Happy Summer!

Hi everyone. Happy summer! Everything is very beautiful here at Katmai. It is very green, and the salmon are now coming up the rivers from the ocean. So the bears will be coming out a lot more now. The water here is still too cold for me to swim in though. Everything is going well. I feel very lucky to live in such a beautiful, wonderful place. I do need to learn how to fish because the salmon is so good!

I got to do an amazing hike recently to the top of a mountain in the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. Some of the pictures I'm attaching are from this hike. The one of the volcano steaming is a picture of Mt. Martin, a volcano here at Katmai. I am jumping in front of Mt. Martin. I was so happy that the weather was so perfect and I had a clear view of several of the big volcanoes here - which doesn't happen often! The pink flowers on the mountain are alpine azalea, very pretty. The other picture is of an angler fishing at the mouth of the Brooks River, where I live. And finally, I posted a picture of a sockeye salmon. The first one was caught last Friday, June 18.

I have now given all three of my interpretive programs, and although they still need some work, they are going well. One of my programs is a tour of the valley of ten thousand smokes, which is very fun. I get to take visitors on a day-long outing to the valley. We have lunch out there and then hike down into the valley to the Ukak River which runs through the volcanic ash. I also do a cultural walk where I tell visitors all about the human history of the Brooks River. My third interpretive program is an evening program where I talk about the life cycle of a sockeye salmon. Some of you were wondering what I've been up to here. Well, that's mostly it. I do a lot of informal interpretation also - giving bear safety talks, managing bears and people, and talking with visitors and answering their questions.

Well I hope you enjoy this post. I am going home now to have some hot chocolate. I'll try to post more often!