Treadwell in the rain is a peaceful place. Thanks to the hardwood forest already established among the mining ruins, storm winds can’t reach Aki and I. She tends to spook on days like this and I wonder, again whether dogs can see ghosts. There should be plenty of them here where just over 100 years ago tunnels running under Gastineau Channel collapsed and flooded out the mine. Before that, it would have been a place for me to avoid—crowded and dominated by the pounding noise of machines crushing the gold out of ore.

I would have mourned the clear cutting of the original old growth forest and felt sorry for the Chinese immigrants who struggled to dig the ten mile long ditch needed to deliver mountain water to the mining town. I would also have admired the iron workers who cast the large gears needed to process ore. Today, the gears lay sprawled at the base of spruce and cottonwoods, mining cars waits for the forest to close in, and the only noise is made by a bossy Stellar Jay.

Aki ignores the kingfisher that seems to me to be hunkering down on a small glacier erratic. It’s a fool’s errand to attribute emotions to a bird but expressive kingfishers invite the attention. This one on its small bolder might have been stunned into stillness from a just injected meal. It could be waiting, with patience, for its feathers to dry from a recent downpour that soaked the forest and created rivulets that eroded parts of the forest trail we took to reach this beach. It might just be sulking as another kingfisher, on his one own glacial erratic a hundred meters down the beach, savors a recently caught herring.

When a shaft of sunlight illuminates white gulls that wander a patch of orange-brown rockweed just delivered by last night’s storm surge, I think of the rainbow. It formed over Admiralty Island during the downpour we drove through to reach the trailhead. Aki, didn’t God seal his promise to Noah of no more catastrophic floods with a rainbow.

I can accept the promise of no more civilization ending floods but know rainbows never promise the end of rain. Even as we leave the beach from the old growth, drops dimple the water around a curious seal.

Where beavers recently flooded part of the forest, I see another possible portent: three woodpeckers hammering the same section of an old spruce tree. Two are sapsuckers. The other hunts insects. Why do they crowd together in a rain forest full of targets? The dog has no answers and the birds—they never talk to me.

Back in Juneau and back with Aki, I load the little dog into the car and head out to North Douglas Island. This morning’s light, but steady rain doesn’t deter us. We stop near the boat ramp where fog rising off Fritz Cove obscures the industrial buildings that dot the north section of the Mendenhall wetlands. For once, we can see the glacier snake off the Juneau ice field between coastal mountains as one could have before Joe Juneau and Richard Harris followed Chief Kowee up Gold Creek—before the mining and all that followed.

Minutes later, we walk onto the Rainforest trail and hear the voice of a tour guide educating cruise ship passengers about the old growth. We will pass three more guided groups before the walk ends. During interludes when the forest manages to swallow projected voices and camera clicks, water and bird songs dominate. “Plunk….plunk…plunk,” chant drops striking elephant-ear like skunk cabbage leaves while the varied thrush whistles.