Category Archives: Kwethluk

Nature

Sheep Creek Delta

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Happy Saint Lucy day little dog. Aki looks at with me like someone who had to watch a trusted friend eat warm saffron buns with his morning coffee while all she had to look forward to was a breakfast of dried kibble. Fortunately she forgot about my neglect by the time we climbed into the car for a drive out to the Sheep Creek delta.

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Using our car’s magic blue tooth connector, we listen to music recorded on my phone. This morning that device doesn’t allow me to choose songs. Instead we have to settle for an eclectic mix tape as the phone shuttles through my music library. After The Pogues finish a song about brown eyes, Yo Yo Ma starts playing one of the more obscure Bach cello suites. We reach the trailhead before the phone can shuttle over to the Texas Tornados. As if she doesn’t care for Bach, Aki bursts out of the car and into a heavy rain when I opened the door.

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It’s high tide so most of the delta is under water. What seems like every mallard in the greater Juneau area hugs the beach or sleeps on it. When I close the car door, one of the mallards makes a sarcastic chuckle. Crows have crowded onto the mid-channel navigation aid. More of their murder stand on a nearby gravel bar even though it is covered with a inch of water. When the tide turns in a few minutes and retreats from their gravel bar, the crows will fly to another one closer to the beach that was dry when theirs was wet.

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We won’t see or hear an eagle during our beach walk. But on the drive home the car will pass under a trio of them jockeying for position over a beach with a brace of stubborn ravens. The center of their temporary universe is something dead. I look on the beach but see only rocks and rubble.

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A Little Gift

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The little dog and I are pulling into the Fish Creek trailhead parking lot. And as if nature thought we deserved an early Solstice gift, it is not raining. Aki, you just never know what climate change will bring us. The pastel pinks of sunrise color mist rising off the pond. As if to gild the scene, a heron flaps through the mist to land on a pond-side spruce.

5The weather guys forecast heavy rain for tomorrow, which makes this break in the storms that must sweeter. But it is not all beer and skittles for the little dog. A shotgun booms across Gastineau Channel making Aki cringe and look back to make sure I know what I am doing. The gunshot drives a gang of Canada geese into a noisy flight. I wonder if they are giving warning or hurling curses down upon the hunter.

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It’s a day for finding bones. I almost step on a slim seal bone and later spot the large leg bone of a moose. Eagle feathers littler the beach grass. All these things were deposited here by a powerful flood tide.

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It is also a day for crows. The Juneau murder must have roosted in the small forest that at the end of the Fish Creek spit. They spill out over the water of Fritz Cove, their black bodies looking like music notes inked onto the mottled sky.

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Rainy Day Retreats

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Heavy rain has forced us to retreat into the Treadwell ruins. The little dog and I have the place pretty much to ourselves. Aki manages a brief dash about with a big husky mix. When that dog moves on her spirits drop. The rain must be getting to her. She hangs back at a trail junction, apparently questioning my decision to push on rather than take a shortcut back to the car. With human arrogance, I walk further into the ruins. In a minute she ends her strike and trots up to my side.

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The storm, which started last night, has engorged all the watercourses and filled up the ponds. Surface water flows down long unused rivulets to the beach where it cuts new courses through the crush gold ore that forms the sandy beach. No bird, crow, raven, eagle, duck, or even gull shows itself. I imagine them all down at the Triangle Bar watching hot dogs cooking on the open rotisserie. Or maybe they are in the Viking, nursing drinks while watching European football on the big screen TV. Too bad dogs are not allowed in either bar.

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Pioneer Road

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Aki and I are taking the new pioneer road on Douglas Island. To its advocates, it is valued because it may eventually provide access to housing developments and a hoped for golf course. Detractors see it as a yet-to-heal wound that cuts over two miles of forested hills. They have the stronger argument. When less than a quarter-mile in we pass the gravel borrow pit where the road builders blasted the side of hill into useable rubble. On Surviving hemlock tree still clings to the pit’s edge.

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The big spruce and hemlock trees, some that were at least 200 years old, that were cut down to make way for the road lay neatly stacked like the corpses of disaster victims along the roadside.

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Wind can still make music in the remaining forest as can the rivulets channeled through metal culverts. So, I do something I have never before tried on one of our walks. I turn on my phone and let stored music accompany the sounds of wind and water. First comes a lute playing a piece by Dowling. Then Sting sings the words to the song, bringing harmony, for a moment, to the scarred forest.

Cross Country Slogging

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There are a lot of things the little dog and I could be doing this morning. Recent rainstorms cleared almost all the local trails of ice. We could be walking on one of them. We could be on a snow free beach watching harlequin ducks paddle slowly away. But we are 30 miles north of town where there is enough just snow for cross-country skiing. Thanks to all the dead leaves, twigs and spruce needles on the trail my skis are doing more slogging than sliding.

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On a drier day it would be even harder to make progress on the trail. But the steady rain lubricates the trail debris. For some reason, I am the only one of the 30,000 Juneauites that thought skiing here today was a good idea.

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Aki would rather be dashing about on a popular dog walking trail but she manages to entertain herself by reading the wild animal sign. When we ski over fresh deer tracks I expect the little dog to growl or bark. But she ignores them. I still search the trailside woods for the animal that left the tracks. Nothing shows itself.

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The Piano Has Been Drinking

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Aki and I are driving out the North Douglas Highway toward the Rainforest Trailhead. It’s raining. Tom Waits is singing one of his downer songs. The piano has been drinking, the piano has been drinking. Not me. Waits writes the best music for rainy day road trips.

The little dog has insinuated herself in my lap, content to listen to Waits and watch the windshield wipers snap back and forth across the windscreen.

2After we pass the boat harbor, with its fair weather view of the glacier, strong wind gusts buffet the car. I tell the little dog: We’ll just make a quick dash around the trail and then dry out during the drive back home. But as often happens at the tip of Douglas Island, the wind and rain drop off. We barely notice either during our walk through the forest to the beach. It’s even calm on the beach. A half-mile away on Lynn Canal, strong winds bother the water into waves.

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I think of the U.S. Coast Guard helicopter that searched in front of Juneau all of yesterday for the two men who drowned during a short skiff ride on Gastineau Channel. At low tide, you can walk across the channel where they were lost. But the extreme tidal changes that day, from a plus 19 foot to a low of 1.9 must have flushed their bodies into Taku Inlet. Maybe I should listen to Beethoven’s 6th on the ride home.

Red Sky At Morning

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Red sky in morning, sailors take warning. Look at that sunrise, little dog. Know any sailors we should warn? Aki gives me her “don’t mess with me” stare and curls back up into a comfortable sleeping position. Down channel the water glows with an angry glare. I sip coffee and watch the fierce light fade to grey as clouds descend to block the sun.

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Hours later and we are walking the beach in front of the old Auk village. Even through it is just past noon, the sky is already yellowing like it does at sunset. A long strip of light reaches across Favorite Channel from the Chilkat Mountains to our feet. A rising wind raises small waves that slap the beach. As if the light could provide them heat, a small raft of harlequin ducks paddles into the thin strip of sunlight.

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We walk out to Pt. Louisa, the site of at least one killing shipwreck and watch a fishing boat move without difficulty towards the Auk Bay harbor. So much for the “red sky at morning” warning.

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I wonder if the boat carries home red king crab. Harvest of the once abundant crustaceans has been banned until this winter due to a population drop. But Fish and Game just opened up a season for them. Now fishermen who pulled their boats at the end of September’s silver salmon season are rethinking that decision. They ask around in bars or the vegetable section at Foodland if anyone has a boat they can use to go after crab on days when the sun doesn’t color the morning clouds red and the Taku winds don’t send water sprits dancing across Gastineau Channel.

Moraine Moose

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Aki and I are out on the glacial moraine with one of my oldest friends. He is also one of the little dog’s favorite humans. She follows close at his heals as we walk on soft snow to the Mendenhall River. Our mutual friend is a gentle man. Maybe that is why Aki is so excited to hike with him.

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In order to reach the river we need to pass through a field of willow and alders. The local beavers have logged off many of the larger cottonwood trees and lots of willows. We find their large den embedded into the bank when we leave the woods. I can’ t find any of the rodents’ tracks but we do find recent evidence of a moose. Aki has never seen a moose but her two human companions have seen many of them when living in the bush of Western Alaska.

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I’ve never spotted a moose in the Juneau area. Last fall two of them were photographed while browsing along the river. Everyone assumed that they had moved back north to their home range along the Antler River. But at least one has stayed. We think it is a young moose, maybe last year’s calf. I wonder if it’s decision to winter on the moraine signals the start of a new migration made possible by the colonization of the moraine by willows, a moose’s favorite food.

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Downtown Blues

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Tlingit elders pass on the Box of Daylight story on to each new generation. It explains how Raven brought light into the world.  There was a dark time when a shaman kept the sun, moon, and stars in bentwood boxes. Through cunning, Raven brought light to the world by opening the boxes. Carvers often illustrate the story by showing Raven holding in his beak a disk representing the sun. Today, with its dusk-at noon light, reminds rain forest dwellers of the value of Raven’s gift.

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On our walk through Downtown Juneau, Aki ignores the ravens even though they croak at her for attention. The melting snow reveals too many tempting smells for the little dog to focus on anything else. The snow and ice are mostly gone but I still have to skip and hop behind her to avoid the piles of soggy dog poop that spot the sidewalk. I think we need a new law of thermodynamics: dog poop can created but it cannot be destroyed, just carted off the to landfill in black plastic bags.

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Blue Skies or Gray

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Aki and I are walking on a trail just a few miles from yesterday’s snowy paradise. This place received rain while the moraine was blessed with more snow. But it has beauty and even a little drama to offer. There’s the sound of eagle complaints from raptors perched on riverside spruce. Three other eagles fly in tight circles over the river. I suspect some late arriving silver salmon are drawing the crowd. It could be a deer carcass. We followed the recent tracks of one to the confluence of Montana Creek and the river.

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All the eagle activity makes Aki nervous. She stands, almost touching my leg, and squints down river. She calms down when we return to the forest where snowmelt drops rain on both of us. Aki is as excited today, as she would be on a sunny summer Sunday. The little dog uses her nose to discover smells buried under the snow. I have to wait often for her to catalogue the best ones. Gray skies or blue, pee smells the same to her.

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