Katmai Winter McKittrick and Lituya Journey Higman

I wish I could crawl!
It’s been awhile since Katmai got a blog post… He’s 5 months old already! Mostly because I’ve been busy working, playing, gardening, hiking… And partly because our camera broke (Canon has it now). We can’t really complain after tens of thousands of photos taken in harsh conditions. So most of the photos in this post are courtesy of Tatyana’s iPhone (with a few taken on a camera we borrowed from Tim)
Morning watering ritual
My cousin Tatyana came to visit over the 4th of July, which was great. Katmai walked with me in the parade, we watched the canoe jousters, and had a good time. Then, of course, we took her crashing through the bushes on a more-epic-than-initially-planned adventure. What else would we do with a guest?
Nap time
We left the house at about 2PM.
Packraft office?
We got back at about 3AM.
Nursing break on hike with Tatyana
After walking to the Outside beach, paddling across the bay, hiking over the ridge, hiking down 4th of July Creek Valley, paddling back to the Outside beach, and walking up to the yurt. With many breaks thrown in order to feed Katmai. And just to calm him down. Generally he’s quite tolerant of his wacky parents and their adventures, even when daddy scratches him in the face with an alder branch (I was extremely impressed that Katmai didn’t get more scratched – his daddy is a master bushwhacker). But it was a bit hot that day, so Katmai needed to pop out of the wrap more than usual. And the scratch was hardly noticeable by the next day, because he’d fallen off the bed and scraped his nose from that instead.
Sunset in the cottonwoods
And we probably haven’t quite got our “hiking time with baby” estimates down yet. But we all had fun, and luckily sunset wasn’t until midnight anyway. We paddled home in the dark – one of the rare times I see dark in the summer – under the light of a bright red full moon.
Tatyana and Erin
Lounging
We’ve been taking Katmai packrafting for a while now (only in really calm conditions), so we decided we really had to test out what would happen if we actually fell out of the raft with him.

milk jug playing the role of Katmai
We didn’t think Katmai would appreciate a sudden dive into the lake, so I tried with a milk jug full of gravel and water first. Not so hard to keep its “head” out of water, but it was really hard to get back in the raft.

Katmai doesn’t like this kind of swimming
Had to try with the real baby too, of course (gently walking into the water). The lake was actually pretty warm (a nice swim if you watch out for leeches), but Katmai thought the whole experience was a little weird.

let’s try it with a life vest
And if you’re a baby, a little weird = “I should scream now.” But I’m glad to know it works.

swimming with baby and life vest
A couple weeks after the adventure with Tatyana, I got to take a small group of 13 year old Girl Scouts packrafting. They got a bit more than they bargained for too, though I did manage to get them back to their campsite by 11:30PM (after leaving at 4PM, walking a few miles to a creek, trying to float down the creek, walking the beach, paddling around the point, then fighting a headwind to get back to the beach). In my defense, I didn’t anticipate that the creek would only be ankle deep (it’s been a really dry summer), so a normally 1/2 hour float turned into a 2 hour wade on slippery rocks with a bit of floating (more for the light 13 year-olds, less for the chaperone and me). But they had a trip to remember, at least.

napping with dad
When we aren’t dragging him around, Katmai’s been busy figuring out new tricks, as always. In addition to grabbing them, he now likes to suck on his own toes (and on nearly everything else he can get his hands on). One day a little over a week ago, he suddenly decided to learn to sit up (he’d never shown any interest before), and is now pretty good at it. Though he’ll still crash after a minute or two when he decides to reach too far, or leans back suddenly. He has a great happy croak that sounds like a frog. He has a pretty good scream too, but only does that when he gets overtired before going to bed, which we try to avoid when possible. He really wishes he could crawl, but hasn’t yet figured out that it works better if you keep your head off the ground while doing it (though the inchworm method is kind of amusing). We have our video camera back now, so I’ll try to post a video soon.

In other news, we’ve finally got a beta version of the Alaska Coal website up. We’ve been working on this for months now, and have a pretty good set of stuff there now, but are still writing some of the articles, and working on getting more photos, maps, and graphs in it.