Tiny lilac colored violets line this trail. Each turns it face downward as if afraid of the rain. Carefully lifting one flower to face me, I see the delicate beauty we expect from Alaska wildflowers. “Look up and show off for soon you will be making seeds while insects use your leaves for folder.”

Aki doesn’t care about these shy maidens. She is here to harvest the rich smells of this forest and the creek draining it.

In a few weeks salmon will battle for space on the spawning redds. Bears, eagles and ravens will follow to fatten on fish flesh and eggs. If I return then it will be with a fly rod, not Aki. Today’s hike is about the forest and its plants — a feast of subtle colors and shapes with the running river sound for accompaniment. Simple  things draw my eye like these rain drops standing up on the leaves of a wild cucumber. I measure the berry and current crops and plan a return trip in late summer for harvest. So rich in food this place of simple greens and browns that make a star of even the shy violet.

Today it’s back to familiar ground that fills the space between Eagle River and the sea. The trail takes us up river through old growth spruce forest before breaking left toward a beautiful muskeg meadow. There we must walk on a recently laid boardwalk which the marsh plants are already trying to colonize. But first the forest, now jammed with flowering berry plants and hungry mosquitos.

I want to linger by the berry bushes in bloom — Salmon, elder, high bush cranberry, and currant — but the bugs move us on, their stings like wounds from  a riot policeman’s baton. Aki is trotting on with her entourage of mosquitos when I stop to investigate what drew a coven of ravens to this spot. They skulked away on our approach and reassemble in a nearby tree to heap verbal abuse on we the innocent. The birds must be on to something good but the bugs won’t leave time to investigate. In my haste to escape I almost step in fresh bear scat. Maybe the ravens were waiting for him to finish up a meal so they can enjoy the scraps .

Breaking from the forest we find tall blue lupine and stunted spruce forming the border of the muskeg meadow. I am taken with the field of arctic cotton that completes with shooting stars and chocolate lilies for space on the boggy ground. The cotton look like a kindergarden art project — cotton balls glued on lengths of green wire.

Three hundred meters further we cross Glacier Highway and reach a rich tidelands meadow running to the sea. Here the flowers, fertilized by generations of spawned out salmon form great swaths of magenta, blue, yellow and chocolate brown. Most of the resident Canada Geese flock is hunkered down across the river complaining about the weather.   A quiet five of their brethren studiously feed on a small strip of land soon to be reclaimed by the rising tide.

A high tide can make the next portion of trail impassable so we hurry on and return to the forest with its mosquitos, then the car.

Today Aki and I climb the old mining road to the head of Ebner Falls, passing  beauty and ghosts. We also pass cascades. Most are made of water but one of is of red flowering Columbines that together mimic the steep streams tumbling down Mt. Juneau’s avalanche chutes. With patience and time we could see Anna Hummingbirds feed on the flowers now spread wide open. There is only time for a dash to Ebner Falls and then back to Chicken Ridge where I will catch a  ride to Tee Harbor and then, with luck, catch a King Salmon.

We pass the steep slope where a young runner fell to his death on November ice. From here you can see Ebner Falls roar into Gold Creek. The falls blast through a narrow portal in glacial rock to fall over 100 feet into the creek. The government once kept a bench near the top of the falls but removed it after too many died falling in. I can see how it happens. At the top of the falls, Gold Creek is just a refreshing stream broken by large rocks as it flows through flat ground.  After a hot hike from town people venture into the stream, fall against a rock and then go over a precipice into the vortex. Last summer Search and Rescue saved one young berry picker who slipped into danger. The year before a young girl fell and was never found.

With prayers for the departed we return home and I go fishing for salmon. My friend and I try for King Salmon but settle for silver bright chums (dogs). Their red flesh makes great kipper treats we will enjoy next winter.

We listen to old blues or rock music when the baseball games aren’t on the boat radio. My fishing partner was dancing on the boat’s rear deck to a B.B. King song when the second salmon bit.  I saw it all, the fisherman, with arms slightly out twisting with Mr. King’s music and then pointing at his fishing pole. The pole bending over from the pressure of the strike. He playing the fish while I brought in the other line and readied the net. Our friends cruising by in their boat, looks of dismay or perhaps respect on their faces.

King Salmon reach Juneau first followed by chums, and pinks. Finally, in he fall the tasty and plentiful Silver Salmon arrive to fill our freezers. The kings, with fat red flesh can run 40 pounds. One can feed us most of the winter.  They have moved on toward their spawning streams, pushed out by by the more numerous chums.

While we fish a humpback whale hammers herring at the harbor mouth before following us up the Breadline troll run. We both follow the herring, he for food, and we in hopes that they will attract the King Salmon. The water runs deep here and the whale cruises  close against the shore, 100 meters behind us. I worry that we block his passage but he skirts around our boat, raises flukes to the sky and sounds.  We don’t see the whale again until reentering the harbor, where we watch the humpback throws himself into the air in a breach and crash with flukes flapping into the sea.

This trail drops down a series of alpine muskeg meadows to tree line. Here in the first meadow, plants are just shaking off winter.  These low growing blue berry bushes, which produce the sweetest fruit haven’t flowered while their Bog Rosemary neighbors only show tight magenta fists of buds.

Spring progresses as we drop even a few meters in elevation and find the rosemary in full bloom in the second meadow. A isolated pocket of shooting stars,     flowers tilted demurely down are a pleasant find.  Closed buds of Labrador Tea blossoms stand nearby. In the next meadow burst flowers of this plant lay open to the sun.

These meadows could cure the homesickness of visitors from most northern lands with their blueberry berry blossoms, arctic cotton stands, and clumps of heather. Here blooms our Cloud Berry blooms, a plant called the Salmon Berry by Yupik Eskimos and Hjortron by the Swedes. There grows Mountain Cranberriy so like the Scandinavian Lingonberry.

Dropping through another meadow, this one comfortably settled into summer, we reach tree line and enter an old growth forest drained by Fish Creek.  Only three stirring Salmon Berry blossoms break the brown and green monopoly of these woods

Aki plays grab tail with a passing Labrador then we are alone on the Treadwell Ditch Trail. Miners built the ditch in 1889 to carry water to the raceways of the stamp mill near the present town of Douglas.  Decaying stumps of once giant spruce trees show give evidence of where they found wood to line the ditch.  You can almost make out the notches they cut for the spring boards they stood on to work their long whip saws and hear the rhythmic ripping sound made by its cross cut blade biting through several centuries of wood.

Early risings are one of the few benefits of jet lag. This morning I rouse Aki at 4:30 to walk the Flume. This wooden channel runs through old growth spruce along the lower slopes of Mt. Juneau, carrying water to a small hydroelectric plant near our grocery store. It bridges the old Perseverance Mine Road and a street that will bring us back to Chicken Ridge. This morning we have it to ourselves.

Bears, deers and ravens own these early morning hours. Aki walks a respectful distance behind me on the trail which usually means she smells something large and wild. At first we walk with caution but only see ravens and squirrels that tease Aki from the safety of high tree limbs.

Grey has replaced blue in the sky but on this morning it gives peace not disappointment. The past few days of hot sunny weather have melted much of the  mountain snow and the resulting runoff fills Gold Creek and pulses beneath our feet in the Flume. The sound carries away any concern I might have about bears with cubs and I stop frequently to look for feeding deer.  The woods along the trail cut off most views but we still manage to see the Mt. Juneau waterfall through a closing gap in the alders.

Today Aki and I visit an old friend — the moraine trail.  Sunlight melts the remaining snow and rouses mosquitos. Soon these pests will close the more interesting sections of this ground where lightly traveled paths cross thick blankets of moss and skirt pot hole lakes. From such a path I spot a pair of Mallard ducks quietly feeding a few feet away. Aki, exploring ground recently mined for roots by a bear never sees the birds. They glide out of sight, every detail of the drake’s beauty emboldened by early morning light. Even the hen’s subtle coat of gray and brown draws a second glance.

Being so close to the glacier, this ground recovers slowly from winter.  The animals of summer must wait patiently for the bust out of spring. Things are changing. The manic chittery bird sounds of winter harvesters has been replaced with long sweet love songs.

When a bright yellow warbler lands near us on a still bare willow I know summer is near and silently urge these willows and alders to get on with it. Minutes later we reach the little wooden bridge that crosses a long thin pond. Each year meadow grass claims more and more of the pond. In my life time it will disappear but for now there is enough water to surround a handful of small glacier erratics that have spaced themselves like a chain of islands in the pond. I can’t explain the draw of the scene other than that it calms me like views of a Japanese rock garden. Behind a mountain blocks half the sky. With a ten minute walk I could have a world class view the glacier.  We return to the moss covered forest path as I carry the image of rocks reflecting in a dying pond back to the car.