Even though the glacial moraine looks like it is posing for a Christmas card, I would prefer to listen to Irish rather than holiday music while crossing it today. A Carolan harp piece would work best, maybe “Bridget Cruise” played on a hammer dulcimer. That gentle love long would calm down the excited caused by the sparkling beauty driven by sunlight on frost.

Without a quiet waltz we are racing on trails through alder thickets that offer occasional views of mountains or the glacier. Aki trots at the heals of a human friend while I follow close behind.

Our friend stops to touch a willow branch coated with dense crystals and tells me that they are formed from condensed vapor released by the willow. I place the tip of the branch in my mouth and pull off its icy coat. It tastes faintly of willow.

While the vapor crystals are almost clear, like water from a mountain stream, nearby hoar frost feathers are white and striated. They form patterns on dead grass stalks and other things on the moraine that can no longer breathe. Some are scattered on patches of clear ice as if they fell from the wings of a winter bird.

We push on, crossing recently frozen streams, to Mendenhall Lake. Ice covers it and has almost silenced the nearby Nugget Falls. Across the lake, a low hill of rock rounded by the retreating glacier is white with new frost. Above all is a cloudless blue sky offering a simple background for winter’s multifaceted work.

The trail Aki and I take today starts at the end of Industrial Boulevard. To get here we had to drive past a small fish processing plant, metal fabricators, and boat yards. Most of these businesses have a view of mountains or the glacier from their parking lots. The place is a metaphor for modern Alaska. The only one better is our landfill, where smoke and methane gas curlicues up from the dump against a wall of mountains and a hanging glacier.

Aki doesn’t stop to discuss metaphors or take time to appreciate how the white masts of stored fishing boats in the foreground pop against their backdrop of blue glacial ice. She has to pee and poop. Last night’s cold, calm weather allowed frost to form on every twig, branch, and blade of grass. All sparkle in the morning light, making the little dog squint. I’d do the same if I weren’t wearing sunglasses. As a floatplane returning from a village mail run lands, the little dog and I walk along Mendenhall River. She finds plenty of sign to sniff. I look, without success, for wild animals or birds.

No wind riffles its surface so only thin pans of ice disrupt the reflection of mountains and glacier in the river. No paddling goose or duck cuts a dark scar across the watery mirror. I spot an old fashion, humpbacked trailer on a frosted field of grass. Between it and the glacier a thin radio tower pokes up through an alder thicket. Both could have been here when dairymen grazed their cows on these flats. They form a metaphor for the quieter Alaska—before jet planes, Alaska statehood, or modern cruise ships.