To all the vegan/vegetarians, look away now...
We have meat! D returned triumphant from his week-long hunt, with 180 pounds of caribou meat (on the bone). He shot the animal fairly close to the Dalton Highway and so was able to bring back more of the animal that he usually would. Normally he has to pack everything out for miles (and make more than one trip) so it's easier to leave things like the ribs behind. This time he brought the ribs back and we had a delicious BBQ dinner on Monday. D spent a couple days cutting up the meat and processing most of it into steaks, chops, stew meat, etc. We dropped 62 pounds at
Indian Valley Meats to be processed into burger, hot dogs and deer bacon. YUM.
Very proud of my hunting hubby. :-) AND the caribou rack/antlers are big enough to be entered into the Pope & Young record books - for hunting with a bow and arrow. Pretty impressive! I forgot to take a photo of the antlers but will do so. Right now the birds are picking it clean, along with the cape (caribou hide).
What a week...while D was gone hunting, Anchorage was hit with a HUGE windstorm. Like the craziest, most powerful windstorm I've ever experienced - and I've lived in Alaska my whole life. It hit 130 mph at Glen Alps on the Hillside and around 60-70 mph at our house. We've had storms before but usually in the middle of winter. I heard that the damage was so extensive this time because the trees were heavy with leaves and sap, and the ground unfrozen. In winter, the wind just blows through tree branches and trees are rooted down in frozen ground.
This time we saw lots of power lines down, uprooted trees, belongings blown about, trees falling on structures/cars/yards, streets/etc. You need to check out this gallery on the Anchorage Daily News site - pretty amazing:
WINDSTORM PHOTOS
The wind started up in the early evening last Tuesday and our power went out around 9:30 p.m. because of a downed power line. I was ready with my flashlights and battery-powered candles though, since the lights had been flickering for a while. It was just me and Boyd, riding out a crazy, scary storm! We had a pretty miserable night - Boyd was teething/sick and I had the beginnings of a migraine, due to the change in barometric pressure from the storm.
Drift couldn't sleep outside because of the weather so I got up a couple times to let him out for potty breaks. That stressed me out - he's blind because of the diabetes and I was so worried that something would fly by, hit him and he wouldn't see it coming. By 4:30 or 5 am the winds died down and I let Drift out again. It was eerily quiet and Drift's kennel was pushed all the way across the deck. I'm glad he didn't sleep in there! Everyone's power was out and I could see the night sky so clearly - the stars were very bright and twinkly. And I could have sworn that the Northern Lights were out, but I was pretty exhausted by that point so I may have been hallucinating.
In the morning I headed out to the shed to retrieve D's chainsaw for our friends who had 2 fallen trees on their roof, when I noticed that a huge tree had fallen into our neighbor's yard and THIS behemoth was leaning on our shed:
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| D's well-built shed - it held up 2 big cottonwoods for 5 days! |
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| After the tree fell. We got tired of waiting for our neighbor to take care of it. |
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| Our neighbor came over to help D out. They both went to town with their chainsaws! Nobody was hurt, thank goodness. Tree removal is no joke. |
Of course, crazy things always happen when D is gone but baby Boyd and I made it through just fine. My mom was around to help while I dealt with our (extremely unhelpful) neighbor who owned the leaning trees.We're sad to see the big cottonwood missing from the skyline - it really changes our view.
