Category Archives: glacier moraine

Only Has Eyes for Her Frisbee

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glacier

It’s good to see the mountains’ white silhouette against today’s blue sky. The sun doesn’t reach us on the moraine where we walk on barely-frozen ground. Across the ice-covered lake, it slams into the snowy peaks and dull-white glacial ice. Aki cares only for her beloved orange Frisbee. She chases it again and again down the beach. At a stream draining a big beaver dam the little dog drops her sand-covered toy into the water. For a moment she watches it float downstream where it might disappear under the lake ice. She has lost other Frisbees this way. But today she snatches it and carries it to my feet with a silent demand to renew the game of catch and release.

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Dancing in the Rain

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glacier

This morning’s soaking rain has turned the path down to Mendenhall Lake into an Olympic-grade bobsled run. At its base a young women in white tights, black leotard, her hair in a dancer’s bun, strikes an arabesque on a patch of snow. She seems as unaffected by the cold and rain as the glacier that provides her backdrop. Aki peers at the apparition, charges to a point a few feet away, then sniffs. I want to take the young woman’s picture or at least watch her dance. But whatever is going on, it has the feel of a private moment. So we slip and slide down to the lake where a raven leads us toward the glacier with that breed’s little hopping dance.

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Music for a Rare Sunny Day

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mooseFirst appearance of sunshine after days of snow. Aki and I spend the best part of it wandering over the moraine. Normally, I wonder why hikers block out natural sounds with ear buds. But today, I wish the air would fill with a Townes Van Zandt song, maybe “For the Sake of The Song” or “Tecumseh Valley,” and then a Corelli concerto. Aki dances down the snowy trail like she hears her own rich sound track.

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We edge around Moose Lake and then take a spur trail to the Mendenhall River. It’s a narrow way, today partially blocked every 100 feet by trailside alders that lean over the path under a burden of fresh snow. At first, Aki lets me break trail for her. Then I hook one of the overhanging alders and it releases it burden on the little dog and I. After she shakes off the result, Aki takes point.

river         We reach the river a little damp from melting snow. With the 14 mm lens that I usually bring to the moraine, I could share a picture of the scene at the end of the trail: the snow-banked river making a sharp, green-colored bend beneath the forested slope of Mt. McGinnis. Pearl-colored clouds obscure a swatch of the mountain while a blade of sunlight outlines one of the mountain’s sharp-edged ridges. I have a telephoto zoom that only allows me to pull chunks of beauty from the scene. But, if not for the lens problem, I might not have noticed a little world of forest and sky trapped in a shrinking patch of open water on the fast moving river.

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Ending Autumn’s Purgatory

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glacierToday’s snow provides a welcomed, if temporary makeover for the moraine. It settles in fine lines along the branches of otherwise bare alders to emphasize their strength and grace. It hides mud and decaying leaves under a thinning white blanket. Aki and I walk to the moraine’s edge where it abuts Mendenhall Lake. Each beach pebble is wrapped in a coating of snow that can’t quite reach the underlying sand.alder

When we first broke through the trees to the beach sunlight muscled through clouds to shine off some of the glacier. It also reached the top of the surrounding mountains. That changed in minutes as a snow squall moved over the lake to block our view.iceberg

Back in the thin moraine woods, we slip and slide on a muddy trail and listen to heavy drops of snowmelt plop onto puddles. After a bad muddy stretch the little dog detours through the snow cover woods to clean her paws. The wet trail reminds me that this is just a taste of winter beauty. One storm off the pacific will wash it all away. One from the Bering Sea will bring the cold and more snow to free us from autumn’s purgatory.glacier 2

Birds but No Bees

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glaicer Does Aki prefer the one note song of a varied thrush or robin’s happy refrain? She wouldn’t tell me even if I asked, which is impossible at the moment because she is off investigating a patch of grass 50 meters away. We are moving through dense alder brush on the way to the Mendenhall River. The woods hide what sounds like hundreds of birds, each singing a carnal song of spring. Aki, neutered long ago, ignores the din. moose lake I stop on a patch of trail temporality flooded with morning light and search without success for the choir. “Why,” I wonder, “Do we say we taught our children about the birds and the bees by explaining the mechanics of human procreation?” Aki and I know there are birds in these woods singing for a mate and others doing what is necessary to continue their bloodline. But I’ve never seen a bird, let along a bee, do it. Well, there was that time when I saw two eagles lock talons and tumble toward the ground. But trees blocked my view of their final descent so I never learned whether they consummated their love before striking the ground.

Evolutionary Limb

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clouds

As she always does, Aki squeals and fidgets in the car as we approach the glacier trailhead. She flies out of the car when I open the door even though no dogs are near to welcome her. She must always expect wonders at the start of every hike.

We drove through rain, snow, sun and more rain during the 12-mile drive from Chicken Ridge so I birdonly expect confusion from the weather. I hope for a chance to watch mountain goats forage on the rock face above Nugget Falls. I didn’t expect to spot a female white-wing crossbill on some glacier-scrubbed rocks near the trail. The little yellow/gray bird’s bill strands it way out on an evolutionary limb. Overlapping like a broken pair of scissors, the bird’s bill is dynamite for prying seeds from spruce cones, which is why it thrives in the rainforest. The Audubon folks write that the white-winged crossbill can feed on pine seeds and even fruit in a pinch but it’s slim beak evolved to hammer spruce. “Chow down, little bird,” I tell it, “and pray that the spruce forest doesn’t shrink like our glacier.”

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Rodent Envy

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ice

I suppose it is silly to be jealous of a beaver. But I feel a little green each time Aki rolls on a beaver trail. It’s the ecstasy that shows on her face—eyes squeezed shut with pleasure, lips curling up in a contented smile. She is ecstatic today with beaver sign spread everywhere we walk on the glacial moraine. Since our last visit the beavers have been reduced to logging alder trees along Crystal Lake. They have dropped and stripped the bark off of most of the lakeside cottonwoods. Only ones with trunks protected by wire fences stand. My resentment changes to concern when I think of the hard times ahead for the big-toothed rodents.

Aki

Beaver Logging

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Aki 2Aki and I pass some new fallen alders along the glacial moraine trail. Large wood chips, marked by beaver teeth, surround the resulting tree stubs. We never heard or seen a beaver drop a tree until today.

beaver teethThe snow is gone but a strip of smooth ice covers the trail. I slide down it while Aki checks the peemail. She sniffs something on one of the beaver dams near Norton Lake and then starts a wide sweep of the area. When a tree crashes onto the frozen lake, the little dog flies across the ice to investigate. I grow uncomfortable waiting for her to return, thinking about what a beaver’s teeth can do to a tree trunk. But Aki dashes onto the ice before I can head over to the beaver’s logging site.

AkiAn hour later, while we circled one last lake in the troll woods and hear another tree crash. Two years ago Aki broke through this lake’s ice when we heard several beaver tail slaps. I thought I had lost her that time. Today she runs to where the tree lays on the lake ice but is back before I can worry.ice

Settle Down

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Aki

Winter seems terminal today: snow almost gone from the moraine and trail ice already turned to a leaky bowl of melt water. If I lived in an information vacuum, I’d only know of this winter’s deaths and resurrections; how it grows with blizzards and shrinks in a following onshore flow. Since our house is wired to the grid, I know the truth. Winter flits between autumn and spring, riding the jet stream out of his Alaska home to places like Maine where he has worn out his welcome. He ignores our glacier’s need of snow but clogs Atlantic streets with it. Oh sure, winter visits the folks at home when it can, throwing around a little freeze here, a few inches of snow there, before returning to places where they feature him on the nightly news. Son, settle down and come home.

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Supplicants

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Aki

The recent wind-enhanced cold has given way to a day in the mid-teens. Aki and I walk, some might say tromp, along the edge of Mendenhall Lake with plans for a large loop through the glacial moraine. There is enough snow on the trail for a ski but the slow pace forced by the snow cover leads to contemplation. Aki contemplates the absence of other dogs or even good smells. Once, after burying her face in the soft snow, she stared at me, as if sending her thoughts to one with lesser mental powers. I use my height advantage (so there little poodle) to watch a line of supplicants heading toward the glacial ice cave. I would ask Aki what draws them to the cold space but she would think me even more a fool. In time I figure it out for myself. For most of the year those without wings, or willingness to take the risky overland trail, can never touch the glacier. We can only study from across the lake, the river of ice’s blue color fade and strengthen in our ever-changing light.

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