Category Archives: Dan Branch

Don’t Blame Me

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This morning, for the first time in a week, the sun rose unimpeded by clouds.             There was a thick rope of fog laid the length of Gastineau Channel but it was gone by 9 A.M. I listened to foghorns while drinking morning coffee and thinking about where to spend part of this sunny day.

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As Aki slept curled in my lap, I decided to head North to where a trail snaked over a small rise and along the edge of Favorite Passage. The little dog always seems to enjoy that one.

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Later, while taking a break on the trail, we waited on a pocket beach for Aki to rinse her new Frisbee. It was only unnatural thing on the beach. Time and tide, not human hands, had placed every pebble and rock. The tiny grass meadow at the edge of the splash zone was sown by the wind.

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After finishing the walk we drove to the Shrine of St. Therese where someone with too much spare time had stacked beach rocks into cone-shaped cairns on the beach in front of the columbarium. Nearby a raven paced. When we neared the bird flew off and landed in the middle of small collection of cairns, knocking down two of them. After defecating on the ruins the raven surveyed the field of rock stacks and then turned to stare at us. I wanted to tell him about the beach not far from here where no one had tried to improve nature.

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Bouncing Down the Pass

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This is a harvest trip. True we have time to watch the North Pass humpback whales feed. But thanks to a fifteen-knot wind that is cross grain to the incoming tide, we will bounce on close-set waves all day. We’d be elsewhere if not fishing for silver salmon. Again, Aki is safe and comfortable at home. As we did last week, the captain and I have used downriggers to sink baited herring into the pass waters. Unlike last week, there are other boats bouncing with us. No one is waving a net around preparing to boat a silver. We see someone boat a pink salmon but until the captain netted a eight-pound fish that I had hooked, we will see no silver salmon pulled from the water.

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Slow Walk Through Downtown

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I chose this route through Downtown Juneau for its convenience, not its beauty. Aki’s other human and I have an appointment at 10 A.M. Aki lead me out the door at 8:30 this morning. We should have finished in be done in an hour. But even though rain sluices down on us, Aki insists on taking her time. Each scent mark must be smelt from different angles. No pee spot may be passed by without a full nasal inspection.

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She slows down ever further when we reach the South Franklin Street tourist stores. I have to discourage her from peeing on a full-length coat on display outside of a fur shop. Otherwise she is well behaved. She trots by friendly cruise ship tourists but stops to accept pets from clerks standing like barkers outside their jewelry shops. Aki pays the most attention to homeless people sheltering from the rain in the doorways of closed shops.  My frustration with the little poodle fades when I see the smiles on those she favors.

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We Could Be Miles Away

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It rained all last night. This morning only a light shower dimples Crystal Lake. But soon the real drama will begin. A storm is moving over Sitka. It is scheduled to drop four inches of rain on the Troll Woods and raise the lake’s level. Tomorrow the trails may be muddy and in places flooded. But now Aki and I should have no problem exploring the woods.

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I lead the little dog off the main trail and onto one of the beavers’ logging roads. We follow it to a little lake we seldom are able to visit.  For the last few years the access trail has been flooded by water backed up behind the beaver dams. Now it is dry.

Less than a mile away, a string of tourist buses unloads in front of the glacier visitor center. People crowd the bear-watching platform searching for inbound sockeye salmon and the bears that feed on them. A few miles in the other direction, planes and helicopters take off and land. When the wind drops we can hear airplane and bus noise. But the wind is rising in anticipation of the storm, letting me pretend we are thirty miles deep in wilderness.

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There’s Always an Eagle

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The forest is silent except for the plunking of raindrops hitting skunk cabbage leaves. No thrush sings it’s claiming song of love. No flock of chickadees chit their hunting chant. Even the normally bossy Steller’s jay is keeping its beak shut.

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I picked this trail for the protection it offers from the rain. The not silence and solitude are a bonus. The trail also grants us access to the beach where there will always be an eagle. We hear its scolding screech first then spot it.  The eagle sits on a small rock in the flooded tidal zone where it had been enjoying some me-time before we broke out of the woods.

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Beyond the eagle’s perch, fog partially obscures our view of Admiralty Island.  I look without success for the fog-like exhale flumes of humpback whales and return to the eagle. From behind Shaman Island comes the huffing sound of surfacing sea lions. While I wait for them to round the island into view, I realize that the sounds could have come from the forest, not the sea.  Bear sows huff out warnings to their cubs. I’ve heard a nearby brown bear mother huff as her cub approached me on a Misty Fjord beach. But the huffs this morning, which sound like moist air being expelled through a tube, couldn’t have been made by a land mammal, no matter how large.

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Soft Day

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Aki and I emerge from a tunnel of alders to access the wetlands. Overhead a bushel basket of clouds mute the sun. Mist clings to Aki’s grey curls and soaks into my cotton sweatshirt. The clouds also mute the magenta of fireweed blooms and the normally intense yellows of dying beach grass. It’s a soft, subtle day.

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Sparrows flit through the trailside grass, stopping in dead stalks of cow parsnip where they can watch our passage. Across the Mendenhall River two bald eagles break from their spruce tree roosts. One swings so low over the river that its left wing tip slips into the water. It rights itself and slams its talons beneath the surface twice but comes up empty. I wonder how many more times its will have to sink its talons before snatching away a meal.

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The little dog and I push on down river to where the trail ends at the edge of a backwater slough. Just across the slough two other bald eagles perch on the root wads of driftwood logs.  Rain soaks into their ruffled feathers, giving them an “I just woke up” look. But their eyes are clear and hard as jewel stones. They are ready to race for the first food revealed by the outgoing tide.

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They are Back

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The ravens waited for Aki. Two of the large black birds strutted down the Fish Creek Bridge as if fat-rich bodies of dead dog salmon weren’t stretched out for them on a gravel bar beneath the bridge. They were sated and bored and looking to do some mischief. My little dog was a handy patsy. When they didn’t make way for us on the bridge, Aki growled and dashed forward. The ravens flited a little further down the bridge and waited for her to catch up. Just before she did, the ravens lifted themselves onto the bridge rails.

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Game ended, the little poodle-mix trotted off the bridge and headed toward Fish Creek Pond. Two bald eagles eyed our approach. Incoming pink salmon splashed on the pond’s surface. One let itself be caught by a grade schooler on the opposite shore of the pond.

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We’d see at least a half-a-dozen eagles on our walk to the creek’s mouth. All have been drawn here by the pink and chum salmon now filing up the creek. All around Juneau, chum salmon are spawning in their home streams. Each stream draws of collection of bald eagles, ravens, crows, and gulls waiting for the dying to begin.

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Grumps

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Three young women walked towards us off the Basin Road trestle bridge, not together but spread out like they are trying not to draw artillery fire. Aki trots toward them, tail wagging, eyes intent. The first woman stares at me and I laugh and hope that she doesn’t notice.

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I laughed, not because of her designer “cat eyes” glasses or bronze colored body suit. I laugh because she is the first person we have met that hasn’t responded to Aki’s goofy charm.  We had just walked a loop up and down Perseverance Trail, passing many locals and cruise ship tourists. Every one, even the gruff guys and smart phone-toting teenagers at least smiled when we passed them.

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Maybe the three young women had just fought and needed time to cool down. Perhaps they had been forced by family to take an Alaska cruise when they would rather have spent the summer at the beach. What ever brought on their grumpy mood is sure to prevent them from noticing local beauties, like the lilac covered daisies lining the old mining road trail.

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Why Not Stop Once in Awhile?

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The rain stopped early this morning and the wind has shaken the beach grass dry.  As I slow walk down the Outer Point Beach, watching two eagles do an aerial dance with steps known only to them, I realize that I have never just sat and watched the sea from here. Without giving Aki warning, I plop down on a beach log.

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A strong breeze tears through the canopy of the forest that borders the beach. But the trees prevent it from reaching the little dog or me. The wind rips leaves from the beach-side alders, carries them over our heads, then releases them to float down onto the water.  Microbursts of wind slam into the surface of the bay driving tiny by intense waves out in concentric circles. Out in a Lynn Canal a boat idles, waiting for a whale to surface.

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The rain starts up, falling in thick drops that form grey circles on the beach pebbles when they hit home. I am still inclined to doddle but Aki is not. She stands thirty meters away where the trail through the woods begins, showing me her “are you crazy” look. Perhaps I am, little dog, to let you bully me away from all this turbulent beauty.

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Fish and Friend Ballet

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Aki didn’t come with on this fishing trip. It’s for the best. She’d been bored after she investigated the boat for crumbs. The boat’s rhythmic pounding as it rounded Shelter Island would have sent her searching the cutty cabin for a place to hide. She wouldn’t have been calmed until the banging stopped, even after I assured her that the waves would drop at the changing of the tide.  Now I wonder if I shouldn’t have stayed home with the little dog.

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I was thrilled and frightened by a humpback whale that surfaced less than fifty meters in front of us as the boat headed for the fishing grounds. The captain and I both felt relief after he made a course correction letting the whale slide by twenty meters to port. Now I am a little bored and feeling put upon by the rough motion of the boat beating into sharp-edged swells. The captain and I sank our herring-baited hooks an hour ago.  At the edge of our vision, a pod of humpbacks bubble feed. But to move nearer to them would take us away from the fish we seek.

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Right now the Juneau Costco store is opening its doors. If home and not being hammered by waves on Lynn Canal, I could buy two immaculate red salmon fillets nestling under plastic wrap in a foam tray. The tray would cost less than the gas used to reach the fishing grounds. But if I substituted that salmon for the one I hope to catch this morning I could not have watched the peaks of the Chilkat Range climb out of low lying clouds. There’d be no more whale encounters if I only fished at Costco, no more chances to see a bear work the tidelands for found food.

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The tip of my trolling pole dips down and then pops us as a fish pulls my line from the downrigger clip. I grab the pole and reel in slack until I can feel hooked salmon struggling to escape. When it breaks the water and I know it is a silver.  My fishing partner reels in his line and cranks up the downrigger cables so they can’t interfere with the boating of the fish. With the net, he moves in front of me as I gently reel in my line. Three times the silver will undo my efforts when it swims away after being brought close to the boat. It will be too tired to resist the net the fourth time. Then I will remember that it is this ballet of salmon and friend that I would miss most of all if I only fished at stores.

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