Haeckel Hill and More: Wherein I Reveal A Pet Peeve

This afternoon, and friend and I drove up to the top of Haeckel Hill to see what we could see. She has lived here for a long time, but had never been there. This is only part of what we saw--the landscape to the north. The smoke is obscuring the view of the river valley, so we could only barely make out Lake Laberge, but if the air is clear you can see it as a massive blue body near the middle top of this photo.

Every direction you turn from this vantage point, you can see an expanse of valley. To the east you see the river and the sewage lagoons, and to the southeast Schwatka Lake, and beyond that Marsh Lake; to the southwest there's Jackson Lake, and then Fish Lake nestled in between the mountain peaks. We're up above the tree line, and all the mountain shrubbery is in it's full fall colors.

I didn't tell my friend about the cougar reportedly seen up there twice this summer until we were already on our way home. From The Whitehorse Star:

It appears a cougar might be calling Haeckel Hill home.

Two sightings of a cougar around Yukon Energy's wind turbines have been reported to the territorial Department of Environment

The first came on July 15, with the latest reported last Monday by a father walking in the area with his son.

"It was a pretty good sighting," conservation officer Nick Veres said in an interview this morning about the July report.

The adult cougar was reported to be on rocks below the local hill's fire tower.

Secretly, I was hoping we'd spot it, and I'd be able to capture it on camera and be the first with photographic proof of this most elusive of Yukon animals:

While there have been numerous reports of cougar sightings as far back as the 1940s, there have been few substantiated cases, Veres said.

The most substantiated case showing that cougars do live in the Yukon came in 2000 when a dead cougar was found in an abandoned car in Watson Lake.

But while we saw many interesting things, a cougar was not among them.

Haeckle Hill is where Yukon Energy's big wind turbines seen above town stand, and it's fun to see them up close, too. And, speaking of Yukon Energy and wild creatures, the final salmon report is in. From CBC North:

It's been a good year for salmon on the upper Yukon River.

But fisheries managers are still not seeing enough wild fish coming through the Whitehorse fishway.

The count for the season is 1,982 chinook salmon using the fish ladder to bypass the Whitehorse dam, but wild salmon only make up 25 per cent of the returns.

If you're clueless as to what all this migrating salmon and fish ladder stuff is about, I explained it in this post. Or you can just watch the video linked on this page.

Now that you've made it all the way through this, I'll reveal my pet peeve: I hate one sentence paragraphs. Well, not all one sentence paragraphs, but whole newspaper articles and such made up of only one sentence paragraphs drive me nuts. Like the two articles--the one from The Whitehorse Star and the other from CBC North--that I linked to in this post. Where's the flow in an article made up of 20 separate one sentence paragraphs? It seems very elementary schoolish, although even fifth graders know how to form paragraphs, don't they?