Blueberry Harvesting Road Trip!

On Thursday, we drove up to Anchorage through the rain. Joining forces with our friend Terry, on Friday we then drove about as far from Anchorage northward as we'd covered from Homer the previous day. And back. And back to Homer today. Our quest?

Blueberries! Yes! You may remember my disappointment last year at our paltry harvest after a very strenuous hike, due to a new invasive moth whose caterpillar had stripped all the leaves from the blueberry plants in that area.

Given that, it was so sweet to see flourishing plants, autumning golden, with perfectly ripe berries.

As befits a long trip, there were sideshows and pit stops. We had to stop at the gas station in Willow for 'A Cultural Experience:' the longest candy aisle you ever saw.

On both sides!

No comment. OK, one comment. It reminds me of Scott Nadelson's self- and Oregon-deprecating line that most 'artwork' around where he lives is paintings of salmon or carved elk-horn. Here, too, Scott--and this we call a Cultural Experience?!

More wondrous were the views. The tundra and below are already in full fall colors--purple carpets splashed with yellowing birches, Denali in the background.

Spectacular like this for mile after mile...

It gives a whole different perspective on distances. You can see a day's walk off and yet the mountains look close enough to touch.

After many days of rain, it was also stunning weather. There were some neat-looking animation clouds to tell stories about from time to time, but mostly we had some late-season warmth and sunshine, just as I start to look for my long underwear and down coat.

Harvesting blueberries can tell much about personalities. In my post about blueberries last year, I showed the 'harvesting combs' that can be used to pick more rapidly, that some people deplore for the mechanization, claiming that it can also damage the plants.

Phil picks with one comb in each hand, roaring through a field as if he were back on a combine, the zingy noise the teeth make as they pass through springy branches even a positive sound-effect for him: "productivity!"

I used one comb, sometimes. Having driven such a long way, I sympathized with the drive to pick as much as possible in the time we had. On the other hand, it's so much more pleasing to use my fingers as combs, to touch and caress the plants, to milk the berries from the stems and greet each one. A couple times, the comb would pull a whole small plant out and that really put me off. There are techniques to make comb-picking friendly to the plant and I'm careful to use them, but they're not totally infallible. Terry's a finger-picker too, focused and speedy. Phil definitely picked the most of any of us: more impressive was how clean (as in relatively free of leaves and debris) his picking was: it's awfully easy to pick leaves with the berries that way.

These are low-bush cranberries, aka lingonberries. They look so funny, just marooned in the bog there--all the foliage has died back and here are these little red jewels saying "Look at me! Eat me! Spread me!"

Speaking of marooned in the bog, it happened to me too.

I didn't think it was funny at the time, knee-deep and sinking. But I was sport enough to have a pic taken, even though I think that those bib overalls on top of my layers of clothing make me look even more unsightly than usual in photographs! Had I been alone, it would have been truly scary. I was so grateful that Phil helped me out.

Speaking of other growing things besides blueberries, Phil pulled out these king bolete mushrooms, and modeled them very fetchingly...

On the way back toward Anchorage, we stopped at Honolulu Creek (what is it about Hawaiian names in other states?)

It's a glacial outwash, which means rock-hunting heaven. Almost every stone you set foot upon is unique, beautiful, different from its fellows. We hauled down several backpack-loads of large rocks (well, Phil did): Terry's pretty sure she has enough now to finish a major landscaping project.

My taste runs to smaller rocks. The one on the left is a granite that has been compressed, shivered, compressed again and you can now pick it apart with a thumbnail--it's already significantly smaller in the picture than it was when I found it. The one on the right is the closest to triangular that I've seen in a long time, and it's blue with interesting green faceting that doesn't show up well in the picture.

So, successful harvesting of two kinds, plus great company and conversation for a long drive.

And now we're home again, with significantly more blueberries (even having given away a whole tub) than we picked with great effort last year.

And now we're home again, and I still miss the taste of being at Residency, and I'm still not fully rested from it, still have to figure out all kinds of scheduling and prioritization.

But the question remains: was it worth driving a thousand miles for those berries? Yes, that's closer than the frozen berries from Oregon and Washington we can get at CostCo, and these wild berries have far more antioxidants than those do. But the expense for the amount of berries pulled out is pretty huge in comparison to the CostCo berries. I feel very mixed about it and have to weigh in with the value of being there, seeing that wonderful scenery in a part of the country I haven't been for a year, the company...