Category Archives: Dan Branch

Digging Out Small Beauties

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With its gray, nondescript sky that drizzles down rain, today is one for small beauties. Evidence of such is not hard to find on this mountain meadow. On both sides of the trail muskeg meadowland spreads toward the mountains. Reddening moss and blueberry plants form patterns with yellowing deer cabbage plant on the muskeg—a Persian carpet that would be stunning on a sunny day. But today it looks like a carpet ruined by flood.

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Aki follows me off the trail and through thickets of blueberry brush weighed down with accumulated rain. She stops for a minute and gives me a hard look before moving in behind me. Little dog, sometimes you just have to explore new ground when the sky is gray and the land is already going to rest for the year. She knows that her fur will soon be as soaked as my pant legs but still joins this pointless expedition through the wet.

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Bears and Birds

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The salmon are returning to the Eagle River. I have to take care not to step on their desiccating bodies as we cross a riverside meadow. There are no bears or their scat just see a cranky pair of ravens, so I decide to continue our walk along the river. Just in case, I place the little dog on her leash.

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The dead salmon smell blends with the others of fall—the sweet and sour smell of ripe cranberries, leaf mold, and the sharp tang of grass. I wonder if the strong bouquet threatens to overwhelm Aki’s sensitive nose. But the poodle-mix shows her usual keen interest in, for me, unremarkable spots along the trail.

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We pass a family with small children picnicking along the river. One of their members operates a drone, which gives off an annoying hum. I’m thinking about letting Aki loose when she gives out a little growl. Two people just up the trail point to a bear munching away on a salmon it had carried up from a nearby stream.

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I’m holding Aki now. We watch the bear saunter over to an alder tree and bury her nose in tree moss. Then it moves into the forest. I carry Aki a little further and then let her walk. She stays on the lead. We pass gravel bars covered with gulls, crows, and ravens and, just seconds before I can focus the camera on it, a fishing bear.

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On the drive home, near a different salmon stream, I have to stop the car to let a black bear waddle across the road. Just after Aki gives another low growl, the bear turns, for the first time, to look in our direction. Who knew that bears had such sensitive hearing?

Low Energy Fall

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It feels like a rain forest fall, just warm enough not to need gloves. The smell of dead salmon reaches on a wind that shivers changing leaves along the Outer Point trail. But what fall color we have is dull, more brown than red. I blame the wet summer that just ended. Last year we were enjoying the last of an exceptionally warm, dry season. As if squandering their windfall wealth, the leaves of willows, cottonwoods, and high bush cranberry plants painted the forests with rich reds and yellows. After this year’s wet summer, the forest trees and bushes have barely enough energy to fade to a yellow-brown.

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More Tracks

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For the second day in a row, I am puzzled by the presence of moose tracks in Juneau mud. Aki and I are walking along the eastern shore of Mendenhall Lake. At the north end of the lake, the glacier snakes down between two mountains to touch the water. Just ahead Nugget Falls roars away. Beneath my feet are moose tracks. Later I will follow them to the edge of beach in front of the falls. I will learn that a bull moose hung out near the falls yesterday while we followed its tracks across the moraine. It swam across the lake and hasn’t been seen since. The powerful waterfall is a world-class tourist attraction. Maybe our wayward moose is just another foreign tourist, albeit a Canadian one.

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Lost Moose?

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So quiet, I tell Aki. We are walking around an empty campground that offers occasional views of the glacier. Aki looks up at me with her, “Are you crazy?” stare. She is sampling the rich smells left by a summer’s worth of camping families. While I see empty space, she smells the ghosts of those who used the place before.

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I wonder if the little dog can single out the smell of the moose that we are tracking. The big animals are rare on this side of the Juneau Icefield. One must have wandered down from the Antler River, drawn by the juicy willows that grown on the glacial moraine. This is an odd time of year for a moose to do a solo walk about. He or she should be sticking around other moose trying to mate. Are you a young male, driven off by the mature bulls or an oldster?

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We follow the tracks to the river where the moose must have entered the water and crossed over to the moraine. I search the opposite shore but see only a thick wall of moose food.

Invisible Men

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Under a flat-gray sky Aki and I walk a familiar trail through Downtown Juneau. The little dog trots out at the end of her leash, stopping suddenly from time to time to pee or sniff. I am jealous of her ability to get so much stimulation from odors. While she checks the pee mail, I let my mind wander.

By the time we reach the Franklin Street tourist zone, it is filling up with cruise ship passengers. I am grateful to them for exhibiting even a little joy on this low contrast day. Crewmen from the ships stand in line at food carts run by local Pilipino families. Those already served sit on stone benches eating rice and barbeque meat from Styrofoam containers. Behind them the panamax cruise ships they serve send blue smoke into the already dark sky. Nearby, under the Marine Park shelter, a dark skinned homeless man shivers through a cigarette while clutching a paper cup of coffee. Aki drags me toward the food carts in hope of snatching dropped food from the feet of customers.

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The cruise ship tourists, many this morning from big cities in China, look up at Mt. Juneau or out over Gastineau Channel where great rafts of gulls float as they wait for low tide. Some of the tourists smile when they see a local and his little dog. But few seem to notice the crewmen or the homeless man.

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Climbing up Main Street we pass a sign drawn with some skill with chalk onto the side of a business office building. It quotes from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five: “Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt.” I shake my head. When the sun sparkles on fresh snow, a honest man might write that everything he sees in Juneau is beautiful, even the pink cheeks of locals huffing up our steep streets. But somewhere there will still be pain.

On the Fringes

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Last Sunday evening, while Aki napped inside our house, a yearling black bear munched fallen apples in our yard. He moved with a calm that only the wild and innocent should have. As Aki’s other human and I watched, the little bear lifted its front paws until it was standing on its rear legs. It looked like a small man in an oversized black coat. The little guy looked up into our Golden Delicious tree, shrugged as if it would be too much of a bother to climb after the few remaining apples, and dropped on all fours and left to forage in a neighbor’s yard.

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This morning I think about that young bear and the other wild animals that thrive among us human interlopers. Aki and I are cruising through the Treadwell ruins, which is quickly filling up with families of Juneauites drawn outdoors by the sunny weather. On the ruins’ fringe we hear a chicken yard in uproar and I wonder if they are under attack from minks. Probably not. Those little weasels are night workers. An eagle then?

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On the beach, the resident pair of ravens salvage dropped dog treats. One hops onto a rock to watch Aki. Above the pair of kingfishers we often visit fly a wide, fast arc around us. We have nothing to offer the swift birds but admiration.

 

Worth The Effort

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I am tired—a bit worn from trying to bust through to this beach on a little remembered, underused trail through thick brush. Aki is fine. She was small enough to slip along her own trail under the wet bushes. For me, the view we now share was worth the effort.

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We are on the backside of Douglas Island, just south of Outer Point. The tail end of the latest storm surge fights with rising high pressure and appears to be losing. Blue holes grow in the grey marine layer and we can see the mountain ridge on Admiralty Island. Aki watches a brace of juvenile sea lions swim just offshore. Since they move in a direct line northward, I assume they are chasing late arriving silver salmon. Later I will watch a male killer whale hunt silvers in Fritz Cove. But, now I’m happy to watch the clownish sea lions pulse up and drop down on their swim up channel.

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A wide beam of sunlight moves across the channel and onto the beach near where we stand and then dies out. Before it did, the light beam sparkled the ruffled sea and brought out the oranges in the exposed seaweed. I feel my tiredness and frustration fade like the sunlight, am content with the return of gray.

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Low Tide

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Aki follows me on a trail that passes under a line of occupied eagle roosts. A large swath of the Mendenhall River bank is exposed by low tide, which has set the table for the big birds. The bald eagles are jumpy, made more so by a trio of ravens that worry them, acting like police in a homeless camp. One eagle looks down at Aki, screams out as if the presence of my little dog is the last straw, and throws itself into the air. Perhaps it is more accurate to write that the big bird threw itself down into the air, kicking away from its perch with talons and tensioning its wings until each tip curls look like witches’ hands.

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On the southern end of Gastineau Channel, our local harbor seals treat low tide as leisure time. They are hauled out on a temporary bar formed by the receding tide. The seals will get back to work on the flood tide, which will carry a new pulse of silver salmon toward their home hatchery. They will rest again on the bar when it reappears with the next low tide.

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Mixed Feelings

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Rain hammers the car’s roof and challenges our windshield wipers. Aki still squeals and hops around the car’s interior, like her death is imminent if not released immediately. When I open the door, she leaps over me and hits the ground, nose ready to search for irresistible smells. I splash to the wooden bridge over Fish Creek, which is running high thanks to the storm. Standing waves form over pools that once sheltered spawning salmon. Now the carcasses of those salmon and pieces of the other organic debris of summer are being flushed downstream or carried to the forest floor to act as fertilizer for hundred-year-old trees.

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Aki crosses the bridge, empties her bowels, and stops. She flinches each time a particularly heavy drop hits her exposed face. Her body language tells all. The little dog clearly does not want to follow me on the trail that leads to the creek delta. We walk back to the car and drive over to a rain forest trailhead.

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Even in the protecting woods, Aki shows little joy. But she copes like a dog trying to find some pleasure in a bad situation. The canopy shelters her from the worst of the rain and she manages to skirt most of the flooded sections of trail. At the beach, again exposed, she looks a little pathetic. But I want to linger for a few minutes to watch two rafts of newly returned surf scoters. The storm must have blown them off the exposed waters of the outer coast where they summer.

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When we break back into the woods and head toward the car, the little dog shoots ahead. I wonder again, whether I should leave her behind on stormy days. Then I remember the sad song she sings when I walk out the door without her.

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