This morning, another storm sweeps through Juneau. Its rain discourages trips outside. But, I have good rain gear and a dog determined to have her daily adventure so we drive out to North Douglas where a trail meanders through protecting old growth trees. At the trail head, heavy drops slam into Aki’s fleece wrap. She gives a full body shake and trots into the woods where the spruce/hemlock canopy keeps out the worst of the storm. I think the rain has stopped until the trail takes us to a beaver pond where emerging water lily fronds, still infant brown, curl toward the gray sky, accepting the rain drop battering as if it were punishment from God.

Crossing through more woods, we reach the beach where aggressive surf hammers the gravel. It releases a salt sea smell that we can only enjoy when a westerly stirs the fjord waters of Lynn Canal. Crows stand at the tide line and stare at surf like a bloke might stare at football on TV. A small raft of parti-colored harlequin ducks appears and disappears in the offshore swell. Four form a line and turn to watch the little dog just before they slip behind a wave. As is always the case, they watch us and we them.

On a day with rain low and snow high we drive to connected mountain meadows where winter is enjoying one last rager before springs takes over. Falling snow adds to a skiable cover on the muskeg. When snow stops and the sun breaks loose of cloud cover it animates the tundra like meadows. Aki and I have to squint our eyes against the glare. Snow blindness conditions. I’m reminded of the day trips to the mountains behind Los Angeles “for the snow” I took when a child. There was beauty and pain then too, both provided by winter. The beauty most North Americans know: sun enriching white ground and the evergreens poking into a crayon blue sky. The pain was as simple: cold felt by bare hands or ones covered in cotton gloves. After an adulthood living in Alaska, I accept pain as a price for beauty. But it always surprised me when I was a California boy.

The varied thrush told me it is spring, as did the warmish temperature, sun, and a brace of eagles circling low over Chicken Ridge. The eagles warned that it is also a time of famine for the big birds by hunting cats in the neighborhood. Aki and I headed to the Fish Creek delta to check its grassy wetlands for migrating waterfowl.

The parking lot was empty when we arrived so it was no surprise to hear the complaints of unseen ducks and geese when we approached the pond. We spot hundreds of nervous birds through a screen of trees on the pond’s edge. Some sound like geese, but not our Canada residents. Even though I am hundreds of meters away, the birds explode into the air when I start taking pictures. In minutes they are gone.

As punishment for displacing the birds, I find the glacier hidden behind clouds. Maybe it is not punishment. The clouds reveal enough of the ice field mountains to create beautiful reflections in the waters of Smuggler’s Cove.