10-11 August 2016.
I spent today looking for flowers and driving back to Anchorage. I found a couple more populations, and stopped for a large pizza on a restaurant by the road. It tasted delicious! On the way I stopped in the Kenai River, and in some smaller tributaries. The creeks were full with sockeye salmon. In those places of easy access, fishermen were having a field day. I wondered if intense fishing competes with wildlife that relies in the salmon runs. The fishing of salmon in Alaska I supposed to be regulated, but I suspect the fishing quotas are seldom enforced. There are too many fishermen and too few park rangers.
Now I am at the airport, waiting for my last connection back to Scotland. I am excited to go back to my family, and can’t wait to see my wife and two-year old after three weeks away.
The trip has been amazing. I learned lots, met great people, and saw monkeyflowers in their natural habitat for the first time. Alaska has captured my imagination once again. And the Aleutians have been as exciting as I expected and more. Now the second part of the project can begin. Using thousands of genetic markers we will attempt the first world-wide analysis of monkeyflowers. The samples we collected in the Aleutians and the rest of Alaska will be studied alongside with other samples from western North America, Europe, the Faroes and New Zealand. We hope our study will help understanding how species adapt to new environments, and throw some light into the origins of a little yellow-flowered plant that was collected more than 200 years ago in a Russian expedition to Alaska.
