Another Rainy Day In Valdez

Raining again today, that made the decision for us to leave Valdez and head north toward Glen Allen. The weather continually improved as we approached Glen Allen until we had complete sunshine. 

We are on the hunt for Diamond Willow to make walking sticks. Diamond Willow is a slow growing hard wood, great for walking sticks. It is beautiful with red and blonde wood and diamond shaped groves. It will be a hard hunt since all we know is it grows like a lilac bush with many branches sprouting from a center cluster with small leaves and thick bark. Do you know how many trees fit that description here? We also know that it likes to grow near streams or swamp areas. So it looks like we will be in the swamps and permafrost today. Just in case we didn’t find any, we purchased an unfinished stick that I will have to whittle the bark off and out of the diamond shaped recessed groves. Anyway we hunted for hours, found trees that looked like it but when the bark was peeled back there wasn’t any red wood. We will keep looking on future days but today we came up empty handed. What we did find were mosquitoes. We haven’t had them while down on the Kenai Peninsula, but they are here in Valdez and Glen Allen for sure. I am glad we purchased that one piece of Diamond Willow. I started to remove the bark from the diamonds,  will need to sand it smooth, and then varnish it.  A project to finish while sitting around a campfire. It’ll be gorgeous.

I got a glimpse of the moon for the first time in months.  This is about 12:30 am. The mountain way off in the distance lit up under the moon light. There is a mountain in front of the snow capped one, but the way we were sitting it looked all as one. That is a nighttime picture of the mountain. The sky stays light for quite some time. I took the moon picture out of the front window of the RV and turned to take the mountain pic from the side window.    Alaska will loose about 3 hours of daylight per month now until the winter solstice. She still has very long days. At 11 pm it’s just dusk.