About a week before my daughter graduates from her Lower 48 college Aki and I hike the East Glacier Trail. While Aki, a poodle mix roams ahead I think about how I approached life at my child’s current age. Things like movies had a great influence over me. There was that time I watched Lost Horizon on the family’s black and white TV.  (Too young to catch it on the silver screen). That beautiful film seemed to lay out all of life answers and provide a great stage for the lovely Jane Wyatt and dashing Ronald Coleman.  I dreamed of dating Ms. Wyatt and vowed to grow a pencil thin mustache like Mr. Coleman. Neither happened but I still remember the plot.

Mr. Coleman plays a talented diplomat who is needed in London to end the threat of war. He is abducted and taken to Shangri-La, a magical  valley high in the Himalayan Mountains where the dying high lama asks him to take over his responsibilities.  The movie asks the audience to examine what is truly important and to consider adopting a different set of values.

I think of Lost Horizons today because the East Glacier Trail takes you to a Southeast Alaska version of Shangri-La. First you travel on the Trail of Time, passing markers commemorating the glacier’s edge in 1916 and 1920, far from its current face. Then you climb, sometimes negotiating, Ronald Coleman like, granite cliffs with the help of wire cable hand lines.   You also pass miniature moss framed waterfalls that cascade over granite grooved by the receding glacier. One is terraced like the orange orchards of Kishu Island.

A mile or so in the trail winds through moss covered boulders scattered like they fell from a giant’s pocket. These erratics form the doorway to a flat plain drained by a clearwater stream. The noise of town and the airport that were constant companions on the climb up the hill are gone, replaced by the sound of moving water and bird song,

I stop next to a chickadee just a foot from the trail and enjoy a rare opportunity to study one of these tiny earth tone masterpieces. He cocks his head and I find myself imitating the gesture. “Peace to your brother,” I say before moving off. In too short a time we approach the foot of a yellow cedar stairway that takes you 221 steps to the summit.  This too echos Shangri-La, with its grand staircase to the monastery where Mr. Coleman meets the high lama.

We climb the 221 steps but find no fount of wisdom at the top, just two complaining ravens amid relics of an old mining operation that emerge here and there from the moss covered ground.  I think again about my daughter and how we climbed these same 221 steps when she a child while she and a friend of the family sang “Make new friends, but keep the old, one is silver and the other gold.”   I can almost hear the echo of their refrain in the rushing of nearby Nugget Creek.

Stopping to photograph the glacier on the way down I find myself standing on a large pile of spruce needles, a sign of insect damage that we didn’t see before the current series of warm winters. The glacier also reflects the warming trend, having retreated quite a ways from where it stood when my child sang it her song of friendship.

We find one more echo of childhood down the trail when the sound of children playing  sends Aki scurrying to my feet. I expect two kids to plummet past us on bicycles. When they don’t, I listen again and realize that we are hearing the sound of bear cubs playing. Fortunately they are behind us so we press on to the car.