Category Archives: Aki

Blink of Beauty

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Aki slips on slick ice, her right rear paw sliding sideways, and then recovers. I follow behind her, taking care to avoid falling. I could not have made two steps down the trail without my ice grippers. As I was pulling the ice cheaters onto my boots the sun broke through the marine layer to hit the Mendenhall Glacier and Mt. McGinnis like a spotlight.

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I want to rush down the trail and past a wall of alders that blocks my view of the sunny scene. Aki slips again. Seeing her misstep reminds me to slow down. I do and still make it through the alder screen in time to catch the show.

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The first sunlight I’ve seen in days enhances the vivid robin’s egg blue of the glacial ice and makes the remaining fall color on the flanks of Mt. McGinnis pop. Reflections of both in the ice-free portions of Mendenhall Lake are more intense than the scene reflected.

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Aki and I slip and slide out to Nugget Falls. It’s a boring trip for the poodle-mix since no other dog walkers are willing to try the trail. Over our shoulders a blue wound forms in the gray cloud cover. I want to reach Nugget Falls before the wound heals and shuts out the sun.

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While I am photographing the shrinking image of Mt. McGinnis reflected in open water, the patch of blue disappears. Low clouds obscure the mountains and all but a thin strip of blue glacial ice. After carrying Aki up a slick slope of ice, I turn back to the car. I should be disappointed by the loss of sun and the beauty it brought. But it could never last, not with a series of storms heading our way from the Pacific. Without the beauty to distract me, I can concentrate on safely traveling over the treacherous trail.

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Water on Ice

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If not for the ice there would be no drama and little beauty to be seen on this rainy day walk. Yesterday’s 20-foot high tide broke up the five-inch thick ice sheet covering the Fish Creek Pond and carried pans of it up the creek where it now forms a temporary dam. More ice pans ended up on the meadow. Several large pieces came to rest athwart the trail.

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Aki is happy that we have the Fish Creek delta to ourselves. The little dog is always shy when wearing her “Elvis Presley in Scotland wrap”—a pink and gray fleece number with an argyle pattern and a large collar that curls up toward her ears. I’d share a picture of it but she refuses to pose for portraits today. The Elvis wrap keeps her warm, even when wet, so she wears it.

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Before arriving at the pond, we stopped to watch a raft of scoters drift over the waters of Fritz Cove. In the foreground a red-breasted merganser bobbed to the surface with a sand lance wriggling to escape the bird’s beak. Disheveled with head feathers all ahoo, it still looks more at home than some little dog I know.

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On the Margins

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Rain-slick ice covers the trail into the Treadwell Ruins. Thin strips of grass form margins on both side of the ice. Aki and I watch an older hiker maneuver down one of the grass verges, using a walking stick to keep from falling. The little dog and I follow, she sniffing, me dancing around islands of ice or dog poop. It’s the only way to add excitement to this gray, wet visit to the ruins.

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I manage to descend through Treadwell to the ice-free beach and spot a bald eagle perched on an old mine ventilation shaft. The eagle ignores us, which is not surprising as 100 meters of seawater separate us from the bird.

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After we move down beach a raven lands on a short piling 10 meters ahead. Turning its back on the little dog and I, it looks as relaxed as a drinker on his favorite bar stool. When we’ve halved the distance, close enough to make out the patterns of purple and black feathers on the bird’s back, an Australian shepherd dog dashes past us and chases the raven off its perch. The raven calmly lands on a 3-meter high piling. Another raven occupies the top of a similar piling a few meters away. The shepherd circles one of the occupied pilings. Neither raven move even when the shepherd dog rises up on its hind legs and reaches up the piling with its front paws. In seconds they could both be perched high in a beachside alder, away from the pesky dog. But that would end the excitement.

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Winter, Please Come Home

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A little sulky, Aki was slow to meet me at the front door this morning. We both squinted against the rain while walking to the car. She was keen enough at the trailhead. But now she starts up every trail that would lead back to the car. The little poodle-mix wants our winter back. Two days ago it rode the jet stream down to the east coast of America where only school children in hope of a snow day welcomed it. Winter’s gray cousin, autumn, has back fill the hole with rain and wind.

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We walk through a thin stretch of old growth spruce forest between Auk Bay and the main road out of town. The woods offer filtered views of the bay through which I watch the resident raft of harlequin ducks dive in unison on bait fish. A larger raft of Barrow goldeneyes works nearby waters. Ducks don’t need sunlight or snow to feed.

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Down beach a line of gulls work the surf line and the rolls of seaweed formed by the last flood tide. Once in the air, the gulls are the most graceful things on the beach. But they must lumber through their takeoffs and almost always splash their landings.

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Hunting Seal

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Four gulls relax on their own floating island—a cork of dense snow that was carried from the beach by last night’s flood tide. You might say they look smug. Snow islands populate much of the bay. Some host gulls. Groups of others provide a harbor for a group of jumpy mallards.

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The ducks explode off the water, fly back and forth along the beach and return to their spot before the water has had a chance to calm. Aki didn’t scare them. It’s a seal quietly swimming between the snow islands. In minutes the seal surfaces near the three gulls’ island, using an oblique angle to shorten the distance between itself and the possible prey. When the gulls stir, the seal slips beneath the surface until the birds calm down.

 

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Before the Snow

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Aki and are back on the moraine, taking a trail that offers filtered views of the glacier. Between frosted spruce tree limbs I can watch a line of worshippers walking on lake ice to or from the glacier. Some drag sleds full of toddlers behind them. Part of me wants to join them. They are walking to the ice cave. But Aki is happy with the company and the many chances given to her this afternoon to chase after her beloved Frisbee.

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Thick swirls of frost cling the trailside alders like Monarch butterflies on an eucalyptus trunk. Enjoy your day in the gray frost butterflies, tonight it snows.

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Happy New Year.

Harsh Winter Beauty

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It’s 8 degrees F. Aki dashes toward the warm car that we left just a minute ago. She has explored on colder days. I wonder if she is aging out of real winter like some one from the Iron Range who moves to Florida after retirement. Ready to wait for warmer weather, I am about to give up on today’s walk when Aki sniffs a patch of frosted grass, pees, and gallops back to me. False alarm.

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Reunited, we join one of Aki’s other human friends to walk down the Eagle River on a trail softened by frost feathers. They slush, rather than crack or snap when stepped on. While some light still reaches the mountains and a slice of meadow we walk in dusk conditions even thought it is only 1:30 P.M. Some water still flows in the river but much of it is covered with ice. Five-inch-thick pans of it, all sharp-sided puzzle pieces, are marooned on sand bars until the next flood tide.

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I am glad I am wearing an old beaver hat made for me by a Yupik woman from the Kuskokwim River. The weather’s too cold for wool caps. Today’s harsh winter beauty, the kind produced by mixing cold, light, snow and ice, is rarely formed by the rain forest. These ingredients are as common as ravens during the Kuskokwim winter. But gray skies are more common than blue along the Eagle where the temperature rarely drops this low.

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Aki has no problem appreciating today’s rare gift. She patrols along without concern and seems put out when I lift her over sea ice that has yet to set. She must not know that her feet could freeze if they became wet in the slush. I take many pictures, keeping my camera inside my parka between snaps. But this precaution doesn’t prevent the shutter button from stinging my finger each time I push down on it.

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The Route Not Taken (Part Two)

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Part one of this photo essay was posted yesterday

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…Another guard, this one working for the gulls, gives out an alarm when we are still 100 meters from breaking out of the woods and onto the beach. Even though I use no stealth during those 100 meters the gulls, and they are hundreds of them, are still hugging the beach when we arrive. Some are almost painfully bright in the sunlight. They seem sluggish, almost hung over. I consider moving quickly on so they don’t have to expend energy to relocate but choose to linger. The gulls follow a four duck raft of mallards slowing paddling to the mouth of Peterson Creek. The scene produces a cold, penetrating beauty similar to that just found on the beaver’s pond.

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The woods we next transit are too dense for the sun to penetrate and block sunlight from the second beach we crunch across. But the forest doesn’t block an east wind that makes our cold passage back even colder. Like the forest, this beach and the waters that touch it are empty of visible wildlife. The resting gulls we watched on the first beach explode past the point that marks the entrance to the little Peterson Creek bay. Some settle on the point or the much larger Outer Point. Most choose to fly to Shaman Island. All three landing locations are bright with sunlight.

 

 

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Back in the woods I face the consequences for my decision—the wood-planked trail. It’s dry at first but soon I’m mincing over ice-covered treads. Aki would wait for me to pull on my ice grippers. But my right hand is too numb from holding the cold camera to manage it. If we had taken the wooden trail first, when I still worn grippers, I could have enjoyed views, like the one of sunlight shafting trees. Easy to see, but almost impossible to photograph, such filtered sun reminds me of the light that people are pulled toward in near-death-experience stories. Really I’m in little danger. Aki, with her little clawed paws trots over the ice like it was dry concrete. In most places, I can walk on firm dry ground rather than the wooden path.

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In the end the little dog and I benefited from my choice not to take first the boarded trail even though for Frost’s speaker in “Road Not Taken” it would have been the route less traveled. But my choice allowed us a chance to see the gulls before they were scared into dispersing and that made all the difference.

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The Route Not Taken

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After today’s North Douglas walk with Aki I wrote more than normal. So this is the first of a two part post. Thanks for you patience. 

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Thirty meters into old growth forest, I stall at a trail junction. While Aki catalogues recent dog activity, I think seriously about breaking with tradition and taking first a wood-planked trail rather than continuing on the gravel one that offers a more direct route to salt water. I want to reach the beach while the brief window of daylight is still open. But the ice grippers on my boots would be dulled on the journey. They would ease transit of the icy planked trail. But I can always use the grippers when we return to the car. After trying to remember the lines to Robert’s Frost famous poem about two trails in the woods, I chose the gravel route.

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Our cold snap has silenced the forest, even the few remaining ice-free watercourses. No bird chits. No squirrel scolds, but circles of hoarfrost on forest moss betray the entrance to their dens. To survive the coldest days of winter, our squirrels and other smallish rodents climb into chambers dug out from wood stumps or rotting trees. They reduce their heart rate and metabolism and wait for the warmth to return. I wonder if a person could slide a gloved hand into an icy-rimed den and lift out a comatose squirrel without waking it.

 

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The cold weather silence works in the favor of the forest’s largest rodent—the beaver. The sound of running water keeps them awake at night. Too bad they are sleeping in today. Sunlight has just reached their pond making the covering ice glow. Adult alders rise out of the ice looking like trees that have learned to balance on severed trunks.

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Feet from one of the pond’s dams, beavers have chewed a hole in the pond ice. They must post a guard here to protect against a breach. Even on a cold night, a sudden dam collapse could lower the pond enough to allow an enemy access to their den. Even with a beaver’s wonderfully insulation, the guard must suffer while on duty.

 

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Snow and Ice

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Today we went higher up the mountain where Aki could find some snow. I wanted to see if the current stretch of cold weather had finally frozen a favorite mountain stream. We both got what we wanted.

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Aki’s snow covered a sloped mountain meadow with a two-inch carpet. Frost butterflies added another five. Even though the trail was empty of dogs and other people to welcome, the little poodle-mix galloped with purpose for 100 meters. Then she turned to run back at top speed.

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Once reunited, we dropped down onto my creek. It still ran free. But crystal-ice had turned rounded rocks into grey jellyfish and trolls.