Yesterday’s high winds, some gusting 65 miles an hour, scoured this meadow of the lovely frost I enjoyed during our last visit. The winds also blasted the trail to a porcelain  smoothness. Even Aki slips and slides on the steeper sections. I expected to be pushed quickly off the meadow by more strong winds but they haven’t appeared. Perhaps they wait for the sun to stop hiding behind a cloud bank the color of dirty fleece.

Nothing in the gray invites us to linger on the meadow so I take a faint trail into a sheltered valley. On rock hard snow we drop into onto a gentle plain dotted with old growth mountain hemlock trees, some a foot across at their base. I would have passed through without much thought if this morning I hadn’t read a chapter of  Lynn Schooler’ “Walking Home.” By counting its growth rings of a 12 inch thick mountain hemlock, Mr. Schooler discovered that the tree was 299 years old. Standing before two similar sized mountain hemlocks, I realize that they started their struggle in this weak, poorly drained soil before europeans discovered Alaska, before Russian started decimating its sea otter population, before England’s Capt. Vancouver had his first violent run-in with Tlingit warriors, when the ice of the Mendenhall Glacier touched the salt water of Gasteneau Channel.  One tree still thrives but its neighbor is bare except for a unkept cap of green still pulling energy from the sun. I wonder which I should honor more—-the damaged older soul, or it’s thriving neighbor? I chose the damaged one for its optimistic green bonnet.