Category Archives: glacier moraine

A Quiet Time

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          Opting for solitude over spectacle, I drive Aki out to the False Outer Point trailhead. It sunny and the temperature has climbed above 70 degrees F.—beach weather in the rain forest. Our favorite trails are already clogged with sun worshipers. 

           We approach the point on a crescent-shaped beach. It offers filtered views of the glacier and smooth gravel that seems perfect for sunbathing. I am the only human here, Aki the only dog. There are no bathing beauties or families roasting hot dogs over an open fire. Tiny sparrows hop in and out of the beachside grass but no eagles roost in nearby trees. Just offshore a solo gull does a touch and go on the surface of Fritz Cove. But no whales will surface for air as we walk around the point. 

           After watching hermit crabs skittering across the bottom of a tide pool, the little dog leads me into the forest. Red Huckleberry bushes line an informal trail up and over the headland. Aki finds a spot on the forest floor dappled by sun. If we stay in this spot much longer, she will collapse into a nap. It’s not a bad idea. I could join her on the mossy spot and listen to the sound of diminutive surf until we are both asleep. 

Living With Ignorance

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          The trail from Skater’ Cabin to Mendenhall Lake is flooded. Aki saunters to the edge of the water, sniffs and then hops straight onto the top of a two-foot high concrete barrier. In seconds she has walked onto a pocket beach. I don’t know what amazes me more—that she figured out the workaround on her own or that at 12 years of age, she can still manage such a vertical leap. 

        While the little dog conducts a nose survey of the beach, I try to enjoy the view of Mendenhall Glacier reflected in the calm waters of the lake. In winter light, the mountains surrounding the glacier would cut a crisp, jagged line across the blue sky. Today forest fire haze blurs their rocky details. The glacial ice manages to catch and refract light to reduce the dullness. It’s still a beautiful thing, but one robbed of drama.

          Glacier melt water has swollen the lake so we are forced to use the informal paths made by animals in the lakeside forest. I coax Aki onto tiny beaches when we find them. One is occupied by a juvenile semipalmated plover. It takes no notice of Aki. The little dog returns the favor. I wonder why one of the normally nervous plovers is content to stretch and flex in the morning sun while we watch.

          Leaving the plover, Aki and I cross a small beaver dam and reenter the forest. In minutes we are walking around a small pond. Dragonflies battle each other over the pond water. We spook a small flock of winter wrens and dark-eyed juncos. Instead of flying off to safety, the birds fly down the trail a few meters and stare at us from the trailside spruce. I can make no more sense of this behavior than I could that of the mellow plover. I have to accept my ignorance, like I have to accept the dulling effect of forest fire smoke blown here from the Yukon by prevailing winds.  

Fishing the Morraine

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There is something unsettling about the golden eye hen, the only duck on this moraine lake. It hunts for food with the aggression of a belted kingfisher. Rather than slip into the lake in search of fish, the golden eye slams its head into the water, pulling its plump body after it. 

            I’m trying Aki’s patience with my attempts to catch a trout.  Just as I am about to give in to her whining, a cut throat trout leaps out of the water with my lure lodged in its jaw. It is free of the lure a second later. I am not surprised since I use barbless hooks. Responding to all the splashing, the golden eye cruises towards the little dog and I. 

            I think of a friend who once hooked a gull while trolling for salmon. The seabird flew into the air and floated like a kite above the boat. With much effort my friend managed to pull in the gull and free it from his hook. I reel in my lure until the golden eye paddles away. 

Even Bears Like to Have Fun

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Aki and I are walking along the edge of the Troll Woods. Mosquitoes buzz around us but can’t land if we keep moving. I pay for each photograph with a bug bite. Aki doesn’t seem to be bothered by the mossies. 

            When the little dog stops to sniff some pee mail I spot a line of tracks recently made in a muddy ditch. Stopping long enough to learn that a bear left them, I let a mosquito nip the back of my right thumb. It is a small price for priming my imagination with the image of a two hundred pound black bear waddling along in the mud. It could easily have chosen the firmer trail that the little dog and I are using to get back to the car. 

            Did the bear, which never has to worry about tracking mud onto a recently cleaned kitchen floor, chose to walk in the ditch just so it could feel mud oozing up between its paw pads?  Given their size and power, it is hard to think of bears as more than scary eating machines. The one that just left here with muddy paws is also a bit of a hedonist. 

Bears share other things in common with humans like the ability to have fun. Several springs ago, Aki and I watched a sow and her two cubs slide down a snow covered mountain meadow, climb back up and slide down again. The mom eventually stretched out on a rock in the sun while her kids continued to play in the snow. 

Natural Air Conditioning

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Aki spent much of yesterday afternoon panting in the shade. Her humans also felt the heat. To escape we packed up the car with camping gear and headed out to Mendenhall Lake. The dashboard temperature reading dropped as we approach the lake. It was ten degrees cooler there than downtown. A strong wind blowing off the glacier made it feel colder. Good thing we brought firewood. 

            This morning Aki joins two of her humans for a canoe ride on the lake. It is flat ass calm. The little dog makes the ride interesting by shifting the boat’s balance dashing from side to side of the canoe. 

The sun is up, turned red by the forest fire smoke. We paddle toward the glacier and then divert toward a spot where we found good blueberry picking in the past. 

            Aki hops out of the canoe when we beach and soon finds herself wading down a flooded trail behind her humans. She dog paddles over submerged blueberry plants and past white stalks of lady tresses. Soon she is back in the beached canoe, looking tiny against the still massive glacier.   

Singing for Rain

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An immature eagle, small patches of white showing on its chestnut brown head, hovers over the North Douglas boat ramp. I am close enough for a good, crisp view of the bird. Behind the eagle smoke from Yukon forest fires dirties the appearance of the glacier that descends between the Mendenhall Towers toward Fritz Cove. We need rain to wash the air. The forest needs it to water the understory plants and refill ponds and streams. I wish that I hadn’t stopped at the boat ramp to watch the eagle. 

Aki and I leave quickly and drive to the Rainforest trailhead.  The smoke filled air hasn’t deadened the difference between darks and lights in the forest. But clarity drops off when we break out of the forest and onto the beach. 

Smokey air has reduced the Chilkat Mountains to smudges on the horizon. Aki finds plenty of strong smells to investigate. I use my eyes and ears to a fruitless search for surfacing humpback whales, seals, or ducks. We heard an eagle while walking through the forest. But none screams here. Even the sea is quiet. Then a song sparrow settles into the crotch of a cow parsnip plant and sings its “sweet, sweet, sweet” tune.  

Getting to Know Each Other Again

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This is the first walk for the little dog and I since I returned from a solo adventure. Not a time for drama, intrigue, or distraction. To allow us both a quiet time to sync, I drove Aki out to the Troll Woods with a plan to wander around the beaver’s trail system. 

            It’s a bluebird day. The temperature may reach 70 degrees F. At first a little breeze riffled the lake surfaces. When it stopped the cottonwoods among Moose Lake could used the lake’s surface to appreciate their beautiful spring coats. My little dog wades out into the lake, making a hole in a scum of spruce pollen. The electric green pollen covers everything from cars to Aki’s little paws. The poodle-mix sneezes. I hope she isn’t developing an allergy to the omnipresent stuff. 

            We leave the lake for a path lined by northern marsh violets, one of the first wildflowers of the summer. Dragonflies, another harbinger of real summer, flit around us like mosquitoes. One lands close enough for me to photograph but takes off when Aki trots over to investigate him. The payable price of companionship.

The Bike Will Understand

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Three miles in, I’m thinking that me riding alone to the Herbert Glacier was a bad idea. Maybe if I were on a mountain bike it would be okay. But I’m using my touring bicycle, hoping that its 29 inch tires can handle the trail’s rocks and roots.

I haven’t ridden to the glacier since Aki was a puppy. That day the tiny little guy chased my bike the four miles to the glacier. She has hated bicycles ever since. I have always regretted bringing her along.

The highway is my bike’s natural home. When I left Glacier Highway to ride onto the trail, I promised the bike I would turn around if things got too rough. After I’ve traveled on it for a few thousands miles the bike and I have developed that kind of relationship. Because it knows me, the bike expects my promise to be broken.

We do fine the first few miles. The trail is flat and covered with fallen spruce needles that cushion the ride. As we climb toward Herbert Glacier ugly lumps of rock start appearing above the needles but I avoid most of them. Just a mile before the glacier the trail turns into a rock strewn single-track. I should turn around but we are so close. The bike will understand. So I proceed with caution, cringing each time a tire slams into an unavoidable cob.


           When the trail becomes a narrow path between cliff and river, I finally park the bike and proceed on foot to where the glacier can be seen hanging above a forest of yellow green cottonwoods and alders. It’s cloudy, but here and there blue holes in the grey appears. One lets enough light through to bright out the best in he glacier and its forest.

Peace on the Delta

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It is almost impossible to rise with the sun during the northern summer. At this time of the morning last winter Aki and I would have been hiking in the dark. Still, during most of our visit we will have the Fish Creek delta to ourselves. A nice bird watcher arrived just before us but didn’t go beyond the pond. 

            On the drive to the trailhead, I thought about deer and when a doe walked in front of the car. After we stopped, it crossed to the west side of the road and tried to find cover behind a sparse blueberry bush. Another deer appeared to be waiting for us at the trailhead parking area. Acting like it was still undiscovered, it tiptoed off the trail and into a forest tangle. 

            Things have calmed down on the delta since our last visit. The resident eagles have reached accommodation with the crows, which no longer try to drive the bigger predators from their roosts. Freed up from defense work, the crows have spread out to feed on the tidal meadow. One crow lands on a rock in the middle of tiny pond, apparently to enjoy its reflection in the pond’s surface. It doesn’t seem to notice a sandpiper that wades past.            

The marine layer that darkened our skies for weeks is breaking into clouds that reflect in the waters of Fritz Cove. An adult bald eagle flew out over the cove, dove on a fish and pulled up—wings wet and talons empty. Now it squats at the top of a spruce tree with its wings spread out to dry, a sour look on its face. 

Interest from Overhead

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Aki couldn’t have picked a worse tip to go on a walk about. We are exposed on an open section of the Mendenhall Wetlands. The 10-pound poodle-mix is 40 meters away, sniffing a pee mail message. A bald eagle on its way toward the glacier makes a sudden course correction and begins to circle over the little dog, which must look like a plump, gray rabbit from the air. Aki freezes when I demand her to come to me. There is no time to outwait the little brat so I run toward her. The eagle breaks off and veers north toward the glacier.  

            Aki, who never saw the eagle, trots close to my side a little confused as we move down along the Mendenhall River towards Fritz Cove. The tide was out on our last visit to the wetlands, exposing food-rich mud flats to hundreds of teals, northern shovelers, mallards, and shorebirds. Today, with the tide at the flood, we only spot a bored-looking raft of mallards sleeping near the riverbank. 

            I expect that we will have to rely on the glacier, surrounding mountains, and the intense yellow-green colors of unleafing cottonwood trees for drama. Then an arctic tern flies overhead. It’s amazing to think that the tern’s frail-looking wings carried it all the way from Antarctica and will have to carry it back at the end of our summer.  

            While Aki sulks with impatience at my feet, I watch the tern disappear over the river. Then I spot two sparrow-like birds perched near each other on the roots of a driftwood log. They look like female Lapland longspurs in breeding plumage. If they breed this year it will be on the northern tundra, not along this river. They must be resting up before resuming their flight north.