The beauty of the Gold Creek Valley shows through the fog, rain, and gloom. I credit the yellows of willows and cottonwoods whose leaves will be swept away in the next strong wind event. Aki trots over the top of the flume through a shower of rain and falling leaves.
Two battered silver salmon maintain station in a Switzer Creek eddy. I can see a child’s slide that the fish had to swim past to reach their holding water. The head of one fish is white with scars but neither move with the lethargy of spawned-out salmon. I’m thinking that they took a wrong turn out in the Gulf of Alaska or spent too long at a herring feed. For whatever reason they missed the procreation party. Nature won’t allow them to spend another year fattening up in salt water so they are doomed to hunker until death in an ice covered hole.
When Aki grows impatient we move up creek through an old growth forest, then onto the boardwalk trail across Switzer Meadow. Black slime makes the submerged boards too slick for my boots and I almost fall several times before we can reach an old corduroy road paved with fallen tree trunks. They must not be chasing eagles away from the nearby dump because none of the big birds perch in the spruce lining the meadow.
We hear city noise in the hillside forest: the city bus shifting gears as it heads to Lemon Creek State Prison, heavy equipment moving gravel, the beep-beep-beep of a truck full of televisions backing up to the Walmart loading dock. Except for the forest and the neighborhood of middle class houses drained by Switzer Creek, all the land we could easily reach by foot is zoned commercial. We drop down into a small creek’s drainage and find a place where kids could camp during the summer. With the stream noise blocking that made in our industrial area they could pretend they were in the heart of darkness.
Just past the campsite we enter the true dark heart of forest recovering from a 1930’s clearcut. Nothing grows beneath uniformly thin spruce. Their roots, thin and crooked as a witch’s fingers, reach across the trail. Someone has marked the way out with pink florescent tape. We follow it back to the older forest and find the two salmon still hanging out, still looking for the party.
Aki dances around as I prepare for this afternoon’s expedition. God blessed her and all dogs with a weak short-term memory. She seems to have forgotten yesterday’s windy walk through the woods.
Soft, sparse rain falls as we walk onto the moraine. A fog ghost rises from a grove of yellow leafed cottonwoods and climbs up the spruce green wall of Thunder Mountain. Recent weather has put me in an Old Testament kind of mood so I pretend that the rising white form proves cosmic acceptance of our sacrifice during the just ended wet summer. (Juneau set a seasonal record for rainfall). But I know better.
Years in Alaska have taught me that bad weather never guarantees future stretches of good. Last summer’s monsoon season didn’t produce any cosmic credit that we can cash for a dump of snow followed by weeks of winter sun. I also know that a good stretch of summer sunshine creates a debit that can only be paid while wearing rain gear or arctic gear to block the icy Taku winds.
Aki doesn’t worry about cosmic imbalance or even the rain. She bounds around the moraine playing with a heard of water dogs that gallop up to her with wagging tails and goofy grins. I urge her to let them go and move on to the shore of Moose Lake so I can enjoy the reflection of the blue iced glacier underlined with a jagged line of yellow cottonwoods. We reach it just in time for a few quick photographs of the ice reflected in gently dimpled lake. Then, a deluge destroys the reflective power of the water. I wonder why this won’t earn us any points. 
The day broke well on Chicken Ridge, announced by the slap of Sunday’s paper on almost dry ground. “Where shall we go today, little dog?” Aki ignores the question and heads for the kitchen, nails clacking on the hardwood floor. Her tongue lifts water from her dish when the first blast of wind driven rain slams into our house. Heavy raindrops appear to atomize when each strikes our neighbor’s metal roof. Wind carries the resulting vapor toward Gastineau Channel.
The poodle mix withdraws to the back of her kennel as I carry out the prep work for a walk in the woods—fill water bottle; grab camera, leash, pop bags, fleece for Aki; don rain gear, insulated Elmer Fudd hat, boots. She joins me just before I open the front door and we fight our way through wind and rain to the car.
We park at the edge of an old growth forest with a trail that leads to the sea. Aki dashes into the woods where it is calm and even free of rain. A gentle breeze tosses ferns that grow on the roots of a wind-tumbled spruce. Reminded of the power of wind, I look to canopy to see if the tops of the century old spruce trees bend. They don’t. Deep in the woods we hear the trickle of water in swollen streams but not the crack and creak of trees struggling in a serious wind. Still, Aki walks with caution; quick to jump when a stray alder leaf flutters toward her.
We follow a trail that snakes around broad circles of spruce root wads ripped from the ground when 100 miles an hour winds toppled the tree they once gave life. I’d like to be in the woods when such a wind drops giants but each time a storm brings them, common sense convinces me to hunker down on the ridge and ride it out.
Even on the bordering beach, the great trees shelter us. Gusts break over the tops of the tall spruce to darken the otherwise calm water with small, spiraling ripples. Some rip off isolated alder leaves that twirl and spin to beach. Apparently feeling exposed, Aki dances back into the woods. I follow, my mind filled with a memory of Cara Dillon singing “Donald of Glencoe.” I think of that exposed Scottish glen and the coast between Oban and Fort William so open to the wind. Is the sister to this Alaskan wind scouring the Highlands? “Ponder that little dog, those coastal Scots can’t even duck into the woods for shelter. The dog ignores my admonishment. We motor through the woods. She doesn’t doddle when asked to hop into the car.
After all my whining about the recent spate of wet weather I probably do not deserve this crisp, sunny day. Alaskans are supposed to suffer in silence. My only complaint on this walk through forest to the beach is that the fall color has peaked. The Douglas Maples show some color but only a few scarlet leaves still cling to beach side crab apple trees.
Aki is busy herding her charges—today another guy and me. We break through the woods and sit on a rocky shelf above Favorite Passage. Six harlequin ducks paddle their party-colored bodies along the shore until a sea lion cruises through. Out in the passage a humpback whale breaches and falls, breaches and falls, sending a gush of water upward each time he returns to the sea. He dances alone, without the presence of the tourist boats that had tracked him and his kind all summer. For this afternoon, it’s just Aki, our friend, a sea lion, colorful ducks, and a whale dancing in the sun.
I thought that three days of heavy rain washed all the smells off this trail but Aki manages to find lots of work for her nose. I walk, head down, parka hood up and listen to the simple tattoo of raindrops on my hi-tech rain gear. No one else shares the wet joy with us. At least it’s warm rain—falling through 50 degree F. air so I am safe wearing cotton. In a week or two, when the temperature drops to hypothermia range, I’ll be hiking in wool and synthetics.
At the edge of a mountain meadow the rain stops and the sun returns. A rainbow arcs over Mt. Juneau. I know it is nothing more than sunlight shinning through saturated air above the mountain and not a sign of better weather. In minutes we are back in the rain.
If Aki is a typical dog, they have no interest in a raindrop’s sparkle or light shinning yellow through a translucent devil’s club leaf. She reacts to sudden movement, like a squirrel’s scamper or dark shapes that could be bears. Why am I drawn to nature’s bling? If I look at clumps of Oregon grapes, my eye is drawn to the light collected in the remnants of the last rain shower that cling to single grapes. What evolutionary purpose is served by making me a sucker for sucker for nature’s shiny things? shower that clings to a single grape. What evolutionary purpose is served by making me a sucker for nature’s shiny things?
I am cheating Aki, at least that’s what she thinks. We have to squeeze in a quick walk this morning because I have a workshop for the rest of the day. To keep her somewhat clean, I take her on the Twin Lakes paved walking path. Normally, this would send the little dog over the moon with joy because it is a top dog walk path on the weekends. But today, it rains. The wind sweeps the path clean of everyone but my stubborn self and the little, low to the ground dog.
Twin Lakes were formed by the construction of Juneau’s only four lane highway. It cut off two bays from Gastineau Channel. On the map, the highway forms the straight line of a poorly drawn capital letter, “B.” The path outlines the twin swellings to the right of the upright. The lake waters magnify truck rumblings from the highway and no forest blocks the rain or the sight of highway traffic. It has little to offer but light and a view of the Douglas Island mountains rising above Gastineau Channel and the highway. But these, Aki and I have to ourselves.
I shouldn’t be frustrated. Last night’s rain showers ended at first light and I can see the ridges on both sides of the Gold Creek Valley. Aki has traded sniffs with some dog friends and hasn’t growled at anyone except for an innocent looking longhaired dachshund that eyed her in fear. The sun is the trouble. To be more accurate, it’s the broken clouds that parse out the sun’s enriching rays. They roll back enough to release a shaft of light onto a patch of alders, all covered with dead leaves but not the solitary cottonwood tree that, in full sun, would be a yellow candle against its mountainside of green spruce. When sunlight does reach the cottonwood, I am busy bagging Aki’s scat. Poop in bag, I raise the camera and find the sun gone. I move up the trail. Sun shafts, like lightening, can’t strike the same tree. Whipping around, I see the cottonwood’s again jewel yellow leaves dull as the sun moves back to the alders.
It doesn’t get any better until we reached the overlook where we meet a stay-at -home dad shoehorning in some alone time before his child gets out of school. He gives me a little lecture on cloud formation (helpful) as out of the corner of my eye I spot the a shaft of sun turning a cloud of brown-yellow willow leaves gold. I ignore the show and listen. We part without enriching either’s day and I head back to Chicken Ridge. Multiple shafts of light escape the clouds and light up the view I had at the overlook. If I had done the right thing and sat with the man, had conversation, we both could have enjoyed sun light up the deep gorge and its still green covered walls, might have become friends. The teacher managing the clouds gives me two consolation prizes—a slash of light across the creek valley and an illuminated waterfall.
I was looking for fall color in fog, not bears, when I let Aki show me the way into the Gold Creek Valley. The cottonwoods provided a little drama, but not enough to encourage a climb further up the valley so we cross the creek and headed west on the Flume Trail. I followed the little dog down a steep trail to Gold Creek and stopped just below a muddy section to wondered whether the bear, whose paw slipped and left five parallel grooves on the dun colored mud felt pleasure or fear. If it was the young black bear we saw on 7th street last Tuesday night, she must have enjoyed the trill. Still wet from crossing Gold Creek, she moved with surprising grace, the kind some rhythmic overweight people reveal when they dance. The bear bounced step by step down the street, stopped at each trash can to make sure they didn’t contain something tasty, then disappeared into a neighbor’s open garage. Such sweetness; such dangerous behavior. Already addicted to garbage and comfortable around people, the little bruin is not long for this world.
Walking with Aki 