Saturday we went to the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. I thought they could take us on a "tour" of the area and we might actually see some local wildlife, but NO. Dumb! There's just a visitor's center and some "reserve land". Like Alaska needs that! Honestly. The biggest city (anchorage) isn't even 300,000! Pretty sure there's enough land for those wild guys.
Anyway, we actually went for their Annual Berry Fun Day. I was hoping we'd get to pick some wild blueberries or something, but instead they showed us local berries and which are eatable. Good information, and actually quite fun. Some of the berries we have here are blueberries, trailing raspberries, elderberries (poisonous when raw), high-bush (bright red) and low-bush (deep red) cranberries, red currants, wild rose hips, dwarf dogwood (very abundant), crowberries (very dark purple), watermelon berry (grows dangling underneath the leaves), cloudberries (look kinda like under developed raspberries), Timberberry (bright orange, looks like a pumpkin, edible, but distastful), Devil's club (grow in bunches, also poisonous).
We have some wild rose bushes and red currants in our yard, along with dogwood and low-bush cranberries in our forest and along the off-road path. It's cool to know!I took a few pictures.
I think this is a red currant. I don't recall. It looks very close to the high-bush cranberry.
Elderberries. Grow in bunches. Bears love them. Easy eating!
Azilyn and me trying to get out of the rain under the leaves of a Devil's club.
Ok, well, I thought there were more pictures, but I cant find them.
I do have some interesting mushroom pictures though. It rains here so much that they just spring up at random, and there are sooo many different ones! It's cool. In our yard alone, there are probably 20 varieties! I know most are not edible, even though we have some that look just like portabella. We do have one called a puffball that is edible! We even have some of those in our yard (I think). I dont think I'll try it though. They were too small to get a good picture of but, here are a few of the most interesting ones from our yard and the hike at the Refuge.
This one had been munched on by the bugs, but it was a beautiful red-orange.
Here is another view of the underside. They actually grow convex, rather than the normal cap formation.
This one is a red-purple. So cool. There is a turquoise colored one in our yard too, but my camera wouldnt capture the color.
This one is actually quite large, and another inverted-type.
Here is another view. I couldnt get a great picture.
Nickname is Mario's mushroom.
At first I thought this was bear scat, but it's actually a black mushroom!
This one grows this way. It wasn't smashed.
