Eleazar's cabin

We started our hike up the summit trail from the Wickersham Dome trail head. The summit trail is in great shape. We hiked past the trail shelter at mile 8 until around mile 10.5 to start our bush whack to Eleazar's cabin in the White Mountains.

We headed toward the cabin off the ridge and half way through we came to a nice clearing to get a view of our direction. The cabin is just beyond the hilltop directly behind Dan's head.

The hiking was not bad off trail some bushwhacking, but mostly trees and a lot of bear scat, though we saw no bears.
The cabin has great views in the summer, but no water. So Dan and Ted hiked 1 mile down to the winter trail and filtered some yummy brown tundra water.
I was able to get a little editing done on a chapter of my thesis. Multitasking my weekends so I can still get out on a great hike.

Dan on the other hand carried his entire biochemistry text book out to the cabin and he really did get some studying in(easy with 24 hours of daylight).

Packraft day trip! CHST to Middle Fork Chena River

We started out with a beautiful day for our first packraft trip of this year. We headed up Angel Rocks to the ridge and down the back side to find the middle fork of the Chena River and paddle back to the road.

The hike was 12 miles and we followed a winter trail that started near the trail shelter and it was not yet too boggy down towards the middle fork.

We had to bushwhack the last 1/2 mile (or so.....) and a beaver dam flooded the area so in true pack raft trip style we walked through a large area of water before we found the river.

We found a small gravel bar to inflate the boats and had a great paddle back to the road, about 2 hours.Ann stlyin' in her new pack raft boat. The middle fork Chena is a nice mellow float back to the road. We had few twists and turns and that made the day even more memorable!

Thesis writing, knitting, running, ice and berry jams

Moose Mtn ski area is great for running and hiking up. We have been going on Thursdays and woman's running group intervals on Wednesday...it is shaping up to be a great summer of running, and backpacking/packraft trips. The biggest thing I have on my agenda for the summer is....

..writing my thesis for PhD defense in the beginning of August! I move in and out of the lab to get a better view of the ski trails. We had good timing for the Chatanika River break up and ice jam this year. Though not as massive as the break up of the Yukon River last year, ice jam's are always cool and timing is pretty good thanks to Ed being a hydrologist.

Knitting on the deck at Brown's is a favorite spring time activity in the short period where it is warm enough to knit and the mosquitoes are not taking over. We also made a great batch of Boreal Berry Hat trick Jam- blueberry, raspberry and cranberry.