Sunday Observations - Mar 29

- Alaska's Mt Redoubt is having a good time this week. It starting spewing ash last Sunday. It has closed flights in and out of Anchorage and has kept lots of Alaskans on the Kenai Peninsula inside. Check out all the fun stuff at the Alaska Volcano Observatory website.

And here's a photo of Mt Redoubt I took from across the Cook Inlet in Nikiski in summer 2008:


- Further south of Mt Redoubt is Katmai National Park. Katmai is where you go to see bears. Air taxis leave Anchorage, Kenai/Soldotna and Homer on a daily basis in the summer flying across the Cook Inlet to drop tourists off to see grizzlies.

- Katmai is where Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend were eaten by bears that he had "befriended". He was the subject of the documentary Grizzly Man. Using much of his own video, the documentary shows incredible footage of Treadwell among bears (and a fox that took a liking to him). While he had tremendous love for the bear, I am not sure that he had enough respect for the bears. Plus he had a severe, yet dellusional, messiah complex.

- What do Lindsay and James, Ruth, Brent and Jessie, Kate, Emily, Matthew, Jeff, Jacob have in common? These were all awesome people that I don't see enough of or live out of town that I got to visit with this week.

Crush of the Week:
There are 900 miles of hiking trails in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Jennie Whited has hiked them all. And she's done it five times, making her the only woman to do so. Oh, and she's 65. I am impressed by her tenacity and envious of a life walking in the woods. I am left asking, "Why am I sitting here and not in the woods?"