With wind and rain in the forecast we head out to the sheltered trails of North Douglas Island. The darkness promised by a walk through October woods is the price we are willing to pay for its shelter and a brief glimpse of its storm pounded beach. When the clouds lift to reveal new snow halfway down the island’s mountains I change the plan and head to the alpine thankful that Juneau’s tight topography offers mountain and sea trails within 30 minutes of Chicken Ridge.

I hope to track the first snow of the year but the rain has driven it off the meadow and into a retreat up the bordering mountain ridges.  No rainbow arcs over the meadows and forest this time but we still find color.  A stiff  mountain wind presses down the now golden grass to reveal patches of moss the color of Claret. Three round bog cranberries lay on the moss, still tethered to their tiny green vines. You cannot see the vines until close enough to pluck the berries. I harvest two and enjoy the tartness released with the first bite. Aki leaves the third berry for birds. She prefers the sweeter low bush blueberries. Sadly none remain.

Other tiny plants display fall reds and oranges but except for a few high bush blueberry bushes sheltering along the tree line, the larger deciduous plants stand bare. The exposed blue berry brush, as if chilled by the storm, have darkened to a rich red. Last week we found one or two bog rosemary plants in bloom.  Now their perfect magenta flowers have faded to a dead brown as if mummified by the cold.

Aki doesn’t share today’s agenda with me just continues scanning ahead for smells, She stops to show impatience when I take too long over the pond reflections or some other foolishness. One time she starts to follow a faint trail onto the meadow but stops a few feet in as if by a wall. She pees often to mark our passage. When I stop to make water she dashes to my side to stand guard. Touching, if a little odd.

We only receive one hour of light this weekend and spend it watching a rainbow die. Sadly, Aki the shortsighted can’t see the arcing band of color but she is still enriched by the hike through these mountain meadows. She is all nose to ground for smells.

As residents of the rain forest, we are forced by circumstance to appreciate the subtle beauty of grey.  We also thrill by unexpected sunshine appearing after a rain shower. Each simple gathering of dead meadow grass merits preservation in a digital format.  Today, even before the rainbow’s birth, sunlight flooded the meadows beneath dark low hanging fragmented clouds.  Columns of spruce trees marching up the mountains bridged the sunny meadow with the cloud obscured mountain ridges.

When I am already snap happy from this mixture of lights and darks, the rainbow appears as a faint swipe of color over the meadow. Even in infancy it challenges me like the richest item on a dessert cart. I turn away from it and walk into a light flurry of superfine snow. Each tiny square flake reflects a prism of light and I wonder if I am walking through another rainbow. The flakes must evaporate before hitting me.  I can’t feel them on my skin and they don’t moisten my black rain gear.

When Aki barks at something behind me I turn and see the rainbow now a strong arc of core colors stacked on top of each other. For the next twenty minutes, as it pulses weak and strong, I try to capture it with the camera first as a streak of color fired from a forest cannon. Later, when the trail moves out of the woods and onto a meadow, only the right rainbow’s half appears arcing down from the clouds. It dies on the meadow, pulsing strong than weak then strong again until fading to nothing.

The rainbow was not a live thing, just a mixture of moisture and fickled mountain light.  You don’t morn a rainbow, just the departure of it’s beauty.

We find the back door unlocked at Eagle Beach on this wet wednesday. A minus tide has left the river’s secrets exposed. We feel like fans with a back stage pass to a fancy theatre—-one with lots of expensive devices to suspend the audience’s belief.  One other person could share it with us but she is present only to her cell phone.

From the back she looks like a bird watcher using binoculars. Then I hear her, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, no not yet.” Cell phone coverage is spotty this far out the road.  She comes here for bars not beauty. If she looked she’d see a mixed sand and gravel bar reaching at least a half a mile into Lynn Canal. The now indistinct Chilkat Mountains, tucked under clouds, line the canal’s far bank. She wouldn’t miss any animal action. We only find two nervous gulls who fly before we can get within 300 meters.

The bar testifies to the carrying strength of water and the power of tide driven current. A wide barrier of supersaturated glacier silt forms an unpleasant border for the bar. Once across, shoes wet, happy not to have to free boots and paws from the sucking sand we gain firmer ground formed of heavier stuff. Between islands of golden beach grass run shallow channels where the the hammering of the out going tide carved in sharp sided ridges like those on a washboard road. Closer to the main channel we reach a bar made of round river rocks—-pebbles really—that roll under Aki’s paws as she walks.

I know the river is a mindless engineering model but it often acts as if guided by wisdom. When strong with storm water it gathers all within reach and carries it as far as the sea. It quickly drops what it can no longer carry when the sun shines or a big flood tide robs it of power. It seems to know that the tide always ebbs and other storms will come and what it has dropped eventually will ride again in its current.

Moving up river we pass a small raft of sleeping Bufflehead ducks. They float freely in the current, bills  tucked into back feathers. In minutes they pass an eagle facing away from the river while sitting on an upturned stump.   Will we see drama? We don’t.

A little further upriver another eagle sits alone high in a tall spruce skeleton. We have seen him there on every visit since mid-summer.  Today he peers through the fog forming on the river’s surface as if for food. Focusing on him I don’t notice a raft of red breasted mergansers floating by. One of my steps sends them into panicked flight.  These are local boys, probably jumpy from being so close to the eagle.  The sleeping Buffleheads, who are just passing through, must have floated by the watchful upriver eagle.  Was it exhaustion or lack of local knowledge that left them so oblivious to danger?  I just know they are lucky.

I started this journal a year ago with a description of the Fish Creek Trail. Today Aki and I are back. It rained hard last night and will again later today. We enjoy some dry weather in between, pleasantly surprised when a little sunshine muscles through the marine layer. It hits the grassland bordering the fish creek pond where we had been enjoying the subtle play of yellowing cotton wood leaves against the deep green spruce woods. The sunshine drives away subtlety, enriching fall colored trees and grasses and energizing the sacks of rain still clinging to blade and leaf.

The color had faded by last October 9th. The salmon and eagles and bears had all left. It was a land going to rest. Today summer green holds on if a little faded, bug eaten with wounds of brown. This year’s summer is a strong willed dowager resisting the inevitable move to a nursing home. Berry brush and willows retrain their summer foliage. Even the ferns hold on to some of summer.

A mile in we catch a whiff of fish carrion—what bears smell like at the end of salmon season. I’m relieved to find Aki taking timid steps at my heals and continue on. Minutes later the smell returns even though recent storms have washed away all the dead salmon. I slip her leash on and we walk with cautious eyes to the turn around point.  I sing and talk to Aki in a loud voice who appears to raise an eyebrow in critical response. An eagle complains from a close tree so there must be some salvageable salmon still on the spawning ground.  The smell returns. Aki, suddenly appreciative of my wisdom moves back behind me for the return trip. She stays there until we cross a small stream — ther Rubicon. Aki struts from there to the car.