew the rock I where I made the observation in 2019 (on a big day effort). There were multiple lichens growing on the rock. In the intervening time, the one I photographed at the time had grown (and perhaps perished), and I wasn’t sure which, if any, of the ones I was looking at today was the same one. Even so, the background lichen was apparent, so I took pictures of it as well as some other lichens and mosses for good measure.
I spent a chunk of the evening working on the .gpx file for the Heart Lake-Thimbleberry Lake loop. The recorded elevation was not very smooth, and the DEM based elevation profile had a couple of hills that stood out as incorrect (I think once again a problem with poor resolution for the DEM and steep slopes). I am more interested in the elevation profile being qualitatively representative than precisely accurate. I’m not sure where the inaccuracies were exactly, and just opted to manually edit the files to shape them so there were no longer the two 40-50ft bumps in the profile.
Connor and Rowan’s flight was early. They said the flight out of Seattle was mostly full, and then only about half full after Ketchikan (so similar to my experience last Monday, though my flight out of Seattle was completely full).
My iNaturalist Observations for Today
