Food Challenge

The past couple days, I’ve enjoyed two wonderfully relaxing days off, but before I recount the adventures, allow me first to touch on my days on the glacier. Recently, we’ve had enough slow days and weather days to make even a couch potato crave activity. Between the empty port in Juneau and the engulfing waves of fog on the Herbert glacier, we’ve had few tourists and lots of time on our hands. In a world of cell phones, television, and Internet, most people would find our remote glacial camp miserably boring. We have no reception, no computers, nor movies. Other than the little generator, we don’t even have electricity. But don’t worry; we’ve managed to find ways to entertain ourselves.
Other than my marathon reading sessions, I’ve been playing a lot of cards. Gin Rummy, Up and Down the River, and Cribbage are the favorites at dog camp, but recently, bragging rights are no longer enough. To make the games more interesting, we’ve raised the stakes by incorporating dish duty, water binges, and food challenges. Jake and I are the only ones dumb enough to play the food challenges, or rather, I’m the only one. For some unknown reason, I’ve been unable to win a single food challenge and have paid for it dearly by eating all sorts of barely edible concoctions. The first creation I was forced to eat was a pancake made of Skittles, teriyaki sauce, ranch, peanut M&Ms, peanut butter, canola oil, hot sauce, honey smoked ham, and burnt pancake batter. I have to admit, after two bites I called a cop-out. For the next food challenge, I decided to regulate the ingredients and ruled that the finished product had to be bearable. Of course, I lost the next food challenge card game and had to eat four deviled eggs meticulously made by Chef Jake. The first was a regular deviled egg. The second was filled with melted M&Ms, peanut butter, and chocolate. The third was a mixture of hot sauces and egg yolk. And the final deviled egg was filled with ranch and tang powder. As delectable as those may sound, it took awhile for my stomach to digest dinner. The next day brought a new food challenge, and I was determined not to lose. For this game, the winner (Jake) had to make a delicious dessert for the loser (me). Kudos to Jake, the dessert was delicious…and unique. He deep-fried a Snickers bar in pancake batter, placed it in a cored green apple, then drizzled chocolate peanut butter sauce over the top. Luckily, Seth was willing to help out and be the garbage disposal for all my leftovers. After this food challenge, I finally realized that I was mentally horrible at the food challenge card games. The following games resulted in regular, tasty dinners of Mexican pie and pizzas rather than unique concoctions that make your stomach turn. Because I am quite competitive, I like to think that the reason I’d play so poorly is that subconsciously I wanted to see what Chef Jake could cook up.
The past two days, I’ve been back in Juneau and enjoying my free time. Yesterday, I woke up late and spent more time than I feel comfortable admitting sitting in a café and watching soccer reruns. Today, Chrissy, her dogs (Bo and Lucy), and I ventured up Lemon Creek towards the Ptarmigan Glacier. Since the day was so beautiful, we were planning on a nice long hike. Unfortunately, Bo and Lucy happened upon the trail of a porcupine and cut our hike short. We pulled out as many of the quills on the trail as we could but had to return to the apartment for heavy-duty tweezers in order to remove the quills from the inside of their mouths and gums. We finished off the afternoon by enjoying a relaxing walk along the beach, porcupine free.

Does This Glacier Make My Butt Look Big?

It’s hard to believe that it’s almost the middle of June and the summer solstice! While Nick and the Durango crowd are packing up shorts and tank tops for the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, I woke up to fresh snow and sub-freezing temperatures on the glacier. Oh, the excitement of glacier life. While this might sound cold and miserable, I have to admit, I’m not completely roughing it. I have a small propane heater for my tent and most days the temperature soars to anywhere from 60-80 degrees. I’m told that later in the summer, a 90-degree day is not uncommon. This past month, I’ve been very fortunate and only experienced a couple of weather days. Most of the time I have to worry about covering up to prevent skin cancer rather than bundling up against the cold. On sunny days I worry that hourly sunscreen application might not be enough! Even the dogs are covered with zinc oxide and sunscreen. Of course, I’ll take a bluebird day over rain anytime.
As long as we are not socked in, the helicopters and tourists come, rain or shine. Most of the time, the tourists love it. And while the tours do get slightly monotonous, and I’m guilty of sounding like a recording near the end of the day, I’ve never met so many people from so many different places. We’ve had guests from all over the world including England, Australia, Malaysia, India, China, Spain, and New Zealand just to name a few. Recently, I gave a tour to a family from Puerto Rico who had never seen snow. I guessing it was an experience they’ll never forget. (Nor will they forget my attempt to give the tour in Spanish, which probably added to the entertainment value). Luckily, the family knew English as well, so they could correct me whenever I made a mistake. Other tourists don’t even speak English. During those tours, my main job is that of photographer. I must say it can be a nice break to not talk for a whole hour. One of my favorite tours involved a very friendly and very large woman. We stopped in the middle of the loop for the usual photo op when she hands me the camera and runs out into the middle of the snowfield. She bends over with her butt to the camera and yells, “Take the picture, it’s for my Christmas card.” When she returned to the sled, she informed me that beneath her picture instead of Merry Christmas or Season’s Greetings, she would put Does this glacier make my butt look big? Ha, priceless. Hopefully she’ll send me a copy of her Christmas card.