Only those of you with the Internet will receive this letter before Christmas, I am afraid: as usual, book tours get too confusing to do much creative stuff and when I got home I had a technical crisis with my solar power so could not use the computer. And before you know it, another year has galloped by.Last winter we had a lot colder temperatures than we have had of late, and it was a record snow year. We already had a couple of feet on the ground by the solstice, which is unusual for this area, and in late January received another humungous dump.
That needed the plough again - as everyone was crying for attention (farm-owned pickups with blades on the front could no longer handle it), it was ten days before I was ploughed out. Total cost for snow removal was now $800.
Makes helicoptering into Nuk Tessli for the winter seem not so expensive after all.
At the end of March the first spring migrants arrived. I put up a tray feeder and had the best fun photographing birds, many of whom I had not seen before. The ecology is quite different here than at NukTessli, being lower (although still at 1,000 metres altitude) and drier.
Juncos
Redwing Blackbirds having a spat.
Some wwoofers had planned to arrive mid April and I wondered if the snow would have melted enough for us to work. But by hacking daily at the ice around the door, I had cleared the foundations and done the structural work on the porch; Ron and Claire (Canadians) put on most of the roof. They also hauled and split a lot of firewood and cleared up a great deal of the yard.
The next wwoofers, two young men from Belgium and a woman from Switzerland, who arrived a couple of weeks later, finished the roof and gable ends,
and did an enormous amount of peeling and clearing on the road to the new building site and the new site itself.
I am very excited about this location: it has ponds and marsh from the northeast to south, and mountain views from south to northwest. A short walk will take me to the bluffs over the river with spectacular views of the wide, marshy riparian corridor full of moose and other animals. Ginty Creek is much better for wildlife viewing than Nuk Tessli.
(That is the McClinchy river, into which Ginty Creek flows.)
At the beginning of June, I went down to the river to do laundry when I heard an odd noise. On the far side of the water was a new-born moose calf bawling for its mum.
At first we approached very cautiously as a moose mum can be very dangerous but there appeared to be no sign of her and the baby bawled for none hours. In the end the wwoofers insisted we try and catch it so we drove the 10 kms round to the far side but although we hunted for it, it disappeared and we never saw it again. Whether it went into the river, which was already high, and drowned, we will not know. Maybe its mum came for it - but it is highly unusual for a baby to be so noisy - normally they lie motionless and silent when mum is away.
A week of heatwave combined with the heavy snow that still lay in the mountains to make a major flood along the river.
When the water receded, two large cottonwoods were down at the point, forming a large logjam, great chunks of the bank had fallen in, and the main channel, which had run along the near bank before, was across the far side.
This is how we left it when we were finally able to fly to Nuk Tessli.
See part 2 for the next episode
