Day 46- Two Lakes Trail

The hard drive on my new laptop is about 240 GB of memory. The last time I checked, I had filled about half of it so I’ve begun burning my images to DVD. It’s a good back up system in case something happens to my laptop as we travel, too. Now, you might think I should just back off from taking as many photos. That thought never crossed my mind. That’s why I brought 39 blank DVDs with me. Earlier today, I watched the RED SOX play the white sox. The game started at 10:00 here in Seward. That is so cool, I still get a kick out of it. It took us a while to find the Two Lakes Trail after we had lunch. The trail head was behind a technical school building with no signage to direct us. The first lake and a nice picnic area was within sight of where we parked the truck. The easily laid out pathway led us around the second little pond as well as a rather marshy depression. The forest on either side of the trail was thick with vegetation, mosses, bushy ferns, skunk cabbage and lots of other mid level browse. The canopy was made up of several types of spruces with some smaller deciduous trees mixed in. We not only heard but saw numerous red squirrels although we would have known they were in the area anyway because of the huge piles of cones collected at the bases of many of the trees. They’ve been gathered as a winter cache. The squirrels with gather thousands of cones, hauling them underground so they can be found when the snows come. We even saw evidence of where millions of seeds had been eaten as they worked. A ranger in Denali described it as “ if it looks as if a Spruce tree exploded” which is exactly what it looked like. Those ranger talks are starting to pay off. We actually knew what we were looking at. Those squirrels were the only wildlife we saw during the 2 mile round trip although we found quite a few clear impressions of moose hoof prints in the mud and lots of scat in and along side of the trail. I have to confess I am not an expert on scat but if I were asked, I’d have to say I saw lots of dog and even some horse manure. The trail was perfectly adapted to be ridden with horses with the possible exception of low limbs in one section. Even though the day was overcast, I mentioned the other path, the Tonsina Point trail and Carl said okay. Unfortunately, we still couldn’t find where it began. We found ourselves on the beach near Lowell Point watching about a dozen people salmon fishing in the low surf. We splurged and had some really great ice cream downtown across from the Major Marine office and then we fueled up for our trip to Soldotna tomorrow. Supper was fresh salmon caught on Carl’s trip yesterday. He didn’t catch it but when no one claimed it, he decided to give it a good home. I hope we’ll have plenty of our own caught on Tuesday.