On this rare sunny Juneau day Aki and I walk on the dark side of Douglas Island. We came here for the shelter it provides from the Taku winds now hammering Douglas Town and Southern Gasteneau Channel. The picture above, for which I gave up feeling temporarily in my right hand, provides testament to the power of wind.  What looks like fog patches hanging on the mountain sides are actually plumes of snow being blown far over the channel. The winds. borne in the Yukon are strengthened by passage over glaciers.

Even without the wind this creek side trail offers a cold passage, which seems to energize Aki.  She dashes ahead 20 or 30 feet, snatches a sniff and dashes back to me.  The old growth canopy kept out most of yesterday’s snow fall so the walk is dominated by the green, brown, and gray colors of a resting forest and the deep brown of the creek.  Snow capping half submerged stream rocks and downed tree snags bring some brightness. Otherwise we have to look to the tree tops for even a hint of sun. There blue mixed with the colors of sunrise bleed through the trees. I find a perfect reflection of this in the stream but is is gone before I can record it with the camera.

Near our turn around point we pass through an area transformed when the stream jumped its banks to cut new channels through a small plane of old growth hemlock trees. This must have gladdened the local bears who grew fat last summer pulling salmon from the new narrow channels. The flood erosion damages the trees and many of the younger ones, maybe 5 to 8 inches across, later fell in windstorms. One lays across a giant downed ancestor now serving as a nursery log.  The wind victim slowly dies as tiny new hemlocks compete to see which one will fill the space it left by falling.  Only a human would find sadness in this.

Hoping to catch some sun we follow the stream out of the woods to it’s mouth. We pass a pond  now covered with a layer of thin, milky ice. Even here all is gray except for a rose and pearl glow infusing sheets of bending shore ice.