Category Archives: Aki

Back to the Cave

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It’s a white day: white skies, white snow following on a lake ice covered with more of the same. I’m back on the pilgrimage trail to the glacial ice cave. But, this time the little dog and her other human are here.

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Aki bounces through the new snow. Her humans use skis on the irregular surface. They are tools, not sporting equipment. Without them, we’d be slogging through the heavy new snow.

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At the glacier, Aki’s humans switch to ice cleats and use a frozen creek for access to the ice cave. On this day of flat light, I don’t expect to find as much beauty as on Friday when strong sunlight muscled its way through the thick glacial ice. But the cave surprises. In the softer light, I find fairy ice fractures, crystal clear against a background of blue.

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RIP

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To get to this pocket grove of old growth spruce, Aki and I had to cross recovering ground. More than 200 years ago, it began rebounding after being crushed by the Lemon Glacier. The Lemon retreated into hanging glacier status but since then someone clearcut most of the old growth that grew in its newly freed earth. Alders and berry brush choked the slashed land until new hemlock and spruce trees managed to rise above the tangled mess and form a second growth forest. The canopy of these thickly packed trees now blocks the light needed for understory plants.

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Perhaps because they rooted in a hard-to-reach stream valley, the collection of spruce that now surround my little dog and I have stood since America purchased this land from Russia. In a tiny glade formed by the big trees, a bald eagle died and its body was devoured by forest recyclers. Aki tentatively sniffs the corpse—-now just bones and feathers, talons and beak, then backs away. The bird lays on its back with wings splayed out, head upside down. I hope it chose this peaceful place to die after a long life.

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A Cold Sheet of Ice

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Aki doesn’t want to be here. She’d rather be back on the trail that splits a thick patch of wild roses. But morning sunlight bouncing off new ice has pulled me onto the grass flats drained by Fish Creek. The little dog followed, mincing her way over thin sheets of ice that started forming from salt and fresh water at high tide.

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Mountains, a glacier, and birds normally grab all my attention during walks on the Fish Creek delta. But with the north wind making the 15 degree temperature chill like a number well below zero, we find the usual suspects—crows, gulls, and eagles—hunkered on the ground or in trees beyond my view. Aki passes within 15 feet of a murder of crows that ignore her. The birds take flight when I inadvertently cross their privacy line but land a few meters down the beach. Is it because she is dressed in a pink insulated number that warms her and challenges my manhood?

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My mind and camera turned toward the grass flats, now covered with a shinny white blanket that has molded itself to the land. In most places, the new ice flattens the underlying grass. But strands with more tensile strength break through the surface. Some force—wind or water current—has caused the ice to mimic the patterns used by the Japanese painter Hokusai to form The Great Wave Off Kanagawa. The tide is still retreating, allowing unsupported ice to slump and shatter. Aki and I are surprised by the sound of the wind scattering some of the shards over the white plain.

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Blowing Snow, Giggling Kids

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We are back on Mendenhall Lake skiing into a brisk breeze. Blowing snow obscures parts of the mountains above the glacier and has filled in the tracks of those who skied here earlier in the day. Aki tears ahead into the northern, In seconds she catches her other human, Minutes later, we all turn around and finish our ski session on the the nearby campground’s protected track. There we find another storm, this one of preschoolers who giggle and move in our direction. Some try to ski. Most drag their equipment toward the cars that brought them. I lift the little dog off the snow before she can dash around the kids, barking her invitation to play. She treats small people like shy puppies.

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Light and Shadow

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Another day of strong light and wind for the rain forest. Aki and I walk a narrow path pounded out of fresh snow by utility workers and dog walkers. The workers use the path to access a power substation. Dog walkers take it to a rocky beach along Stephens’ Passage. We are here for the clarifying light, I mutter but not loud enough for the little dog to hear. She likes to keep it simple.

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The retreating tide has revealed much of the stony beach. Thanks to the deep shadows produced by the clarifying light, I could count every rock on the shore, every barnacle and the waves that boom while striking barrier boulders and reefs. But that would only produce sums.

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Easily resisting the temptation to count, I lead Aki off the beach and back down the path to where another one breaks off into the woods. No one has used this path since the last snow but it’s easy walking.  I head toward the lazy portion of Peterson Creek. In summer it looks like a New England stream with its deep pools and borders of thick hardwoods. But today little sunlight reaches the stream. What does can’t make the opaque surface ice sparkle. River otters could liven things up. We cross many of their snow slides. Each winds down the bank and onto the creek ice. But the slides aren’t slick from recent use. Even the otters look elsewhere for a little excitement.

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Cowee Meadows

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Finding a place where the wind can’t hit me, I pull off a heavy mitten and use the bared hand to frame a photograph of a beaver house reflected in pond ice. “Click.” I swing the camera toward a ridge of saw-toothed mountains rising above the forest at the north end of Cowee Meadows. “Click.” Hand cold, I return the mitten and search at my feet for Aki but find only snow and glare ice. As she has since lunch when our hiking partner gave her some tasty treats, my little dog is hard on his heals.

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They are fifty meters out on the pond ice. Squinting out the glare, I think I see Aki looking back to make sure I am okay.

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I’d forgive the dog if she asked. She’s earned it. For two hours she bounced in and out of our snowshoe tracks or leaned into a wind that has already scoured trail ice clean of snow. She joined our approach to a beach being hammered by forty-knot winds, winds so cold that I could only stand for minute to appreciate Lion and the other peaks surrounding a riling Berner’s Bay. Then she follows us to this beaver pond, her exposed rear chilled by the wind.

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Aki’s Complex Relationship with Wind

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The wind beat Aki and I to the Gastineau Meadows. After morning sunlight reached the ice field but before we left Chicken Ridge, it rushed over the summits of Roberts, Sheep and Juneau mountains and down the creek valleys that separate them. After whipping up the waters of Gastineau Channel, the wind climbed the gentle foothills of the Douglas Island ridge, creating snow devils in the open spaces between the trees. That’s what we found when first starting up the meadows trail.

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Because I see the north wind as a bringer of sunshine, I don’t mind having to lean into it. But the little dog has a much more complex relationship with winter wind. This morning, after receiving the first punch of wind, she barked and bounced down the trail toward it, like she would a potential playmate. When another gust caught her mid-pee, she growled and whirled around. Then she was off chasing a swirl of snow. When we had to trudge in a steady blow she stopped and waited for me to find her a better buddy. But, reaching a section of protected trail, she charged past me, barking at a scene empty of life except for the movement of air.

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Reading the Signs

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Aki runs ahead of me with her hind legs splayed out like both are in casts. It’s the only way she can make progress thanks to the collection of snow chunks, some bigger than golf balls, hanging onto the her fur. She has a similar collection on her chest and front legs. I’ve been struggling to make progress thanks to a buildup of snow on my ski bottoms. Were a pair to draw to, little dog, I think when something crashes through thin ice near the edge of Moose Lake.

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At first I think that new snow sloughing off overhead branches made the noise. Then I spot a beaver, fur darkened by water, munching alder branches on another section of lake ice. These guys should be snug in their dens, waiting for ice out, if not night. But here they are exposed, eating as snowflakes melt on their backs. Is this a sign of the apocalypse, bad timing, or a failure to make a fall-time wood pile big enough to keep them in alder and cottonwood until spring?

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Snow and Sand

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We’re visiting the Treadwell ruins, which today, at low tide, offers Aki a chance to run full out on wet sand and porpoise over paths covered with deep snow. After doing her business and checking the pee mail, the little dog links together a series of leaps that propel her far down the trail. When the rubber band connecting us that she imagines stretches to breaking point, Aki returns, otter-like, to my side.

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While we crossed the Douglas Island Bridge to get here, sunlight broke through the storm clouds to illuminate Gastineau Channel with silver light. But all that is gone by the time we reach the first place that offers a beach view. A new storm pulse has backfilled holes in the marine layer and flattened the light. I mourn the lost opportunity, while my little dog motors flat out across a beach made of pounded gold ore. As if commenting on her happiness, irrational in the midst of the storm, two eagles and a raven scream and croak.

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Lights and Darks

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Aki and I are back in the woods where only a dusting of snow covers the trail. It lies, like powdered sugar on the wintering plants. I am struck with the power of white to bring light, clarity, and interest to the rain forest. Is this how, back even before the big Sitka spruce trees we pass first sprouted in the trunk of deadfalls, an innovative artist discovered the illuminating power of white chalk? Did some charcoal portraitist return from a snowy walk inspired to highlight his subject’s eyes with small squares of light?

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More snow has reached the beach, now exposed by the ebb tide. Here the dark tones of rock and stone demark forms of snowy white. An eagle flies over an almost empty bay, talons extended back, perhaps to balance out the weight of a fish that wriggles in its beak. I can’t make out its white head or tail in the gray light.

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