Pictures from Twin Bears Mountain

The strawberries are blooming! Two and a half weeks after the trees got green, here is a picture of the wild strawberries blooming by the community garden, taken Monday.

Here are some pictures from this saturday's trip, thanks to Dorte! Sonja feeding me crackers...

... and then the trip participants (except for Dorte, who is taking the picture, and the seven dogs we had between the three of us adults), also in their respective carriages. May be the Chariot company could give us some new products to do them advertisement :)



The location of Twin Bears Mountain is somewhere around here: 64.903163,-146.686707, from google maps. That image, view from the satellite the summer when we had large forest fires (the smoke from the Chena Dome fire is visible on that image, if you follow the smoke in the northeasterly direction, you can see the fires) reminds me that the last several summers always had something particular associated with them. Either smoke. Or wasps, like last year.

The wasps are around again this year, making me wonder if they will be bad again this year. Based on Dermot Cole's column from today, Tuesday, May 22, they are not only on my mind:

LATEST BUZZ: That persistent humming sound you hear may mean that we are in for another big invasion of yellowjackets.

Reader Manuela Schmoll of North Pole wrote to offer this advice:

“Sunday night I saw a wasp starting to build a nest on our front porch and I was reminded how bad the wasp problem was last year. I think your column may be a good place to remind people about that and let them know that now is the time to try to kill off the queens and remove any nests that are being started before the queens can lay eggs and the wasp population multiplies. It is best to destroy the queens and not just the nest, since the queen will just go somewhere else and start fresh.”