Today it’s back to familiar ground that fills the space between Eagle River and the sea. The trail takes us up river through old growth spruce forest before breaking left toward a beautiful muskeg meadow. There we must walk on a recently laid boardwalk which the marsh plants are already trying to colonize. But first the forest, now jammed with flowering berry plants and hungry mosquitos.

I want to linger by the berry bushes in bloom — Salmon, elder, high bush cranberry, and currant — but the bugs move us on, their stings like wounds from  a riot policeman’s baton. Aki is trotting on with her entourage of mosquitos when I stop to investigate what drew a coven of ravens to this spot. They skulked away on our approach and reassemble in a nearby tree to heap verbal abuse on we the innocent. The birds must be on to something good but the bugs won’t leave time to investigate. In my haste to escape I almost step in fresh bear scat. Maybe the ravens were waiting for him to finish up a meal so they can enjoy the scraps .

Breaking from the forest we find tall blue lupine and stunted spruce forming the border of the muskeg meadow. I am taken with the field of arctic cotton that completes with shooting stars and chocolate lilies for space on the boggy ground. The cotton look like a kindergarden art project — cotton balls glued on lengths of green wire.

Three hundred meters further we cross Glacier Highway and reach a rich tidelands meadow running to the sea. Here the flowers, fertilized by generations of spawned out salmon form great swaths of magenta, blue, yellow and chocolate brown. Most of the resident Canada Geese flock is hunkered down across the river complaining about the weather.   A quiet five of their brethren studiously feed on a small strip of land soon to be reclaimed by the rising tide.

A high tide can make the next portion of trail impassable so we hurry on and return to the forest with its mosquitos, then the car.