Aki looks worried as we move off shore. We are canoeing on Mendenhall Lake. Rain stops as we approached the glacier. The sun, breaking through a sucker hole about a hand’s width above the Mt. McGinnis shoulder, sends shafts of light on Mendenhall Lake and its new ice bergs. We have never seen so much ice on the lake. Using a canoe we weave thorough the bergs to get near enough to the glacier to see the new scars left by calving ice bergs. Each is a electric blue bruise with the darkest shades showing where deep cracks enter the glacier’s face.

The sound of arctic terns is constant. Some of the ice bergs we pass have a single  tern scout on them but most of the flock fly air cover over the wide sand islands where they nest.  One tern hovers a few feet over us making clicking sounds rather than their usual scary screech.

With no wind, our mottled gray sky mirrors on the lake water except where covered with floating ice. Without first seeing him, we surprise an adult merganser, forcing he and his family off their berg home. Watching them paddle away leaves a guilty pleasure.

Later, we float without paddling up a stream blocked by a beaver dam. Again we disturb someone — this time a black bear on the other side of the pond who ambles calmly up a grass green slope until screened by spruce trees.

They sit on a log staring at the river. He wears a bright yellow pullover that gives lie to the look of great sadness on his face.  Her more subdued outfit better matches their mood. On this overcast day why do they  concentrate on the river muddied with Herbert Glacier silt when they could admire the snow covered Chilkat Mountains across Favorite Channel?  Perhaps they have accepted existentialism as their faith and expect the river and the outgoing tide to carry away their sadness.

Aki starts to break toward them but stops when I turn and move deeper into the tidal meadow. We take this trail often and find it different each time. Today in the meadow, blue and the rarer white lupine flowers have reached their peak. Some are already forming seeds. Fire weed shoots are starting to muscle out a space for their magenta blossoms. In the woods, low growing sorrel cover open spaces with their simple white flowers, aided by orchid spikes and the blossoms of famine berries.

From the meadow, with the tide out we see great expanses of exposed sand bars and fine clouds of glacier silt curling like fog over the river bank to settle on meadow grass.  I turn back to the couple on their seat of sadness just as a tendril of silty fog blows over them.

Each try for king salmon starts with a purchase of frozen herring, label blue. A bad choice could render meaningless hours of trolling for fish. Staring into the bait freezer I start to dig through the blues looking for the best bait. Without a king salmon to advise me it is really a matter of guess work so I drop all pretense of knowledge and grab two packs, pick out some solid tied hooks and check out.

After loading and unmooring the boat we motor out into Favorite Passage, thankful that the predicted wind storm went some where else. I think of Aki and the look she gave me as I left, rod and lunch in hand, without her. She, with a dog’s famously short memory, will welcome me home this afternoon. Besides, she wouldn’t like the whacking sound the boat makes hitting wave tops and wakes or the crash of gear when we cross the particularly nasty wake of a deep hulled man hauler.

The day is gray with a complex intersection of clouds reflected in a salt water sea  colored with glacier silt. We welcome these days even with their promise of rain. Years of life in a rain forest have shown us how to find beauty in overcast. Perhaps this makes us like the English, able to admire Turner for his ability to find true beauty in the gray variation of each cloud and the way each wins a place for reflection in the sea.

After putting out our lines we listen  to a love song sung in French by a beautiful woman on the radio.  Aki might like this but she is not here. Neither are the fish. We fish hard for hours without luck, trolling the edge of shoals of herring made nervous by charging chum salmon that occasionally leap into air while pursuing their prey.

In the afternoon we listen to the Dodger game, saddened when their bull pen blows another one.  The tide pushes a field of weed and debris across our path, which tangles in our gear.  Abandoning these traditional king salmon grounds we motor over to Portland Island and troll alone along its west side. Here we watch a flock of terns form changeable clouds over a rocky spit, flying over a furtive mink, stalking heron, and oyster catchers, jet black with screaming orange beaks. The Captain hooks a large dog salmon which we carefully release without lifting it from the water. It is a powerful and large male already showing his spawning stripes who seems to demand an apology for the inconvenience visited upon him.  “Go,” I tell him silently, “and tell the king salmon that we treated you well.”

This morning’s good weather drew me out to the side yard for guitar practice where a cloud of song sparrows were waiting to jam.  These guys are Bach fans.  Halfway through Sleepers Awake the bird song vanished, replaced by the sound of a plastic garbage bag being dragged by a bear down Chicken Ridge.

The black bear dragged its trashy breakfast to within a few feet from me then turned to settle into a spot across the street to eat.

Living on the edge of true wilderness we practice good garbage practices to avoid creating trash addicted bears. The neighborhood failed this one. We also failed its cub which was waiting for mom to bring her someone’s cast away food.

Tiny lilac colored violets line this trail. Each turns it face downward as if afraid of the rain. Carefully lifting one flower to face me, I see the delicate beauty we expect from Alaska wildflowers. “Look up and show off for soon you will be making seeds while insects use your leaves for folder.”

Aki doesn’t care about these shy maidens. She is here to harvest the rich smells of this forest and the creek draining it.

In a few weeks salmon will battle for space on the spawning redds. Bears, eagles and ravens will follow to fatten on fish flesh and eggs. If I return then it will be with a fly rod, not Aki. Today’s hike is about the forest and its plants — a feast of subtle colors and shapes with the running river sound for accompaniment. Simple  things draw my eye like these rain drops standing up on the leaves of a wild cucumber. I measure the berry and current crops and plan a return trip in late summer for harvest. So rich in food this place of simple greens and browns that make a star of even the shy violet.

Today it’s back to familiar ground that fills the space between Eagle River and the sea. The trail takes us up river through old growth spruce forest before breaking left toward a beautiful muskeg meadow. There we must walk on a recently laid boardwalk which the marsh plants are already trying to colonize. But first the forest, now jammed with flowering berry plants and hungry mosquitos.

I want to linger by the berry bushes in bloom — Salmon, elder, high bush cranberry, and currant — but the bugs move us on, their stings like wounds from  a riot policeman’s baton. Aki is trotting on with her entourage of mosquitos when I stop to investigate what drew a coven of ravens to this spot. They skulked away on our approach and reassemble in a nearby tree to heap verbal abuse on we the innocent. The birds must be on to something good but the bugs won’t leave time to investigate. In my haste to escape I almost step in fresh bear scat. Maybe the ravens were waiting for him to finish up a meal so they can enjoy the scraps .

Breaking from the forest we find tall blue lupine and stunted spruce forming the border of the muskeg meadow. I am taken with the field of arctic cotton that completes with shooting stars and chocolate lilies for space on the boggy ground. The cotton look like a kindergarden art project — cotton balls glued on lengths of green wire.

Three hundred meters further we cross Glacier Highway and reach a rich tidelands meadow running to the sea. Here the flowers, fertilized by generations of spawned out salmon form great swaths of magenta, blue, yellow and chocolate brown. Most of the resident Canada Geese flock is hunkered down across the river complaining about the weather.   A quiet five of their brethren studiously feed on a small strip of land soon to be reclaimed by the rising tide.

A high tide can make the next portion of trail impassable so we hurry on and return to the forest with its mosquitos, then the car.

Today Aki and I climb the old mining road to the head of Ebner Falls, passing  beauty and ghosts. We also pass cascades. Most are made of water but one of is of red flowering Columbines that together mimic the steep streams tumbling down Mt. Juneau’s avalanche chutes. With patience and time we could see Anna Hummingbirds feed on the flowers now spread wide open. There is only time for a dash to Ebner Falls and then back to Chicken Ridge where I will catch a  ride to Tee Harbor and then, with luck, catch a King Salmon.

We pass the steep slope where a young runner fell to his death on November ice. From here you can see Ebner Falls roar into Gold Creek. The falls blast through a narrow portal in glacial rock to fall over 100 feet into the creek. The government once kept a bench near the top of the falls but removed it after too many died falling in. I can see how it happens. At the top of the falls, Gold Creek is just a refreshing stream broken by large rocks as it flows through flat ground.  After a hot hike from town people venture into the stream, fall against a rock and then go over a precipice into the vortex. Last summer Search and Rescue saved one young berry picker who slipped into danger. The year before a young girl fell and was never found.

With prayers for the departed we return home and I go fishing for salmon. My friend and I try for King Salmon but settle for silver bright chums (dogs). Their red flesh makes great kipper treats we will enjoy next winter.

We listen to old blues or rock music when the baseball games aren’t on the boat radio. My fishing partner was dancing on the boat’s rear deck to a B.B. King song when the second salmon bit.  I saw it all, the fisherman, with arms slightly out twisting with Mr. King’s music and then pointing at his fishing pole. The pole bending over from the pressure of the strike. He playing the fish while I brought in the other line and readied the net. Our friends cruising by in their boat, looks of dismay or perhaps respect on their faces.

King Salmon reach Juneau first followed by chums, and pinks. Finally, in he fall the tasty and plentiful Silver Salmon arrive to fill our freezers. The kings, with fat red flesh can run 40 pounds. One can feed us most of the winter.  They have moved on toward their spawning streams, pushed out by by the more numerous chums.

While we fish a humpback whale hammers herring at the harbor mouth before following us up the Breadline troll run. We both follow the herring, he for food, and we in hopes that they will attract the King Salmon. The water runs deep here and the whale cruises  close against the shore, 100 meters behind us. I worry that we block his passage but he skirts around our boat, raises flukes to the sky and sounds.  We don’t see the whale again until reentering the harbor, where we watch the humpback throws himself into the air in a breach and crash with flukes flapping into the sea.

This trail drops down a series of alpine muskeg meadows to tree line. Here in the first meadow, plants are just shaking off winter.  These low growing blue berry bushes, which produce the sweetest fruit haven’t flowered while their Bog Rosemary neighbors only show tight magenta fists of buds.

Spring progresses as we drop even a few meters in elevation and find the rosemary in full bloom in the second meadow. A isolated pocket of shooting stars,     flowers tilted demurely down are a pleasant find.  Closed buds of Labrador Tea blossoms stand nearby. In the next meadow burst flowers of this plant lay open to the sun.

These meadows could cure the homesickness of visitors from most northern lands with their blueberry berry blossoms, arctic cotton stands, and clumps of heather. Here blooms our Cloud Berry blooms, a plant called the Salmon Berry by Yupik Eskimos and Hjortron by the Swedes. There grows Mountain Cranberriy so like the Scandinavian Lingonberry.

Dropping through another meadow, this one comfortably settled into summer, we reach tree line and enter an old growth forest drained by Fish Creek.  Only three stirring Salmon Berry blossoms break the brown and green monopoly of these woods

Aki plays grab tail with a passing Labrador then we are alone on the Treadwell Ditch Trail. Miners built the ditch in 1889 to carry water to the raceways of the stamp mill near the present town of Douglas.  Decaying stumps of once giant spruce trees show give evidence of where they found wood to line the ditch.  You can almost make out the notches they cut for the spring boards they stood on to work their long whip saws and hear the rhythmic ripping sound made by its cross cut blade biting through several centuries of wood.

Early risings are one of the few benefits of jet lag. This morning I rouse Aki at 4:30 to walk the Flume. This wooden channel runs through old growth spruce along the lower slopes of Mt. Juneau, carrying water to a small hydroelectric plant near our grocery store. It bridges the old Perseverance Mine Road and a street that will bring us back to Chicken Ridge. This morning we have it to ourselves.

Bears, deers and ravens own these early morning hours. Aki walks a respectful distance behind me on the trail which usually means she smells something large and wild. At first we walk with caution but only see ravens and squirrels that tease Aki from the safety of high tree limbs.

Grey has replaced blue in the sky but on this morning it gives peace not disappointment. The past few days of hot sunny weather have melted much of the  mountain snow and the resulting runoff fills Gold Creek and pulses beneath our feet in the Flume. The sound carries away any concern I might have about bears with cubs and I stop frequently to look for feeding deer.  The woods along the trail cut off most views but we still manage to see the Mt. Juneau waterfall through a closing gap in the alders.