Monthly Archives: December 2019

Remembering Romeo

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Aki is nose down, snuffling her way along a moraine trail. Her paws punch inch-deep holes in the snow as we make our way over ground still rebounding from the time, not so long ago, that it supported the weight of a retreating glacier. 

            In s normal winter the little dog and I would be in danger of slipping on icy or crusted-over snow. But the stuff covering the moraine trail is soft and yielding. We pass the edge of a beaver pond covered with a paper-thin layer of ice. Water still pours over the beaver’s dam where some guy tried to dismantle it. 

            We drop down onto the lakeshore to get our first unfiltered view of the glacier. There is an informal trail packed down by the boots of paws of others. I leave the easy path and punch my way to the ice edge and find only the track of one large canine that moved with purpose toward the Mendenhall River. The animal moved in a steady trot, the kind used by sled dogs and wolves to cover ground. 

The romantic in me wants to attribute the tracks to a wolf. Years ago, Aki and I listened to wolf howling when we skied along the edge of this lake. Later that winter, a black wolf nicknamed “Romeo” followed the little dog and I as we crossed the moraine. But Romeo is now long dead. These might be wolf tracks. No trail of boot prints runs parallel to them. 

Eagle Free Beach

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Aki, why is this eagle sulking? When I look down at the little dog she appears to be sulking too. The eagle has jammed itself into the tangled branches of an alder tree. The dog stands at my few, squinting to keep rain drops out of her eyes. Aki and I have just left the Sheep Creek Delta where only the ducks seem to be enjoying the weather. 

            The beach was empty except for the resident gulls, mallards, and Barrow golden eye ducks. The gulls clustered together on a sand bar. The golden eyes paddled and fed just off shore. But to my surprise, the mallards waddled around the beach where they would be easy targets for eagles. They were today’s canaries in the coal mine, letting me know that there were no eagles around to carry my diminutive poodle away.  

Blink of Light

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It seems more like spring than winter this morning.  A little sunshine can do that even when the temperature hovers above freezing. Snow still covers the trailhead parking lot but inside the forest, the trail is bare. So are my hands. I don’t bother to pull on my mittens. 

            A songbird flits into a spruce tree from the trail before we reach the beaver pond. It’s too dark in the forest to make out the bird’s markings but it has a thrush’s profile. It flies away without breaking the silence with song. 

            Snow frosts the top of the beaver’s dam and dulls the reflection of the sun on the pond ice. The image of the sun, itself, is softened by a gauze of thickening clouds. Soon we will return to the gray. Aki needs no encouragement to quicken our pace so we can reach the beach while the sun is still lighting up the Chilkat Mountains on the west side of Lynn Canal.

            We make it to the beach before the sun fades. The clouds have almost blocked it off. What sun light escapes marks the close-in clouds and hillsides with sunset purples and pinks. But it still manages to make the snow-covered flanks of the Chilkats painfully white. 

Closeting Snow

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With the snow falling in dime-sized flakes, Aki and I head over to Basin Road. After climbing to the top of Gold Street and taking a moment to look down Gastineau Channel to Taku Inlet, we reach the road. Even though it is already mid-morning, the Christmas lights decorating a low of Craftsman houses pop in the gloam. As she often does here, Aki tries to convince me to turn around. She must smell danger or at least the potential for boredom. It takes little to get her to follow me. She won’t try to reverse us again. But she will hang back until we reach the turnaround point for this morning’s walk. 

            We will see things on the walk but nothing will amaze. We’ll step over tracks recently left by an ambling porcupine and meet three dogs. Two will be friendly. The third dog will trot by Aki, throwing her a look of distain. The snow will continue to fall but we will still be able to see the surrounding mountains. The falling snow will whiten the ground and narrow our view, making it almost impossible to think about the angry parts of the world. 

Raven Vandels

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A mess awaited me when I step outside this morning. Ripped paper packaging covered the front porch. A trail of it led to a box that contained a coffee pot that I had ordered. Through holes in the box I could see that the coffee pot was still intact. This was the work of a raven. Only one of their powerful beaks could make such holes. 

            Our neighborhood ravens mess with more delivered packages than a heroin addict. If I don’t grab a package off the porch as soon as the mailman places it there, it is likely to end up with raven beak holes. Last year I chased two ravens away from a package just delivered to our neighbor. It contained homemade fudge. I was too late to save another box containing Sees Candy. When I arrived nothing remained of the chocolates but the little brown paper wrappers they originally sat in. While trying figure out why a raven would attack a package that didn’t contain any food, just my coffee pot package, I took Aki on a walk to the Juneau waterfront. We passed a raven strolling down the sidewalk like it owned it. 

Bad Timing

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Sorry little dog. I really misjudged the tide. Aki is not impressed with my apology. But then, she is not impressed by our predicament. We are caught on the downriver side of a rocky point now poking out into the Mendenhall River. The path around the outcropping was open when we walked around it a half-an-hour ago. I figured we would have enough time to slip down to a big sand bar downriver and be back before the tide flooded over our path home. But there were just many distractions to slow us down.

            There were the two seals riding the flood tide upriver, eye balling us as they floated by. I had to stop and muse about some pink clam shells that decorated the sand bar. Aki needed extra time checking out a scent she found in the beach border grass. Then there were the noisy Canada geese. They stirred and fussed on a shrinking sand island. I burned up time waiting for the tide to force them into flight. When it did, the geese flew away rather than toward us. Now the little dog and I have no choice but to scramble up a little ravine that bottoms out on the shrinking beach on which we stand. Like the geese, we will soon have no choice but to rise above the tide.

            The ravine would have been impassible last summer when the thorny leaves of devil’s club plants blocked the path. With a little care I am able to slip between the bare devil’s club stalks and climb up to a short, but steep section of the river bluff. After lifting Aki over the little cliff, I start to climb a series of exposed spruce roots to the top. Halfway up, the geese fly over our now drowned beach honking hysterically. Disappointed by not being able to photograph their passage, I follow Aki back to the car. 

Working Birds

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Aki is sharing the trail with a sled dog mix from a nearby village. They don’t interact much unless one of their humans offers a dog treat. We are walking down a crescent-shaped gravel beach on a dry if gray day. Gulls watch the dogs pass with “I couldn’t care less expressions. This is a typical gull reaction to Aki. But I am surprised to see that the rambunctious bigger dog merits the same casual treatment. 

            A large raft of goldeneye ducks turns their backs to the dogs and slowly works their way offshore. Nothing panics them to flight until an eagle flies over them. The big bird is a half a kilometer up where nothing can blocks the mountain wind. With quick wing adjustments it hovers over the goldeneyes for thirty seconds and then moves up the bay.

            Just off of Point Louisa, a shrimp boat chugs up Lynn Canal. When it returns to port, its captain will sell his catch from the boat’s deck. He does a good business. People in this rainforest town are comfortable with buying seafood from the captain that caught it. They don’t need to have their shrimp wrapped in Styrofoam and plastic wrap.

            Following the dogs, we humans walk through an old growth forest to Point Louisa. Near the point, a bald eagle glides from a nearby spruce roost, brakes in mid-air by throwing back its wings, and drifts toward the water. It snatches a small fish with its talons and lifts skyward. A jealous gull chases the eagle back to its roost.   

Jumpy Birds

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    I almost turned around in the trailhead parking lot when I saw the a four-wheel drive pickup—the preferred rig of duck hunters. Just one gunshot from the truck’s owner could panic Aki into hiding. But the tide had already flooded over the wetlands, flushing ducks and geese out onto the salt water. Even if the truck driver were hunting, he’d have nothing to shoot at. I coxed the little dog out of the car and headed toward the Fish Creek Pond.

    A diminutive bufflehead hen paddled near the edge of the pond, watched by a roosting bald eagle. More frightened of the little dog and I, the duck moved to the pond’s center. The dog yard sound of panicked Canada geese drew my attention away from the eagle and its prey. 

     We found the geese, a contingent of thirty, formed up on Fritz Cove. A large raft of mallards floated near the geese. I doubt if the geese even saw the poodle-mix or I. We were at least a half-a-kilometer away when something, an eagle or seal, stirred them to flight. The geese flew low over the cove water in a long line. They soon passed the airborne raft of mallards, that had gotten a head start on the geese.       

    The last we saw of the fleeing birds they were passing behind the island at the mouth of Fish Creek. I thought we might sight them when we reached the mouth. But  when we arrived there, nothing stirred the waters of the creek or Gastineau Channel into which the creek flowed. We couldn’t search long for birds. The little dog and I had to hurry to make it around the tip of the island before the rising tide flooded over the trail. 

Finally Getting Her Way

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     Aki, why do you want to stay in the woods? It’s not a fair question to ask the little dog. The woods and the campground road just beyond them are rich with dog smells. She can almost make out the scent left by one of her dog buddies, maybe Cedar. Aki doesn’t care if the lakeshore trail offers wonderful, if misty, mountain views. Besides, it has started to rain. The woods will provide her some shelter from the wet. 

      The poodle-mix might also be deterred by the crunch of ice that follows each of my steps along the snow-covered shore. A two-inch thick sheet of ice is buried beneath snow. An irregular surface of beach rocks stretch beneath the ice. I fracture the ice with every step. 

         I crunch my way around and between a set of small islands. Aki has planted herself at the forest edge. Only when I disappear around a point of land does the little dog trot after me. We repeat this pattern all the way to the place where the Mendenhall River leaves the lake. Then we re-entered the forest and walk on an icy road through the campground and back to the car. Now a happy Aki is free to catalogue the passage of other dogs that recently left their mark on the snow.    

Passive Man

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Beavers own this forest. Their castle is tucked safely away under a pond-sized tree. Aki and I are walking along the base of their major dam. The beavers have anchored the walls of it to a curving line of 100-year-old spruce trees that grew out of another beaver dam. Off and on, beavers have held this forest for more than a century. The little dog would have had to swim along the base of the dam if not for some trail work done last spring. Thanks to loads of gravel and bridges fashioned from peeled and split spruce trunks we can keep our feet dry. But during the last dumping of rain, even the new trail flooded. 

          Every night the beavers try to plug leaks in their dam with severed alder limbs and blue berry twigs. Water still pours over their works and makes its way down a small stream to another dam, this one five feet high. Downstream from that another dam backs water up and over the trail we will use to return to the car. 

           We round the pond and walk over icy trails to the beach where we surprise five bufflehead ducks. Rather than panicking into flight the little white-headed guys paddle a few meters further off shore and resume fishing. Further out, a young Pacific loon shoots onto the surface and quickly dives back under the water. A powerful underwater swimmer, the loon could be behind Shaman Island before it returns to the surface. 

           I try to remember when I became so passive—a walking man content just to see. Years ago, I hunted ducks and would have been tempted to destroy beaver dams that flooded beloved trails. Now I carry a camera and wear waterproof boots.