Cordova in the Fall

It’s easy to start feeling blue in autumn, especially in a place like Cordova, where you can gain 10 inches of rain and lose 5 minutes of daylight in a day. But there is still so much beauty to see, bounty to harvest and sometimes even some sunshine! Happy Fall, everyone!

Nagoon berries ripe for the picking and plentiful. Patches like this are highly coveted and usually pretty hard to find, but this was a good berry year.

Termination dust on the mountain tops as we drive out to collect firewood

Have you met our chickens yet? We named them all after characters from the show Arrested Development, but luckily we can’t tell them apart now. It’d be pretty hard to butcher them if we could…

Fungus Festival!

Every fall in Cordova, when the always-too-short summer winds down and all the berries have been picked, there is still a secret treasure covering the forest floors… mushrooms!

And if there’s one thing Cordovans know how to do, it is to feast on and celebrate the bounty of goodness this land provides!  Enter…  Cordova Fungus Festival!

This year, the festivities commence Sept. 7th – 9th and feature a variety of events.

Starting on Friday, 9/7/12, go gather your fungus-grabbing fingers off and then come in any time for the all-day Fungus ID Tables with:

• Steve Trudell (PNW “Fungus Master” and co-author of the Mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest.)
• Else Vellinga (Mycological researcher)
• Kate Mohatt (Local Forest Service Mycologist)
• Then, later that night, join in on the Evening Program at the USFS Courtroom, where (among others) award-winning nature photographer and writer Amy Gulick talks about ‘Salmon in the Trees: Life in AK Tongass Rain Forest’