Shown above: the Kaleberg sinks the Titanic

Kaleberg Symbionts

Archived Notes

July 2005

To Our Homepage and the Current Kaleberg Notes

Back to June 2005
Forward to August 2005

July 2005

7/27 - We have wrapped up our luau and our lau lau. They may not look Hawaiian, but the little green packages ties up with string in the pot on the left are examples of the Hawaiian national dish, lau lau. What's inside? Kalua pork, pipikailua beef, and taro leaves. Curious? Want to try making your own? Check out our recipe for lau lau.

7/20 - Just a brief note on long peppers, an out of fashion spice that we ran into recently at Uwajimaya while shopping for our luau. Stay tuned for more on our luau.

7/15 - They're back. We're back. Obstruction Point Road has been open for a few weeks now, and we finally made our way eight miles down the one and a half lane road to some of the most wonderful alpine high country accessible by car in Olympic National Park. We took our usual walk to the rim of the great descent to Moose Lake and promptly turned around and made our way back to the car. The air was thin, most of the snow had melted and all the flowers were out in bloom.

Also, there were marmots, the Olympic golden marmots, who looked well fed and were quite active. We could hear them whistling from some distance, probably warning the other marmots about us human invaders.

07/10 - We recently cooked up some lamb on a spit and have posted the video. We are only sorry that we do not have a scent track, but this doesn't seem to be one of the new Tiger Mac OS X features. (Maybe, they'll introduce it when Apple moves to Intel hardware).

We bought a lovely leg of lamb at Sunny Farms in Sequim and butterflied it, and then marinated it in cheap white wine, garlic, salt, pepper, and a whole bunch of herbs we have growing out back like parsley, sage, rosemary and oregano. Then we tied the whole roast up and stuck it on a spit. Check out the rotary action.

After an hour and a half it tasted as good as it looks.

07/02 - The Switchback Trail to Klahane Ridge is one of our favorite high country hikes. If nothing else, the trailhead is right off Hurricane Ridge Road a bit shy of the ranger station on Hurricane Ridge, so it is an easy drive. We got an early start today to avoid the Fourth of July crowds, and we fairly tore up the 1450' from the Switchback Trail trailhead to the ridge, but just as we got to the overlook, where one can see Port Angeles, Sequim, Dungeness, the San Juan Islands and Vancouver Island spread out below, we stopped short. There, by the sign post, was a mountain goat, chowing down on the foliage.

There are mountain goats, actually a type of sheep, in Olympic National Park, but they are rarely seen in this part of the park. This one was shaggy, still shedding its winter coat, but more than willing to cooperate with a photographer.

07/01 - Thanks to the solstice, there have been some very low tides out at the West End beaches. This includes our favorite beach, Second Beach. At the south end of the beach there is a small cave that you usually cannot even get to at high tide. At low tide, the entrance is accessible from the beach. We went on a day with a particularly low tide, as you can see on the left, with only 0.8 feet of water. (If you want to plan your own low tide visit, check out our Tide Finder program, or our tide table for La Push).

Aside from being able to explore various caves, the low tide also brought up a lot of starfish. You can see them bunched up near the waterline on a mussel rock. We have never seen so many starfish stacked together like plastic toys. We could also see a lot more anemones, and not just the dull sand covered ones, but lovely blue-green ones, in the shallow tidal water. We only saw one eagle, but we were quite impressed with Second Beach nevertheless.

07/01 - In addition to weeds, our backyard is also being overrun by baby quail. They seem to like the rock garden, and they are bouncing all over the place.