After this morning’s walk up Perseverance Trail, I search the Cotman color chart for name the yellow-green of back-lit cottonwood leaves and come up with “Sap Green.” The name fits since rising sap feeds them.

Aki and I saw a wall of sap green leaves when we reached the Basin Road trestle bridge after slowing progressing past a line of craftsmen houses built for miners 80 years ago. The little dog had to check each urinary message and great all the dogs being walked by owners about to head off to work.

The bridge was in shadow but on the flank of Mt. Juneau the great cottonwoods of the Gold Creek valley were enriched by early morning light. The rising sun was already darkening the leaves. With camera in hand, I walked across the bridge in quiet mode as if beauty were a deer about to bolt.

Ravens and gulls are the salt and pepper for the Juneau waterfront. Maybe worn out from dealing with the first two jumbo cruise ships of the year that docked here yesterday, members of the raven cabal have draped themselves on the dock rails and the library roof. The gulls bob like newly husked rice on the channel waters. Prevented by the anti-terrorist fencing from giving the ravens comfortable personal space, we walk with a few feet of a small batch. Most keep their wings clamped tight to their bodies but one, with eyes squeezed shut, lets the breeze plays with his purple-black feathers. “Rock on dude.”

Aki runs wide circles around me in the troll woods as I walk down a little used trail in the troll woods. I feel like General Robert E. Lee must have felt with J.E.B. Stuart’s cavalry reconnoitering his flank near Gettysburg. The quirky Stuart injected much uncertainty into Lee’s Pennsylvania campaign. My little dog, ear flaps bouncing with every step, charges across moraine covered with thick, electric green moss, leaps over a beaver felled tree and dives under a tangle of blueberry brush. I am happy for her evident joy but also worried about her possible run in with a porcupine or bear. I just exchanged bear sighting stories with another dog walker who warned of the presence of a sow with three cubs. Should I even be here, so deep in a forest on a trail that dips through country that blocks my view beyond 10 or 20 feet? As usual, I only have this kind of conversation with myself when we are halfway through a place we probably shouldn’t have entered.

It is hard not to think of church this morning. In every rivulet on the meadow, backlit skunk cabbage flowers glow like yellow sanctuary lights. Exploding leaf pods of cottonwoods fill the air with balsam incense. Small ponds capture stain glass images of the Mt. Roberts’ ridge framed by snarled bull pines. There is even a choir lead by robin soloists backed by thrushes and wrens.