Devil’s Peak

I just spent the past week along the Nabesna road. This is one of two roads that snakes itself into the park and it is located about an hour and a half north of the visitor center. My work consisted of driving along the road and pulling off at all of the parking areas and trail-head along the road and doing surveys of the invasive plants. When we find invasives we pull them up if it is manageable, there are some cases where there are just too many of a plant to be able to control it properly. We ended up being able to hit all of the areas along the 48 miles road and pulled about 75 lbs of invasive plants.

This was at 12:07am after the sunset. It stays like dusk then until about 3am.

This past Sunday was also the summer solstice which means the longest day of the year.  Never having been to Alaska was not aware of the celebration solstice can sometimes entail. Everyone was wishing me a happy solstice and there were many activities in the towns close nearby, like local bands playing and free food. Mainly the events are meant to hang out with friends while you all wait to watch the sun set, for my area that time was 11:36pm.

Collecting monitoring points of invasive species that were found along the road

As for this week, I will be helping the park’s fishery biologist with a fish survey in Grizzly Lake. I get to take my first float plane ride to the site and will be spending my time on the water collecting, tagging, and taking samples from the fish. I am really excited to get this opportunity to help out, and I am sure it will be a lot of fun.