Life on the Outer Coast

July 1
Presumably left Sitka for Juneau at 2:30 am on board the Taku. Presumably only because I was asleep in my cabin. Woke up around 7:30, ate breakfast and went back to sleep.
Aaron and Darwin picked me up at the dock, applied coffee to my brain and we went to Mendenhall wetlands. It was the first time that I’ve walked on the trail, previously I’ve just looked at the wetlands from a distance. The goal of the walk was reaching a grove of spruce that was surrounding a nice patch of Cladonias.
One of the obvious differences between the vegetation around Juneau and Sitka is the abundance of Cottonwoods, Willows and Thimbleberry along the roads and trails. Another plant we don’t have around Sitka is Pyrola asarifolia. There was a blooming patch in a grove of young Sitka spruce beside the path.
Another plant I don’t see at home is Orange Hawkweed. It was blooming on the banks where the path went along the sloughs and float plane ponds. It has rather attractive and intensely bright flowers; maybe it should be controlled by promoting it as a cut flower.

Cut across the tidally influenced flats to the spruce grove. In the flats, lots of
Glaux, Puccinellia and a fleshy looking Stellaria. I collected several of the Cladina looking Cladonias from the spruce grove.
Blooming in the meadow parts of the wetlands was Castilleja unalaschensis and Angelica lucida.
Saw one Yellow-rumped warbler (Myrtle) in a willow along the trail. Also saw several Savannah sparrows, a Yellow legs and a Kingfisher.

Briefly visited the Mendenhall glacier (a bagillion tourists and buses). There is one Silene acaulis on the rock just below the visitor center. Also found another plant I don’t see too often, Saxifraga tricuspidata blooming closer to the parking lot. We could hear one tern, largely ignored by the people, talking away.

Aaron and friends introduced me to Disc Golf that evening. There is a course near Auke Bay. It is kind of a unusual sport, but entertaining. Throwing a smallish disc through trees into a metal basket is a different way of spending time in the forest than I’ve done previously . Not surprised that I have no cross body power, but happily discovered that I do fine throwing open armed. I managed to make a few holes on par, but not many. Needless to say my arm was tired after 18 holes and I lost by a lot. Aaron said he did a lot of his botanizing while searching for stray discs, the plant that drew my interest on a disc search was a blooming Cornus stolonifera/sericea. Climbing a willow to retrieve a disc was entertaining as well.