Tag: Alaska

  • S.N.O.W. Therapy

    “A picture is worth a thousand words.” This one from This Day Pictures app popped up my computer today. It triggered a hundred thousand words worth of memories of a solo snowshoe trek ten years ago high up in Alaska’s Talkeetna Range. Snowshoes hushed shush over a white landscape is a clam like none other…

  • Silent Listening

    Officially, the first day of Spring is a month away. Evidently, this daffodil didn’t get the memo😊. Heralding life, it validated the ‘silent loveliness’ of our garden stone’s inscription: How Lovely is the Silence of Growing Things I’ve been truly blessed for most of my life to reside in the relative calming silence of ‘Rularia’,…

  • A Ragamuffin’s Regretful ‘If Only”s

    ‘Woulda’…’coulda’ …’shoulda’ … Life’s ‘if only’s that can block out the bright sunshine with dark stratocumulus clouds of regret. Intriguing that “if” resides smack dab in the middle of LIFE. Regret is “If Only’s” synonym. The dictionary defines regret as, “To feel sorry, disappointed, distressed, or remorseful about. To remember with a feeling of loss…

  • Brrrrrrrrr!

    50 Degree Rhododendron Zero Degree Rhododendron The Great Smoky Mountains has joined much of our nation’s pre-Christmas frigid cold snap . . . the coldest temperatures recorded here in a quarter century! At our digs up here on the mountain > down in the ‘holler’ > over the ‘crick’, the temperature plummeted from near 50…

  • Life’s Flight

    Flying has always fascinated me. As a child (some claim I still am 😊), the adventures of Sky King, a WWII aviator turned Arizona rancher, kept me glued to our family’s state-of-the-art, oval, 13” black and white TV. My time in the USMC as an aircraft electrician heightened my flying passion, and early in my…

  • Hiking and Potato Chips

    Fallen aspen leaves kinda’ resemble potato chips, and fall hiking in the Last Frontier is sorta’ like eating potato chips . . . it’s hard to stop at just one more!😊 Here’s a few ‘potato chip’ pics from today’s wilderness wander, sadly my last before snow-birding south in a couple of days  . . .…

  • Final Greatland Wander

    Looks like we’ll be on a jet headed south for the winter next week. Rather than spend the day going through another box of Kleenex today, I hiked up Castle Mountain to dry my tears 😊. I built a rock cairn on top with a Good Book pocket edition for other solitude seekers. Here’s a few…

  • Nature’s Beauty Pageant

    Seasons transitions are Nature’s Beauty Pageants.  Forest floors carpeted in gold . . . mountains engraved with a 3,000 ft. white line . . . the Last Frontier’s spectacular Fall surrendering to Winter transition. Here’s a few displays that set my soul singing How Great Thou Art this afternoon . . . gazing in awesome…

  • New Bird Feeder Guests

    I ‘fowled’ up and shoulda’ remembered everything’s bigger in Alaska . . . gotta’ go build bigger bird feeders 😊 Smile, and . . . Keep Looking Up . . . His Best is Yet to Come!

  • Drizzly Day Wanderings

    Wild berries captured my attention on today’s woods-wander. Perhaps it was the dampening drizzle, or the fading yellow Devil’s Club with its red fruits, that cast an uncharacteristic, slightly glum mood to my ever wandering musings.  It was a pair of raindrops that fixed my gaze. Precariously clinging to high-bush cranberries . . . they…