Category Archives: glacier moraine

Out of the Wild

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Last week, while Aki chased her Frisbee over Juneau trails, I explored lands drained by the Innoko River area in Western Alaska. Some of the area I passed through has been designated wilderness. But we saw as many or even more animals in the non-wilderness areas. The flying predators we spotted—eagles, peregrine falcons, owls (great grey and great horned), and even a raven—seemed more interested in keeping near their food source than fleeing us. On each beach we sampled we added our boot tracks to those of geese, wolves, moose, beaver, porcupine, and grizzly bears. Twice we watched moose swim the width of the Innoko River.

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Today, now back with Aki in Juneau, I spent part of this Fourth of July picking blue berries near the Mendenhall River. While we walked on trails beaten through the patch by black bears, none appeared. Even one did appear it would not make the moraine a wild place, not when rubber rafts full of cruise ship customers constantly float past the berry patch.

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People of the Salmon

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I could be in downtown, watching members of the three Tribal nations of Southeast Alaska—Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian—sing, dance, and drum down Egan to Centennial Hall. But Aki and I are walking a trail through the gravelly ground left behind by a retreating glacier. The parade is the first major event of Celebration 2016 I’ve missed since Wednesday evening’s opening parade.

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We can’t hear dance drums echoing off the moraine’s pocket lakes and heavy cloud cover has grounded the tourist helicopters so there’s silence for reflection. I doubt that Aki reflects on anything more complex than animal scents and the pile of beaver scat that she rolls in while I enjoy the reverse image of tree-covered mountain flanks half-hidden by cloud.

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Raven’s song bounces through my brain—the one performed as an encore last night by the Git-Hoan dancers. The name means, “People of the Salmon” in Tsimshian. It’s an inclusive term because of the importance of salmon to everyone in the Alaskan rainforest, especially the Native residents. Earlier in the perform Git-Hoan released three man-ravens into the crowd, dancers with large wooden raven mask with articulated jaws. Knowing the ways of the wickedly smart birds, the people of the salmon saw the dancers transform into ravens.

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There are no ravens on the moraine today. Only sparrows and one, apparently grumpy robin appear. In a month or two, silver salmon will move through the waters we now walk along. Eagles and ravens will perch above the trail, waiting for their opportunity to feed. The Native people now in Juneau attending Celebration will be on their own salmon streams. Here, trout and char will stalk the spawning beds. The cruise ship tourists will be home in their suburbs. In the early mornings of spawning days, black bears will slap the silvers out of the water. Aki and I will be home on Chicken Ridge, eating fresh salmon,

Recovery

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Aki never enters the burn. She always waits with a worried expression for me to finish my search for recovery. Until today, I found little to report. Today, the flashy blue of lupine blossoms draw more attention than the skeletons of burn trees. Young poplar trees rise in a scattered pattern between ruined spruce. In a decade shade from the fast growing poplar will force the lupine to the sunny margin that lines the trail. In 100 years the spruce will have pushed out the poplar. But today, the lupine thrive in ancestor ashes.

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After the Storm

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The red tulips we planted last fall made their appearance during last week’s storm. Some of their petals dangle down like climbers stranded on a cliff. Able to relax in today’s sunlight, I feel like a rescued climber, fingernails stressed, not really believing how lovely Mount Juneau looks without its usual cloud cape. To celebrate Aki and I head out to the moraine where high water floods over parts of the trail. Beavers, not storm work caused the lake waters to cover our path. Aki charges through. I slosh, happy to escape with dry socks. There is always more moraine magic on days like this—the first dry and sunny one after a long stint of rain. Every leave seems washed clean. The new poplar leaves glow like they will in the fall as their life drains back into the tree roots.

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Hard Eyes

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There are some things a gray-haired person should not do on a spring morning. Reading Housman’s “Loveliest of Trees,” with its reminder that lost years will not come again, is one of them. While I read the poem gentle rain washed a winter’s accumulation of dust from Chicken Ridge and irrigated the budding lilacs.

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Out of on the moraine with the little dog, I did another unwise thing—locked eyes with a Steller jay. Rather than fly to high branch to scold us, the jay settled on a low spruce branch and turned sideways so its eye could bore in on my face. The hard, black marble of the eye reflected no kindness, just scrutiny. Feeling measured and found lacking, I let Aki lead me to the little cashew shaped lake where the glacier seems to rise about a strip of forest. Two mallards and a bufflehead family move slowly down lake from us. But one of the bufflehead young, still in tan and chestnut swung past us. Aki didn’t abuse this trust by charging into the lake. I locked eyes with the young duck and saw defiance, not fear, realized what a poor judge I am of the facial expressions of birds.

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Muddy Dog of Spring

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As if forced away by music, the clouds always abandon Juneau on the Saturday of folk festival week. This surprised the weatherman, who had predicted a continuation of the wet weather that plagued Southeast Alaska for a week. Aki doesn’t know that a bath awaits her when we return home from this trip to the wetlands. In minutes she manages to coat her fur with estuary mud then prances around like a perfumed starlet. With the tide out, the birds are out feeding on the mudflats. Two eagles do fly over, chasing each other toward the glacier. They disappear, leaving the skies empty except a song sparrow that settles onto a drift wood root wad and sings of spring.

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Alien Fruit

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Thanks to a book I am reading, Eating Stone by Ellen Meloy, I am a little obsessed with our local mountain goats. (Oreamnos americanus). Meloy’s book is about desert bighorn sheep but her descriptions of them in Eating Stone makes me think about the Juneau goats. There should be a clutch of them grazing on the rock slopes near the glacier so Aki and I heading toward Nugget Falls to spy on them. I stop often to photograph the myriad of icebergs that now litter to surface of Mendenhall Lake. You’d expect them to make the best models but I found them outclassed by willow catkins. Even though rain-soaked and already going to seed, they look like complex alien fruit.

3The goats are a no show but on our return to the car we run into a beautiful toddler enjoying her rubber boots, yellow slicker, and red umbrella. She entertains herself with a little umbrella dance until Aki barks. Then she stands at attention next her family’s yellow retriever and laughs at my little poodle-mix.

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Clouds

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This morning, while cleaning up a garden plot, I felt like I was being watched. I was, by a cloud of at least twenty eagles and an escort of ravens. In seconds the cloud dispersed as eagles spread out over Downtown Juneau. Before they totally disappeared, one dived on another in an attempt to mate. Then they were gone.

3This afternoon, Aki and I don’t find any eagles along the shore of Mendenhall Lake. There’s just a huddle of mallards shouldering off the rain on a rocky point. My little dog ignores them but they stir and look our way until we break back into the woods.

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Obsessed

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Aki and I are both obsessed today. She is all about her orange Frisbee, which she wouldn’t drop from her mouth if I waived meat under her nose. In spite of all the blue-sky-beauty of the glacier and its mountains, I’m fixated on a nuclear family of Mt. Goats that look down on us from a mountain ridge. I fiddle with camera setting to get a decent photo of the trio. Each effort fails. Before spotting the goats, I found lots of small beauty, all involving a reflection in open lake water. In my favorite, a sliver of water between shore and ice is sky blue marred by white clouds. Aki walked by the abstract beauty, concentrating only on her beloved Frisbee.

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Early Spring

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reflection

Aki makes a half-hearted attempt to slide her face along a thin patch of snow. We have to accept it little dog. It’s early spring on the moraine. The trail is still frozen but soon will soften into sticky mud. Without snow, sunshine, or summer growth to give the moraine sparkle, he is like a movie star at home with a cold. Not something you want to see until he smiles out a flash of beauty that helps your ignore his red and dripping nose, pallid skin, and disheveled comfort clothes.

moraineIce holds all the moraine’s beauty today—the turquoise-blue glacier and the crystal-clear ice formed around fallen blades of grass and river rocks. An insistent-green clump of grass forces it way through a shrinking ice lens. Skunk cabbages will blossom soon.

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