In the morning’s strengthening sunshine this string of mountain meadows lies like flabby farmers on a beach, satisfied to merely feel the warm sun banish memories of a heavy snow winter. Aki and I have left it late, having missed the first daylight so my camera can’t capture the beauty I see on the still brown ground.

Aki finds remnant  strips of snow for rolling. Walking behind I find her little paw print joining one left by a passing deer. It’s the only drama on offer today so my mind wanders to king salmon and turtles and Edward Hoagland’s essay, “The Courage of Turtles,” where he writes with incredible restraint about a public works project wiping out turtle habitat near his home. In a short time a place much loved on each visit is gone, leaving ducks to wander about a drying landscape for food and turtles to die encased in hardening mud.  He allows the facts to convince.

Will I be as able to hide the pain if the king salmon disappear our native waters?  Great muscled fish, kings spend up to six years in open ocean growing to spawning size. Then, they return to us, those that avoid voracious sea lions and the organized hunts of killer whales, refuse the commercial trollers hooks, and swim under mile long drift nets set by pirates in international waters.

The government created a king salmon run in the very creek draining this relaxing meadow.  I think about what will fall away if the kings never return: no more rich tasting red meat for me and mine, loss of their powerful presence on the spawning grounds, possible famine for eagle and bear. Even the trees will miss the enrichment of king carcasses turning to soil.  

Over morning coffee Aki and I watch winter and spring’s seasonal war for Chicken Ridge. A north wind blew down Seventh Street all night, demoralizing artillery to soften us up for this morning’s heavy snowfall. Enjoying what each season has to offer I don’t have a dog in the fight. My sculptor’s heart loves the way the storm outlines the strong lines of naked ash limbs and mixes whites with spruce’s somber greens. The gardner worries whether our lilacs and the apple tree will ever flower.

Aki hates the north wind but joyfully exploits the rest of what weather has on offer.  She strains at the leash as we head up Seventh Street for the Perseverance Trail.  A neighbor with dog joins up for a couple of blocks, sharing a recent avalanche warning, agreeing to call for help if we don’t return on time. We both know that avalanche run outs can cover part of my intended trail this time of year. It’s early in the day for avalanches and it takes less than a minute to cross the troubled spot so I don’t change plans.

The tracks of only one car and one person mark the snow covering Basin Road. We use it to pass a string of craftsman houses clinging to the hill side of Mr. Maria and gain the entrance to the old wooden trestle bridge.  There we meet the homeless man, smoking his hand rolled cigarette cradled in a shaky left hand. He greets Aki with a kind word but only shows me distain–quickly pulling on his street armor while walking between dog and man.

We follow the homeless man’s solitary track across the bridge and up the old mining road toward Perseverance Basin. This evidence of his purposeful stride reassures me as we approach the avalanche chute as does the low hum of drumming grouse. An animal sound. something a coyote might make while laughing rattled my confidence. This portent of disaster only sounds when we walk. It stops when we do. Is the coyote that hunts this canyon sending a warning or just indulging himself at our considerable expense? Assuming it no more than a tease I join Aki as she follows the homeless man’s tracks on approach to the avalanche chute.  There, between battered trees we see a clear trail, find the  mountain above silent as we cross the safety.

Shortly after the snow stops and its thinning delivery clouds let in weak sunlight. The melt begins immediately, creating local rain storms under each snow burdened tree that soak dog and man but not the birds, robin and thrush, now singing spring’s victory song.

This still cold morning Fish Creek drains a forest of light. Aki and I walk up stream past where the salmon spawn in August, under eagle roosts, beyond where I watched a bear rush deep into the woods while the little dog sniffed at its abandoned supper.   It is too early in the season for salmon or even to expect this strong light to warm the skin. There is a bear and at least one deer around. The deer left tracks across a gravel bar near where a bear cropped off the tops of emerging skunk cabbage plants.

Lost in shadow, the wounded skunk cabbage offer little beauty but everything touched by light has it in abundance. A wrist thick stick, too far gone with rot to have bark, glows like polished alabaster but its the green things, moss and hemlock needles, that have me raising the camera again and again. It’s strange but while all this backlit beauty excites it doesn’t warm my hands or face. I am not used to being so underdressed in an art museum, even one as transient as the Fish Creek forest in April. In hours all will be in shadow. Tomorrow it will rain to enrich the greens, soften the browns, and ramp up the volume of the awaking stream.

Walking along the final kilometer of the Mendenhall River Aki and I find ourselves uninvited guests at a ballet.  It starts with bored eagles sunning themselves in the lee side of beach side spruce. An immature one looks down at Aki with distain, not hungary interest—surprising at the end of the winter famine when cats and small dogs are hunted for their meat.  The little poodle mix doesn’t buy it and walks closely at my heel when we pass under the eagle’s tree.

Ducks, not yet flushed by our presence or the incoming tide sleep tucked up against the beach. They don’t wake even when the first act opens across the river with the shadows of passing eagles setting a huge flock of gulls, all painfully white in the morning light, to flight. They quickly drop to sand bar and sea for better access to the concentration of bait fish (herring or sand lances?) that have drawn them to this exposed place.

The real show takes place later when a conference of bald eagles lift off from a large sand bar and begin an ariel dance with steps too complicated to follow. None dives to snatch food from the sea; each action a reaction to another dancer. Are they jockeying for good fishing spots for when the income tide delivers the next pulse of fish, showing off for the girls,or simply dancing to welcome in Spring?

We’ve been sent to this rainforest trail on a mission: sever and bring home three blue berry branches—-each the red color of spring, each supporting swelling flower buds. I carry a mercifully sharp knife to do the deed. Aki, a fan of the ripe blueberry refuses to help. She knows, as I do, that while the plants wounded by my hand will survive their severed limbs will never bear fruit. They pay the price for our indulgence; our need to watch their tiny blossoms, each a miniature Japanese lantern open during Easter dinner. 

The rain returned last night to wash away much of winter’s snow from the trails. Little bags of rains hang from the blue berry brush, each a misshapen globe of light. With rain hammering my parka hood I can barely hear an eagle complain in the trail side spruce or the percussive rhythms of a woodpecker’s drilling for food. Still, the deluge has freed the trail boards of ice and infused them with a lovely if weak glimmer. There’s beauty here—-shinning trails and bags of rain, melting ice still encasing thin roots of an tumbled tree, this motif delivered by the tide—curves of a partially burned root providing counterpoint for the angular interplay of glowing gray cliff rocks.

After allowing us a generous taste of Spring, Winter returned last week on the north wind, driving down temperatures, silencing smaller water courses with ice, covering all in snow. Now he gives us a sunny two hour window to walk through the resulting beauty.

It’s sunrise near the confluence of the Herbert and Eagle Rivers. Aki flies down the trail, bounding over deeper drifts with front and back legs acting as one. This is her favorite snow—fine enough to offer soft landings and disinclined to form snow balls in her fine poodle hair. She leaves me standing, a little in awe of what comes from new morning light striking newly laid snow.

The temperature climbs above freezing as we walk between old growth spruce and hemlock trees that carry heavy burdens of sparkling white. These, they will soon lose in the heat of the day. We find few animal tracks in the forest but many dot the muskeg meadow we must cross to get the river—small stuff mainly: mice,squirrel, hare. A larger animal left a no nonsense trail on the stream forming the meadow’s boundary. There is also the path made by tiny mice feet that ends in a one inch wide hole in the snow. Other than the flight a sparrow, made memorable by streaming sunlight, these tracks are the only found evidence of wild life this side of the river.

Dark clouds blanket out the sun as we finish the walk, lowering the volume of beauty; bringing a surprising sense of relief—maybe just calm.  I am thankful that Aki and I aren’t jaded by nature’s generosity, which we abuse with familiarity.