Iliuk Arm with the LE boys

     A whole day for "projects," a closed park, and everyone in quarantine except me and the LE boys. What's a Ranger to do? Go adventuring, of course. Well, technically what I was doing was accompanying the LE's while they patrolled areas around the Iliuk Arm of Naknek Lake. Sure. That sounds good. The boat needed to be run anyways. It was all very official, really.

The boys getting the boat going

    You may have noticed from that first picture that the boys are out of uniform. Just ignore that. 

    Once the boat was running, our first stop was Spruce Island, which, if you picture the perfect camping spot in the middle of nowhere, is exactly what Spruce Island looks like. 

This might be Spruce Island, or it might be one of the other 8000 islands that looked like ideal camping sites

      

       A quick check of the area (remember, this was all very official) revealed no current campers, so we hopped back into the boat and puttered around the lake a bit more. A strange bit about boating in waters near a volcano is all the pumice: pumice floats, so you're just running over floating rocks in a glorified tin can. It makes quite a racket, and also, once the waters get murky, it makes it hard to distinguish from a distance actual boat-wrecking rocks or just-barely-under-the-surface sandbars from just bits of pumice. It didn't help that I kept hearing that one line from Monty Python in my head over and over about things that float (very small rocks!)

    While we were busy being mesmerized by the swirl where the waters meet -- one side clear, jewel-green, and the other silty and brown -- we ran into one of those hidden sandbars. The boys hopped right out onto the mudflat and pulled the boat up enough that we wouldn't lose it, then climbed out to play in the mud for a bit. Since I was the only one in uniform, they were free to be silly and ridiculous, so I had a great time filming as they mucked about like five year olds in a sandbox. 

Where the waters meet

In the boys' defense, the perspective in this photo makes the sand way more evident than it was from the boat.

 

    I have an entire video of the two of them wiggling their way into the mud, teetering back and forth as far as they can, and giggling like schoolgirls, but I can't upload it until I have better internet. 

They drew their own portraits in the sand, and then made them holding hands. Awwwww

    There WAS a point to me going with them: I was supposed to write up a blog post for Katmai's official blog Katmai Terrane (the post DID eventually go up, much sooner than this one did. Let me tell you I've had a helluva time uploading pictures, so none of my other August posts have gone up here yet, but I am trying). Eventually I was able to convince them to abandon their waterlogged sandbox and go back to more ranger-y things that I'd be able to write about. 

    We found a few more islands to explore, playing on the rocky beaches, scaling rock walls, and me trying not to drop my camera into the water as I twisted into strange contorted and precarious positions to take pictures of everything, as usual. You may have noticed that several of these photos are repeats from the official blog. I may have taken a thousand, but it took nearly a month just to get these FEW up. I'm not messing with more than I have to. 

Do you have any idea how tempting it was to just push him off this rock? And yet I didn't, because I was in uniform, and I'm a professional. 

    Eventually we got to our last stop: Margot Creek. There was bear sign everywhere, and soon after beaching the boat, we saw a little bear face peeking out behind a tree. Then another one. Then another one. Then another one. #94 and her monster cubs were also enjoying Margot and the giant salmon. 

    You might be wondering why I called them monsters. #94 has three cubs nearly 3 years old at this point. They're almost as large as she is. She should have kicked them out already, but she hasn't, AND when they frequently meet up with other subadults, instead of moving them off they love to run mad through the camp and on the trails with them. Half the time when I've been cornered by bears, it's been her gang, and twice they've approached me within touching distance. #94 is basically Chaos in bear form, and she collects monster teenage bears and forms roving bands, getting into all the trouble they can find. Ever seen a literal stampede of 8 bears coming straight at you? She (or her cubs) are definitely going to kill me at some point, more likely by just running me over than by any sort of actual aggression. I kind of love her. 

Bear tracks in the mud. Measured against my boot, the bear's feet were longer.

Margo Creek

The salmon gorgeous, but impossible to photograph

    As we hung out on the pebble beach, lizard-ing out and soaking up the sunshine, just watching the bears and salmon, Jim gave us a lesson in fossils. Turns out he's a bit of a geology nerd. I promise I paid attention; I even got him to write down the names and all that, so I could tell you all and look like I knew what I was talking about. I don't, and I remember none of it. At one point he mentioned "bivalves" and a bunch of scientific names, and I promptly forgot all of them. Sorry guys. 

    He was even licking rocks. He claims it was to determine what types of rocks some of them were, but in reality, I think he was just licking them to claim them as his own. 

Salmon jaw. Look at those teeth!

    Here we've got the boys trying to look cool. Consider these the "before" pictures. Before what, you might be wondering. Well, there's a gap between two beaches, about 600 meters wide and very deep. Since the water was just barely 50 degrees, normal people would see that gap and think "oh, an excellent place to drive the boat through to get from one part of the lake to the other." Not these two. They looked at that gap and thought "I bet I could swim that." WHY though? No reason. Literally no reason.

Preparing for hypothermia

    This is the "after" photo. I don't have one of Mike, because Mike was willing to admit that it was terribly cold, because Mike is in his 30's and no longer has to play tough. Jim tried to bit it up when he told people about it, and say that it "wasn't that bad" or worse, "was actually pretty nice." Lies. He was hugging the boat for warmth and whimpering after he finished the swim. To be fair, he did do it (they BOTH made it all the way across) which was impressive in it's own right, but I can't let him pretend he's tough. We all know he's basically a marshmallow hiding behind aviators and a taser. (I should probably be nicer-- after all, taser.)

    Okay sorry about the lag in posts: I promise I have a ton of August AND September ones, and you'll soon be inundated.