Bribery might work but I haven’t brought any dog treats. Aki has planted herself on the access road to the Perseverance Trail, front paws dug in against any effort to move her away from Cedar and her dog owner. They have just taken a spur trail home. Being a herder, she knows it is wrong for us to separate. She likes her people grouped together like sheep in a corral.

Aki has staked out her moral ground. It’s all black and white. The only gray she will recognize is the color of her fur. My only choice is to pick her up and carry her toward home. In her defense, it is a day where everything is either in light or shadow—black or white. The February sunshine hammers the bare-branched trees and shrubs along the trail to a dessert like clarity. Snow and ice patches are painfully bright. Strong light produces strong shadows. It’s heady stuff for us rain forest dwellers, so comfortable with soft gray light.

I was disappointed to find so many cars in the trailhead parking lot. But most of their occupants had already formed an ant-like line on the lake ice pointed toward the glacier’s ice cave. Aki and I keep to the eastern lake shore and wander toward Nugget Falls. Fog and low clouds form a grey and white ceiling above the lake, revealing only the lower half of Mendenhall Glacier.

Aki usually keeps pretty close to me but today she ranges like a cattle drive scout, returning for a checkup and then dashing in another direction. No dogs or people draw her away. I blame interesting smells, entertain the possibility of ghosts. One time I spot her far out on the lake where she has acres of ice to herself.

The flat light emphasizes the blue in the glacier ice and turns ice encasing the waterfall a gentle turquoise shade. Water still forces it way through the ice it created to push beneath the lake surface. Even diminished by its turquoise sarcophagus, the falling water intimidates me with its powerful song. Mesmerized, I almost miss a brief reveal of glacier and mountains provided by the sun.

Nature’s timing is off this weekend. Rather than prolong the wet, gray storm that washed though the rain forest for much of the last week, the sun returned on this last morning of 2016. At 8:30 it started a low arc over the Douglas Island ridge and plunged behind the mountains about 2 P.M. Even through a playwright would have scheduled sun’s reappearance tomorrow, when the New Year begins, I’d rather end the year with a day of crisp light rather than one dominated by flat gray. It reminds me that 2016 had sparkle as well as darkness.

Before the sun can disappear, the little dog and I climb to Gastineau Meadows where we look from shadow at the bright-white flanks of Sheep Mountain and Mt. Juneau. The meadow crossing gives Aki a chance to demonstrate her ability to scoot across the top of the snow pack even though as one of my legs plunges through the crust every four or five steps. Early this morning several deer and many snowshoe hares had crisscrossed the meadow, leaving tracks on last night’s snow. The deer had the roughest passage but even their slender legs didn’t pierce as deep as my size 10.5 boots.