Over morning coffee Aki and I watch winter and spring’s seasonal war for Chicken Ridge. A north wind blew down Seventh Street all night, demoralizing artillery to soften us up for this morning’s heavy snowfall. Enjoying what each season has to offer I don’t have a dog in the fight. My sculptor’s heart loves the way the storm outlines the strong lines of naked ash limbs and mixes whites with spruce’s somber greens. The gardner worries whether our lilacs and the apple tree will ever flower.

Aki hates the north wind but joyfully exploits the rest of what weather has on offer.  She strains at the leash as we head up Seventh Street for the Perseverance Trail.  A neighbor with dog joins up for a couple of blocks, sharing a recent avalanche warning, agreeing to call for help if we don’t return on time. We both know that avalanche run outs can cover part of my intended trail this time of year. It’s early in the day for avalanches and it takes less than a minute to cross the troubled spot so I don’t change plans.

The tracks of only one car and one person mark the snow covering Basin Road. We use it to pass a string of craftsman houses clinging to the hill side of Mr. Maria and gain the entrance to the old wooden trestle bridge.  There we meet the homeless man, smoking his hand rolled cigarette cradled in a shaky left hand. He greets Aki with a kind word but only shows me distain–quickly pulling on his street armor while walking between dog and man.

We follow the homeless man’s solitary track across the bridge and up the old mining road toward Perseverance Basin. This evidence of his purposeful stride reassures me as we approach the avalanche chute as does the low hum of drumming grouse. An animal sound. something a coyote might make while laughing rattled my confidence. This portent of disaster only sounds when we walk. It stops when we do. Is the coyote that hunts this canyon sending a warning or just indulging himself at our considerable expense? Assuming it no more than a tease I join Aki as she follows the homeless man’s tracks on approach to the avalanche chute.  There, between battered trees we see a clear trail, find the  mountain above silent as we cross the safety.

Shortly after the snow stops and its thinning delivery clouds let in weak sunlight. The melt begins immediately, creating local rain storms under each snow burdened tree that soak dog and man but not the birds, robin and thrush, now singing spring’s victory song.

This still cold morning Fish Creek drains a forest of light. Aki and I walk up stream past where the salmon spawn in August, under eagle roosts, beyond where I watched a bear rush deep into the woods while the little dog sniffed at its abandoned supper.   It is too early in the season for salmon or even to expect this strong light to warm the skin. There is a bear and at least one deer around. The deer left tracks across a gravel bar near where a bear cropped off the tops of emerging skunk cabbage plants.

Lost in shadow, the wounded skunk cabbage offer little beauty but everything touched by light has it in abundance. A wrist thick stick, too far gone with rot to have bark, glows like polished alabaster but its the green things, moss and hemlock needles, that have me raising the camera again and again. It’s strange but while all this backlit beauty excites it doesn’t warm my hands or face. I am not used to being so underdressed in an art museum, even one as transient as the Fish Creek forest in April. In hours all will be in shadow. Tomorrow it will rain to enrich the greens, soften the browns, and ramp up the volume of the awaking stream.

Walking along the final kilometer of the Mendenhall River Aki and I find ourselves uninvited guests at a ballet.  It starts with bored eagles sunning themselves in the lee side of beach side spruce. An immature one looks down at Aki with distain, not hungary interest—surprising at the end of the winter famine when cats and small dogs are hunted for their meat.  The little poodle mix doesn’t buy it and walks closely at my heel when we pass under the eagle’s tree.

Ducks, not yet flushed by our presence or the incoming tide sleep tucked up against the beach. They don’t wake even when the first act opens across the river with the shadows of passing eagles setting a huge flock of gulls, all painfully white in the morning light, to flight. They quickly drop to sand bar and sea for better access to the concentration of bait fish (herring or sand lances?) that have drawn them to this exposed place.

The real show takes place later when a conference of bald eagles lift off from a large sand bar and begin an ariel dance with steps too complicated to follow. None dives to snatch food from the sea; each action a reaction to another dancer. Are they jockeying for good fishing spots for when the income tide delivers the next pulse of fish, showing off for the girls,or simply dancing to welcome in Spring?