Laura, Zephyr and myself all had a great time tagging along with Garry Hayes' MJC Geology field trip as backup drivers and support for the fifteen awesome students on his annual trip to Death Valley. Normally starting on a Thursday evening, this trip instead started on Friday morning due to a terribly wet storm that drenched the valley on Thursday. Garry didn't want the students' trip to start off wet and miserable so we he cut out Shark Tooth Hill and was able to make it through the rest of our normal Friday stops and get into camp a mere four minutes later than the previous year. Friday was a bit blustery, but the winds calmed to a breeze by the evening and the rest of the trip saw partly overcast skies with high temps in the 60's to low 70's and great star viewing most nights. Enjoy the un annotated photo albums and look for previous years to find teh annotated geology.

Needing to clear our heads and prepare ourselves for what is likely to come in the next 4 years, Laura, Z, Julie, Jill, Fritz and I headed over to the Preston Falls Trail along the middle run of the Tuolumne River. We hiked just a tad over 3 miles into the 6 mile trail. The trail starts where the glaciers ended during the last glacial maximum 20,000yrs ago so there is a lot of great geology to see along the way. The water and rocks are amazing, but we didn't have much time to properly fish on this day. I really enjoyed looking at the laminar flow of the river going over the granite. I hope these memories sustain us while we fight through the impending shitshow. 

Hoping not to repeat the fogged-out disaster of 2022, my dad Jim, his friend Charlie, my brother-in-law Colin decided to return to Whalers Cove this year. The main draw is our awesome and trusty guide, Kevin. He was born and raised in Angoon and his family has lived in the area since time immemorial. He know the intricacies of the land and sea and is just a really nice person to be around for a week.
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July of 2024 was the wettest July on record for the Juneau area. The storm parade didn't want to abate upon our arrival (nor our departure) and our float plane trip to Angoon from Juneau was delayed by fog for three hours. We were very much wondering if this trip was going to be a repeat of 2022 that saw us only be able to fish for two out the scheduled four fishing days.  Luckily I kept watching the webcams in the area and did some meteorologizing that was able to give me hope. Sure enough, the ceiling lifted enough to get us to the lodge by noon and we were out fishing from 1:30pm to 6pm the day of our arrival.

If we based this year's fishing on the poundage we took home, the 50lb/person places us near the bottom of the eight trips in which we've gone to WCL. But this year was very abnormal. Usually the king salmon have exited the area by the end of June. This year we all caught our limit of one "keeper" king (larger than 28") in less than one hour of trying. To put that in perspective we've only caught three total keeper kings in the seven previous years combined! We also caught and released well over 70 "short" kings and several 30"+ kings while targeting silvers. We'd never caught so many kings of any size, ever. The fight was great and made lovely memories, but by the end of the week when our fish boxes were still relatively light I said to everyone "This is fun, but we can't eat memories". 

Our main target, silver/coho salmon usually show up in large numbers at the end of July. Many years we visit WCL and get limits of silvers (6/ea/day) and the pink salmon are usually caught in huge numbers along with the silvers. But this year the silvers hadn't shown up in big numbers anywhere along Chattham Strait or the outside waters near Pelican and Sitka. We worked very hard to get 16 total silvers for the entire trip!

The halibut slot was very restrictive this year (less than 36" or greater than 80") and no-halibut Fridays meant we only fished for halibut on one day. But our friend Charlie had the catch of the week when he caught a 120lb halibut while we were trolling for king salmon! Landing a huge fish like that on light salmon gear was an epic feat! We though we wer snagged on the bottom for a brief second before the line on the reel started peeling-off at a rapid pace.

While the fishing was a bit sub-optimal, the whale watching was amazing. We were graces with several pods of humpbacks repeatedly bubble net feeding, and I may have gotten a few photos you can check out in the full photo album :-). 

Please view the full photo album to see ALL of the amazing things we witnessed on this trip. 

Steve and I made a very early season attempt at getting to Anna Lake at 10,575' in the Hoover Wilderness hoping for some unfrozen shoreline to fish. The Little Walker river was exceptionally high and impassable at the trail crossing. Hydraulically-speaking, it is a terrible place for a stream crossing, right at a knickpoint of gradient change. Since the canyon became impassable on the east side of the canyon several miles upstream, we had to bushwhack through and around nearly a mile of dense aspen thickets to find an area with a gentle gradient where the river split into two sections.

 We found a sketchy downed tree to cross on the way in and on the way out we crossed upstream of the downed tree near low flow of the runoff cycle (about 11am) which was still crotch-deep. 

Our Basecamp was about a mile shy of Anna Lake trail spur. We ventured on a day hike to Anna Lake on day two and the trail after the cairns was quickly lost due to snow and runoff, so we XC'd nearly the entire way. The last several hundred meters to the lake was still covered in large amounts of snow in valleys and the lake was entirely frozen but had some melt ponds atop the ice near the southeast side of the lake. 

​Geology was amazing and the birdsong was stupendous. Saw several large bear tracks (with claw marks) in the mud, and several mountain lion tracks in the snow-covered parts of the trail. Fishing was only possible in eddies behind large boulders or fallen trees and several small brookies were landed on my tenkara rod. Flatiron Butte is perhaps the most breathtaking mountain outside of Yosemite.

PLEASE view the complete photojournal for all the details!

The theme for 2023/24 winter and spring has been one of consistent weekend storms. The just-above-average yearly totals spread out so evenly made this an epic year for wildflower blooms at the Red Hills Area of Critical Environmental Concern. We enjoyed a mid-April four-mile hike with our friends Julie and Jill and their doggo Fritz. The nutrient-poor serpentine soils only allow specially-adapted plants to grow in these hills. Several of the larger ephemeral streams were still running well for this time of year, but many of the smaller ones were merely damp under their rocky channels. The dampness made for an explosion of monkey flowers! In total we saw more than 20 species of wildflower!

Be sure to check out Geotripper's great geology summary of the area, then check out our complete photo album from the hike!