Gorgeous Saint George

I really loved Saint George. The birds were still here, and I picked salmon berries and saw all sorts of wonderful things. I kept pinching myself to see if it was all real.

Overlooking one of the cormorant and puffin rookeries

Guess where the pot of gold is?

A great black sand beach. Great weather too!
The volcanic rock was spectacular here. Very cubist in design and structure


I couldn't get over the beauty inside this urchin shell. A quilt may come from this picture...

Tiny fox feet crisscross this island. We saw smoky blue and brilliant white foxes.

Hundreds of gulls nest along this beach
A cave! Just like in Swiss Family Robinson. This whole island reminded me of that favored childhood story.
A Holey Rock
Not the best year for Salmon Berries according to our local friends, but we found (and ate) some nonetheless.

Russian Orthodox graves in the sunlight

The church all decked out for a special holiday with lights and tolling bells calling everyone to worship
A scoundrel! He/She just stole some seal vomit and was rushing away with their mouth full.
Just in case you land along the beach and don't know where you are, link up to your on board wireless and go to pribilofs.com...except there isn't any wireles....
Hundreds and hundreds of birds. It was easier to tell them apart by how they flew then by their color.

Vast puffin rookeries
Seabird feathers from fox kills
Can you see the cormorant perched along the cliff edge? to his left you can just make out two cute puffins hugging the cliffs.
These stacked stones were all over the island. I found out that they are ancient navigation aids from before there were roads. Apparently when the island gets fogged in telling direction is very difficult, so at the top of every hill are groups of stones that somehow tell you which way north is. Some of the stone groupings refer to village sites that aren't there any more, so it was confusing, and the guy explaining it to me said his grandfathers generation were the last to actually use the stones.


Our really nice hotel. Seriously the nicest rural Alaskan hotel I have ever stayed in.

See? Check out this sweet room?!

My chariot awaits
Saint George is a great community

Pretty Saint Paul

I think the pictures speak pretty eloquently as to the beauty of Saint Paul, but I'll add captions. I felt like a kid in a candy store. There was so much to see, and so much more I wanted to learn and do here! A few hours in the evening after work just weren't enough.

Volcanic lava flow into the ocean

The island has many cliff faces, excellent bird rookeries, although we were too late for many birds this year.
Shannon, Queen of Saint Paul

The coastlines are just so breathtakingly beautiful here -
they reminded me of pictures that I saw of New Zealand's coast

Old weathere rocks along the ridgeline of Saint Paul

Fox prints in the volcanic beach sand

Reindeer hoof prints along the cliff top

The beaches are beautiful too

And, like everywhere else I've been in Alaska,

the beaches are chock full of plastics

PLEASE STOP USING PLASTIC BOTTLES

We arrive in time to still catch all the wildflowers

I don't know for sure, but I made some identification guesses based on what locals told me and from what I recognized from other places...correct me if I'm wrong - PLEASE

Wooly Lousewart

No clue - but these were tiny, less than a half inch across

Saint Paul's beautiful Russian Orthodox Church. The bells were beautiful hear, and you could hear them all over the island.

Aargh! A dandelion, even here! And yes, I picked it.

An alder growing along the ground, almost five feet long! The branches and trunk picked up completely off the ground, so it was a true dwarf tree growing horizontally rather than vertically to escape the nasty winter winds.

Yarrow
Tundra Lupine
Arctic Poppy
No clue - it looks like alien pods though
Another Tundra Lupine

A beach plant with tiny electric blue flowers
Me in the middle of an old lava flow
The coolest flower I saw on Saint Paul - it's stem reminded me of an onion...but no clue
Last land until Russia!

Floating fish processors off the coast

The Saint Paul version of a hotel - we rented a duplex

Sunset on the Western coast of the Island -
Note the silouhettes of the two seals (to the right) watching us