This trail drops down a series of alpine muskeg meadows to tree line. Here in the first meadow, plants are just shaking off winter.  These low growing blue berry bushes, which produce the sweetest fruit haven’t flowered while their Bog Rosemary neighbors only show tight magenta fists of buds.

Spring progresses as we drop even a few meters in elevation and find the rosemary in full bloom in the second meadow. A isolated pocket of shooting stars,     flowers tilted demurely down are a pleasant find.  Closed buds of Labrador Tea blossoms stand nearby. In the next meadow burst flowers of this plant lay open to the sun.

These meadows could cure the homesickness of visitors from most northern lands with their blueberry berry blossoms, arctic cotton stands, and clumps of heather. Here blooms our Cloud Berry blooms, a plant called the Salmon Berry by Yupik Eskimos and Hjortron by the Swedes. There grows Mountain Cranberriy so like the Scandinavian Lingonberry.

Dropping through another meadow, this one comfortably settled into summer, we reach tree line and enter an old growth forest drained by Fish Creek.  Only three stirring Salmon Berry blossoms break the brown and green monopoly of these woods

Aki plays grab tail with a passing Labrador then we are alone on the Treadwell Ditch Trail. Miners built the ditch in 1889 to carry water to the raceways of the stamp mill near the present town of Douglas.  Decaying stumps of once giant spruce trees show give evidence of where they found wood to line the ditch.  You can almost make out the notches they cut for the spring boards they stood on to work their long whip saws and hear the rhythmic ripping sound made by its cross cut blade biting through several centuries of wood.