One of the things you notice in a small town where there isn't much noise is what noise there is.  In addition to overlooking Kachemak Bay and the Homer Spit and part of the Kenai mountains, we overlook the Homer airport, which generates a surprising number of small plane takeoffs and the run-up engine checks prior to takeoff. 

I've traveled many miles in small planes throughout Alaska, mostly in high school as an orchestra geek.  I was fortunate enough to play in the Fairbanks Symphony and the Arctic Chamber Orchestra and saw parts of Alaska that are only accessible by air.  It's also the way to get to where the bears live.

We're in Homer, Alaska for the month of July this year.  It's easy to see why we like it here.  Here's the view from our front porch when I arrived:

Here are a couple of shots from the airplane window as I flew in to Anchorage, with the peaks of the Alaska Range poking through the clouds.

One of the terrific things about coming here for a month is having a a calendar with no appointments on it — a thing of beauty, leading to the best night's sleep I've had in months.

Although I did see blue sky when I arrived, I haven't really since it since.

The weather forecast for the next week is quite consistent:

We may end up drinking lots of coffee.  Here are some fun local roasts:

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Twenty years after the Exxon Valdez supertanker spilled nearly 11 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound in southern Alaska, everything is pristine and natural again, right?

Not exactly.

A study
in 2004 estimated that perhaps 25,000 gallons of oil remained along the
sound’s gravel beaches and was degrading very slowly. So that raised a
question for researchers: Why, despite one of the largest environmental
cleanups in history, has some oil persisted?

Michel C. Boufadel, an environmental engineer at Temple University, and a colleague, Hailong Li, have provided an answer. In a paper in Nature Geoscience, they report that the oil has become trapped in a zone of low permeability below the beach surface.

“We could only answer this question by understanding the movement of water within these beaches,” Dr. Boufadel said.

Field
measurements showed that the beaches have two layers — a top one, a few
inches to a few feet thick, that is roughly a thousand times as
permeable as the layer below. The composition of the two is not very
different, Dr. Boufadel said, but it is quite likely that compaction
due to tidal forces has made the lower one less permeable.

Dr.
Boufadel said oil floating on the water remained in the upper layer
until changes in the water table allowed it to drip slowly into the
lower layer, where it remains.

“In the lower layer there’s not enough motion and not enough oxygen for the oil to degrade,” he said.

But
the oil can be released when otters or other creatures dig into the
beaches. Even in their field studies, Dr. Boufadel said, when they
would dig into deeper sediments, “the whole place would smell of oil.”

One
possibility for cleaning up the trapped oil, Dr. Boufadel said, would
be to inject chemicals into the lower layer that would promote
biodegradation.

During the past week I’ve spent a lot of time and energy complaining about the weather here in Homer.  And here’s why:

Brad and I talked pretty much every day about going home, but here’s the weather forecast for Denver / Boulder / Eldorado Canyon for today — the usual July weather:

So going home wasn’t the solution either.  Sigh. 

To amuse myself while indoors and in my pajamas, I caught up on what my friends were blogging, and found Wordle, which is this fantastically diverting and entertaining little website, courtesy of Ryan, that made my delicious tagcloud into art:

And another scintillating version with the same color palette, but with the words oriented mostly vertically instead of mostly horizontally:

And yet another version, with a radically different orientation and font and color palette:

And another one with the same font and color, but with half vertical and half horizontal:

Fascinating, isn’t it?  I could go on, but I won’t.  You should try it for yourself now.

The good news is that the sun is shining enough for me to stop goofing around and start my summer reading.  I’ve read a book each day this week, which is a more typical Alaska summer reading pace, and I have every intention of doing a summary of summer reading post.  Just as soon as I get out of these pajamas.

The 36th running of the Iditarod sled dog race started on Saturday, with 96 teams signed up for the 1,049 mile race from Anchorage to Nome.  The Anchorage Daily News website has great photos and a daily newsletter about the progress of the mushers as they cross the Alaskan bush.  This is definitely an extreme sport.

Today is the ceremonial start of the 1,100 mile Iditarod sled dog race.  The official race website has a nice interactive map and the Anchorage newspaper has extensive coverage. 

Legendary Iditarod sled dog musher Susan Butcher died of leukemia on August 5th at the age of 51.  See the Anchorage Daily News, the Fairbanks Daily News Miner, the Boston Globe, the Iditarod site, and the Susan Butcher website for words about this incredible woman.

Or:  Not the ‘Burbs

My earliest memories take place here, watching the sun set behind Mt. Redoubt across Cook Inlet and thinking that the golden path across the water actually went somewhere.

It really is a beautiful place.

And here is Brad, doing his version of enjoying the scenery:

The sun shone today for the first time in maybe a week, and I was nearly delirious with happiness.  Cloudy, gray, rainy days really wear me down.  We drove up to Anchor Point so I could take about 200 pictures of the same mountains, ocean, seagulls, and sunset.  I frequently think about getting a smaller digital camera that would fit easily into purses and be truly portable, and then I have the chance to take advantage of the capabilities of my Nikon D100 and I reconsider.  I’m still learning how to frame things, and how to make the horizon level, and other quite basic things; but this camera sure helps.  I’ll upload everything to my Alaska Summer 2006 album, even the crooked horizons, and edit later. 

There’s an entertaining series of shots of pulling a boat out of the water using a big farm tractor, and lots and lots of photos of mountain, ocean, seagulls, and sunset.

On our way home from the beach we saw a baby and mama moose on the side of the road.  It was getting dark enough the the aperature stayed open a long time and they photos are pretty blurry — but fun anway.