June 23, 2006

Back home yesterday. Today went out with Fritz and Kate's on their new boat along with Jim, Annie, Deb, JoAnn, Connie and Eva for a tea party and whale watching. Good to see friends back in town for the summer, and what a wonderful boat!





Trip to Sitka

I got back yesterday from a trip to Sitka and Juneau. Went out on the boat with Van for a couple of days. We visited old friends Al and Sig on Berry Island, anchored in Samsing Cove where I painted this point of land 3 times and never got it right....maybe with some frisket I could have gotten the white of the tree trunks.


Tried to paint while we were trolling.... this was my best effort:

Late Thursday afternoon, June 15, my friend Judy and I started a 7 mile hike across Kruzof Island to the Shelikof Forest Service cabin. Judy's daughter Margie took us over in Judy's boat. The 7 mile hike got extended to a 10 mile hike because we took a wrong turn which seemed to be right according to the topo map we had. By the time we got the compass out and saw a mountain east of us that was south of where we should be and got back to where we took the wrong turn, we'd wasted a couple of hours. It ended up getting dark and we chose to sleep on the ground rather than try to find our way through the bear infested iris meadow.

Crossed the meadow around 5 a.m. at high tide and to the cabin in less than an hour. Beautiful, beautiful beach and woods. Pretty tired the first day, but did several sketches the second day.

Looking south from in front of the cabin. Columbine were beautiful on the little island connected to the beach.



Some treasures from the beach. the gray speckled thing is a bird egg, found in the drift line just above the surf. The tan rock is pumice which is plentiful on Kruzof.



View from the cabin window



One last sketch before dark

Never saw a bear the whole trip, but there was plenty of sign, and writings in the cabin log book attested to lots of bears in the meadow a few days previously..... I don't think they liked our singing.