Mt. Sterling Fire Tower

One last video for now...this is me climbing on top of the fire tower on Mt. Sterling in Great Smoky Mountains National Park to watch the sunrise with Danny and Chad.  (Not advised)

Top Bar beehive Installation

Back to some agrarian-like posts!!!  I started a top bar beehive three weeks ago.  They have already built comb on six bars!  It has been fun to provide housing for these little guys...I know it sounds dumb, but I could sit and watch them for hours.  It's semi-mesmerizing to watch them fly in and out at such a rate.  Coming back with legs bursting with pollen is quite a sight.  This is a video during the installation of a three pound package with a queen.  They queen is in that little box I pull out first.  She is trapped by a big piece of candy that the worker bees eat away over the course of three days to set her free.  Pretty awesome, but man was I nervous.  I am wearing a white shirt because it a more passive color to the new tenants :)

Lake Toxaway Green Roof

Another fancy green roofing video from Living Roofs Inc.  I shot this one with my new GoPro Camera and edited using iMovie.  It's a residential project at Lake Toxaway, NC and we used XeroFlor's pre-vegetated mats to cover the sloped roof.  Spring is busy for us right now...I am on the road weekly either doing and installation or performing maintenance.  Busy as a BEEEE!!!

Mt. Sterling Sunrise

Danny, Chad, and I woke up at 4:00 AM in order to make the fire tower on top of Mt. Sterling before sunrise. We set out with head lamps under a bright moon, summited, and climbed up the fire tower just minutes before light flooded the tiny structure. Then we built a fire, unpacked the cast iron skillet, and made fried egg and avocado sandwiches on toasted rosemary sourdough. Not bad for 6,000 feet!

Driggs Ski Trip

Two weeks in Idaho skiing...got my winter fill, but now I am ready for spring. We are hiking up the Nipple at Targhee.

Uncle ALAN

My sister had a healthy baby boy on December 21st!

More Roofing Verde

We installed a green roof on top of Hamilton County's Public Health Building in Chattanooga, TN.

Check out the time lapse!

Holy Cabooses!

It's been a long time. My blog is somehow symbolic of my life....moments of intensity followed by periods of transience. Anyway. What have I been doing since Alaska? Trying to get settled....not just in a place but in my life. Going up there for three months to work with Steve was an awesome experience that I will carry with me for the rest of my life, but now I must turn attention to what I want to accomplish in the southeast US, where my family lives.

In the past 2 1/2 months, I have run a half marathon, worked on a green roofing job in NYC for three weeks, and gotten a clearer picture of my life for the next year.

My green roofing boss, Emilio, and his wife, Kate, have offered me a salaried job in Asheville, and I have decided to make the commitment to the company and join them in the mountains. The decision was a hard one to make after all the work I have put into Fiddler's over the past 2 1/2 years, but the bottom line is: I love Kate and Emilio, I love Asheville, I love the job, I love the pay, and I will love being closer to my parents as they head into the next phase of retirement/aging. I will certainly miss Charleston but will never be far away because of Chris and Jackie and the fact that we have three roofs in the low country.

The pictures are from the job in NYC at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. Hard to believe that I am standing on a building! This roof was about 10,000 square feet and was planted with about 50,000 plants! It was great experience for Emilio and I to work with another green roofing company on such an interesting project. It was also a perk to wear out my welcome with Paul and Laura (my brother and his wife) and close friends Erica and Timmy for three weeks.

We have two more jobs this fall: one in Lake Toxaway and one in Chattanooga. I will get pictures of them once they are complete.

Farewell Juneau

Just wanted to throw up some quick pics from the halibut trip in Glacier Bay. This fish is definitely the most beautiful, amazing marine creature I have ever been around. I was in awe when it came up the long line, and I deeply appreciate it's life. This 350 pound fish will feed many many mouths. Took Steve and I all we had to wrestle it aboard. The best part of the trip (besides visiting a friend's remote log cabin complete with kick-ass garden, mud oven, and wood fired hot tub) was waking up to piss in the middle of the night. I could hear whales breathing clear across the bay in complete darkness...it's quite a sound to behold.

It has been a wonderful summer...full of adventure, great times with loved ones, and many many laughs. Now back to Charleston to plant the fall garden :)

crab Diving

Wrapping things up.

We finished our crab season on Tuesday with our final shipment to Portland and celebrated with a big crab dinner. Moving 300 pots back onto dry land was a little easier on my back this time through because of the two months training! The picture shows the boat stacked with 72 pots...barely any room to stand on deck. Those had to be loaded onto the skiff (20 at a time), and then hauled up the beach and into the woods.

The "booby" picture was a creature growing on a rope that we hauled up. With 30 years experience working on boats, Steve has never seen anything like them...they even included eerily similar "nipples?" Haha.

Other pics are us goofing off on a bike/run to Herbert Glacier (the same Glacier Tyler and I hiked to 3 years ago and went into an ice cave), and Steve and I enjoying a rare sunset from a real fishing boat.

The boat is now outfitted for long lining, and we are leaving tomorrow for Glacier Bay to catch 4,200 pounds of halibut. The weather forecast is grim with 4-5 foot seas and heavy rain...should be a good trip. NOT

Even More

More

Pics Galore

The best aspect of this "Alaskan experience" is not the wildlife, not the sunsets, not the fishing, nor the money, or even the mountains. By far, the most cherished part of my two months fishing in Juneau will be my time spent with my wonderful cousins. They have been so generous; opening their home and their lives to me, and I will look back on this time with a fondness of meaningful interaction with people I love.

The ENTIRE Box family rallied for last week's all-night off-load. Even the kids stayed up until 4:00 AM packing our crab into insulated totes to be shipped to Portland. Molly was our camera woman, and I would say she captured the events damn well.

The other pictures are of today's perfect trip in the skiff. Usually, the last thing Steve and I want to do on our day off is head back out onto the water, but with a rare break in the clouds and the sun shining overhead, Molly insisted that we take the skiff out, try to catch a Halibut, and check out some remote beaches. It was SO much fun to experience the water in a new light...leisure, instead of work. We set anchor, and Corey hooked into a HUGE fish. He fought it hard for about an hour, and Molly (as you can see) was ready with the harpoon. It turned out to weigh 150 pounds!!!!! Corey only weighs 100 pounds, so he really worked hard to pull this fish up from a depth of 150 feet.

Might have to do a few posts to get them all on here. We leave tomorrow for our last week of gill-netting, then the last week of crab pots before we have to get all the gear back out of the water and on land. Hard to believe I only have 3 weeks of fishing left.

Pics

More picture of the bubble feeding humpbacks. It was an amazing experience to be so close to this incredible symphony of movement. The whales circle around a bait ball of herring and release bubbles that rise in a cylinder to confine the fish in a cage of bubbles. Then other whales rise up through the center of the column with mouths agape to scoop up as many fish as possible. All the whales surface at the same time, and if you look closely, you can make out the inner baleen of their mouths. SO cool.

The other pics are of me making bait out of cut salmon (pretty slimy/gooey on a hot sunny day) and posing next to a nice pot of 23 keeper dungees. Our record pot for the season is 29.

Bubble Feeding

3-4 foot seas

Picking fish

Holy Whale!!!

Hard to believe Steve took this picture three days ago, but we got quite a show from the boat. A pod of about 8 humpback whales cruised by the boat, and I guess they were in a playful mood because we saw about 15-20 breaches in a 30 minute window. They are SOOOO huge...it looks like slow-motion when they shoot out of the water. Maybe Steve should have a career change to wildlife photographer?

This week was a week of records for the fishing vessel Worthy (that's our boat). We started the gill net opening with the three largest consecutive hauls Steve has ever seen. Each one had 550 fish in the net and took about 2 hours to pick each one. (we had to pick the fish out quickly because the net can start to sink under all the weight.) We threw the net out, waited just 30 minutes, picked the fish, threw the net back out, got unloaded (each haul was about 4,000 pounds), picked the second haul, threw the net back out a third time, got unloaded a second time, and then picked the net for the last time. It was a non-stop finger work out, and when we got done Steve asked me how long I thought that took. I guessed maybe 3-4 hours. We were moving the entire time, and those three sets took almost 10 hours and totaled 12,000 pounds!!!! Of course the action slowed for the next two days, but we ended up with 23,000 pounds of salmon this week. Crazy crazy.

Just a few words about the fish we are catching: 99 % are "enhanced" chum salmon. This means that two hatcheries in the Juneau area release millions of fry into holding pins in two locations. The fry are fed for about two months and then released to complete their 3-5 year life cycle in the ocean. When they come back, they return to their original feeding spots and not to a river mouth. Although the fish live for 5 years in their natural environment, eating their natural diet, the touch of human hands is not far away. If we did not catch them, millions of fish would return to the hatcheries and try to spawn in salt water (which doesn't work), and the beaches around Juneau would become bald eagle hang outs and smelly, carcass-filled places. Definitely a crazy thing to be a part of. I cannot think of any other food source (besides maybe mushrooms) where humans release organisms into the wild for later, large-scale harvesting. I could see this happening with insects, as more research is being done into the nutritional value of arthropods (not kidding check this: www.ted.com/talks/marcel_dicke_why_not_eat_insects). Anyway, slightly off topic. So we are in effect, doing a good thing for these fish who would not be able to reproduce anyway. We are giving their lives purpose, so to speak...Haha.

The week ended with a record haul in the crab pots too. One bay with 12 pots averaged 16 keeper crabs per pot (that's the highest average Steve has ever seen in one area)! It brought our total average up to 5.2 for all of our gear, and Steve thinks this week is definitey our peak week for the season. Going back out again on Sunday, so I will update with more totals!

Hike

This was from a hike up to the ridge that rises over the house to the north. Once I reached the top, I could count 6 glaciers and see all of Juneau down below! The glacier snaking out of the mountains in the picture is the Mendenhall Glacier.