poplar road

I snapped this earlier this evening, something to get me out of my chair after working non-stop since getting home from an appointment in town all morning. I just finished work and am about to go watch the Great Pumpkin to try to remind myself it's Hallowe'en. This month has flown by unbelievably fast.

Following is another photo of the local landscape, taken last weekend. I'm just not doing a great job of keeping up with the blog posts. Still haven't seen the new goats either, although I've been hearing them out back all day. They sound so much like children wailing, especially when they lose sight of their mothers. Maaaaaaaaah!!! I'm so glad it's the weekend, I've got lots of plans to get things done around here. Happy Hallowe'en, everyone.

Here are a few more photos of the sockeye salmon run, which is ending this weekend. It's a festival year, the fourth year of the cycle which is usually bigger than the rest, but as festival years go it's only average, not the massive number of fish that Richard remembers from years ago. The turnout was huge - in one of the photos below you might be able to make out the crowd of visitors lining one of the many viewing stations along the river. The festival itself seems well organized and the trails are well kept and wide enough for the hundreds of people that come to see these fish.

The red and green sockeye are stunning as they pair up and begin spawning. The females make bowl-shaped redds (nests for groups of eggs) by flicking their tales through the stoney creek bottoms. The males are the ones with the humps on their backs. As other males come looking for a mate, it drives them away. The females will fight too, over the best nesting spots.

Richard climbed up on a huge tree trunk that had fallen across a spawning creek, and hung over it on his stomach to take a series of photos of one pair spawning in mid-creek in the shadow of the trunk. The water moves quickly so it's very clear despite the number of dying fish settling on the edges. I'm amazed how well our photos captured the salmon's colours, the stones, and the light on the water. I wish I could post them full-size instead of reducing them to these tiny blurred images. I think we took over 50 photos during our 3-hour walk and most turned out well.

The one out-of-place silvery fish below is a chinook, not sockeye. A few of them were larger flickers of black shadow in amongst the red in the main part of the river. The one benefit to viewers of a less than massive run is the smell: it was only a wafting hint of rot, rather than an overpowering stench, despite the piles of fish in varying stages of decay. Richard wanted me to post one shot of a toothy-jawed, near-skeletal chinook carcass lying on the dry rocks far from the edge of the river. Something made a meal of it, probably a bear. But I couldn't inflict it on you - not everyone shares our scientific fascination with this stuff.

The salmon run as a whole is an amazing process. A festival volunteer told us that of 4000 eggs a female might lay (not all get a chance to), only two will survive to make the journey from creek to river to lake and all the way to the ocean and back again. Most feed other fish or birds or become fertilizer for plant life along with their parents. So you take that one female away, and you're affecting a lot more than just taking away two returning spawning fish. It makes the sight of heaps of rotting sockeye less tragic, when you consider the value to nature of every last egg. It's a moving experience.

Autumn on Poplar Road has brought some other cycles full circle. The gigantically fat and greedy ladies at Goat Haven have among them birthed 9 kids. Jonathan is very proud of his new, warm barn with a private stall for each mama goat and her babes. Now that mornings are foggy and/or frosty, the goats stay in there until mid-morning. Neru, the Minotaur-like stud ram, has been sold, and they have a young red to take his place and add some new blood to the family. The two llamas are still around, though Buddy is wearing out his welcome. I suspect he'll be traded soon for a tamer, less aggressive mate for Coco.

Meanwhile, the prolific pine beetle has been multiplying in our woods and has now infested all of Grace and Don's 50 to 100-year-old lodgepole pines. A total of 12 trees are being removed from their yard before the blue disease the beetles carry weakens the trees enough to topple them. Grace is heartbroken, as are we. Jonathan will have to cut down all the pines in his yard, too, including two mammoth hundred-year-olds with branches widespread enough to shelter an entire flock of goats. Out back, so many trees are red that once they are removed, we'll have a meadow behind us instead of a wood. In our own yard we're lucky to have mostly fir and spruce. The one young pine, not a lodgepole, is so far un-infested and healthy with sap despite the drought. And yesterday we had a bit of rain. When autumn rains start for real that will make some difference to the trees' ability to fight off the bugs, although not enough. The whole mountainside is turning red and there's nothing anyone can do other than cut them down. And in the woods, the firs are dying from some other disease so we can only hope this winter gets cold.

In the photo above left you can see the stumps and sections of trunk that are left from the 6 trees taken out next door so far. Compare with the scene from July at right, or from last winter and you'll see the tragedy here. I just can't believe the change when I look out our dining room window – it was all pine boughs before, and now it's a view of the dusty hills across the river, soon to be even wider when Jonathan takes down his. So sad. Winter will be bleaker with so fewer evergreens. At least we'll see more of the river.

Today I must finally get out in my garden to dig up bulbs and plants that should come indoors for the winter. The wheelbarrow my parents have given me for my birthday will help with the digging and mulching. The forecast is still fairly mild, but we will likely see the first dusting of snow on top of the hills across the river next week. I gathered chestnuts and lilac seeds for a table arrangement the other day and yesterday one souvenir pine cone that fell in our yard as the trees came down; but it feels too early for wintery decorating. The leaves have only just turned. I'm looking forward to snow, but not just yet. It's only been a few weeks since everything turned back from burnt summer browns to green.

Work - keeping up with work - has been the priority for both of us this fall. Between overtime and visitors and necessary rest, we've had no energy for renovations, in case you're wondering if we've accomplished anything new on that front. I'm really hoping we get back to it in the spring. Then I'll have more to blog about (and more closet space). Here, though, is one shot of my office, with two new bookshelves Richard bought me for my birthday. I have another set of doors to put on, so I can hide all my work supplies. This is my favourite room in the house. Which is good, because I spent most of my waking hours in here. It's taken me two and a half hours just to post this entry - I tried to use too large a photo size. But now I'm going to go get my hands in the dirt. It's a beautiful sunny morning in my favourite season of the year.

Last weekend our friend Chris came up for Thanksgiving and helped us celebrate a few milestones. First, on the 6th, was our 2nd annivesary of buying this house. And it was fitting to have Chris here, because if you go back to Thanksgiving 2004, it was Chris and his twin brother Ben who bravely tackled the first and one of our worst reno jobs by helping us rip out the living room carpeting the day we moved in. Here is Chris enjoying a more relaxing weekend, digging into beef tenderloin and a couple of massive Alaskan king crab legs – my birthday dinner courtesy of chef Richard.

Yes, this is me a whole year older. We celebrated with surf-n-turf on Saturday night, went to the salmon run festival at Adams River on Sunday, and after turkey dinner we ended the day with a bonfire in the back yard. It was a spectacular day. I'd never seen a sockeye run before. These photos are just a few of the great images Richard captured during our three hour walk around the park on Sunday.

Lots more to tell you about but I'm going to split this entry in half and share the rest when I'm more... awake. Yawn.