Category Archives: solitude

Surviving Frost

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Aki, these deer trails are untrustworthy. The little dog gives me her “you can’t be left alone in the woods” look and leads me through a maze of frosted pines and onto a muskeg meadow. More pines dot the meadow. Unlike their healthy-looking brothers we just walked through, these pines have led a tough life. Some are only skeletons. Wind has carried away their exhaled moisture before it could form into frost crystals. But beneath the trees, fragile frost feathers shaped like butterfly wings, cling to every blade of grass.

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Mountains surround the meadow. They are in the light. We are not. That may change soon. The sun is curling around the curl of a southern hill. Already it’s light is flooding the next meadow over where frost butterflies may already be taking flight.

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Still Snowy

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Aki and I are back on the glacial moraine where only pioneer plants grow. A second ago in geologic time, the Mendenhall Glacier covered the area where we walk. Now willows and alders work to covert poor soil to good. In areas where the moraine has been ice free longer, spruce and cottonwood trees grow close together like they would in a forest recovering from clear cut logging. The path we take has been compacted by previous hikers. If we step off it, we’d sink into deep, soft snow. We stay on the path.

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Snowshoe hare tracks cross the trail in many places. Last night a deer struggled through the deep snow to reach the trail and then used it to speed up her trip to a foraging area. Otters left tracks of their undulating movement through the woods. I look for recent wolf tracks but find only those of wandering dogs.

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Downtown, where Aki keeps her kennel, rain and warm temperatures have already stripped the trees of snow. But here they still carry heavy burdens of white. The glacier keeps the moraine cool while downtown thaws. Every turn of the corner provides another greeting card image to enjoy. We detour down a side trail that provides a view of a frozen slough. Before it retreated, the glacier dropped a dozen small boulders on the slough in a pattern that would please a Japanese gardener. In summer the rocks rise above water like an archipelago of islands. Snow now blurs the boundary between rock and ice. Odd shaped rocks have become pyramids or domes.

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Mountain Soliloquy

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It’s sunrise on Gastineau Meadow. There are no clouds to block the light so it illuminates the meadow’s frozen surface, hitting the golden grass at an oblique angle. In less than a minute I’m 30 meters in, camera clicking, looking for Aki. If the sunlight weren’t highlighting the fur on her raised ears I wouldn’t be able to spot the little dog. She is still on the gravel trail waiting for me to come to my senses.

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She has been burned twice metaphorically by following me onto the meadow. Once she trotted after me in early fall and dropped chest-deep into meadow mire. The other time was after a winter storm when the little dog floundered in deep snow until I rescued her. Today, when I whistle, Aki runs to a spot halfway between the trail and me and stops, perhaps giving a chance to reconsider my rash decision. When I don’t she catches up and we both enjoy a meander over the rock-hard meadow muskeg.

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The strong sunlight softens the images of the mountains it backlights, like Jumbo, Sheep, and Gastineau Peak. But the sun gives Mt. Juneau the position of pride like it is Hamlet reciting a soliloquy. Most of my early photos feature the mountain.

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At the northern edge of the meadow I take a well-used animal trail that would allow a deer or wolf to view activity of the meadow without being seen. Aki follows close at my heals, like she does when nervous or uncertain. She calms down after we spot the fresh scat of a deer buck. The green-colored poop does not steam like it did when just dropped by the deer but it hasn’t been here long enough to earn a coating of frost.

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Aki pulls ahead and tries to lead me toward a human trail we have used many times to drop off the meadow. But I want to follow animal paths marked by broken blades of grass and crushed moss. Aki doesn’t mind. Her tiny frame can slip between narrow openings between alders like a deer and slide under windfalls that I have to struggle over. She reaches the human trail while I am eating frozen blue berries in the middle of an alder thicket.  The sun has awakened the local birds—a grumpy bluejay, industrious red-breasted sap sucker, and a cloud of black-capped chickadees that chit and chirp as they feed.

Fading Fall

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On his rainless day that started with full sunshine that faded to gray when a cloud bank moved in off the Pacific, Aki and I have the moraine to ourselves. I suppose that is not quite true. There are squirrels chitterling challenges at the little dog. The silence we would otherwise enjoy is broken by fast fired rifles booming out from the nearby rifle range.

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Aki rolls in some fresh beaver scat as we walk through one of their clear-cut areas. Water backing up from one of their larger damns floods the spot that offers the best view of their lake. But we don’t see the big rodents. Two Barrow golden eye ducks, spooked by our presence, burst off of the lake but some return to the surface. In a few moments they calm down and swim slowly in front of where we stand. They clearly intend to claim possession of this lake, at least until the first hard freeze.

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The lakeside cottonwood trees and willows still possess most of their leaves but that will change during the next windstorm. Already their leaves are closer to brown than autumn yellow.

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Soft Ice and Silence

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Aki dashes between her other human and me, finding good, firm footing on the snow-covered lake. The number of parked cars near the trailhead led me to expect a crowd on the lake. But all who used the cars to drive here are skiing in the campground. That trail, set by a snowmachine over a paved road, offers little danger and only one view of the glacier. If the wind isn’t blowing across it, we usually chose the lake. Its trail gives you an unobstructed view of the river of ice for more than a kilometer and a half. We have only enjoyed the view for a minute before finding a patch of open water, apparently made when the snowmachine groomer’s roller punched through the ice.

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We ski on toward the glacier, looking for soft spots and finding none. Torn cloud fragments wreath Mt. McGinnis and Thunder Mountain. If the lake is groaning under its twenty inch thick blanket of snow, we don’t hear it. We don’t hear anything but Aki’s panting and the scraping of our skis over the slightly icy track.

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The groomer’s snowmachine approaches after we make the turn back to the car. After it growls past. a trio of skiers slips onto the lake followed by several more. I am not surprised. Like I have many times in the past, the incomers have waited for the heavy machine to test the ice before venturing on to it.

New Land

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Aki porpoises through the five-inch layer of new snow covering Mendenhall Lake. She doesn’t smile, like some dogs, but her body language—ears flapping, front legs extended—conveys joy. Me too, I think. The lake extends for miles from Skater’s Cabin to the glacier. The handful of skiers already on the ice are lost in dissipating fog. I can almost believe that we are the first to use a new borne land.

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Usually the weather or crowds punish us when we ski on the lake. Cold, often assisted by wind, numbs my hand and face, fogs my glasses. On sunny, windless days, the ski trails can fill up like ride lines at Disneyland. But, when we start today’s ski, it 32 degrees. No wind makes it feel colder or banishes the fog that glistens in morning sun. The temperature climbs as we approach the glacier. The snow starts clumping on my skis. The fog fades.

 

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In an hour, after they have enjoyed a good Saturday sleep in and a fry up breakfast, Juneauites will fill up the parking spaces near the campground and skater’s cabin. There will be squeals and shouts of appreciation. There will be lots of selfies. None of them will capture my little dog flying over five inches of still-crisp snow.

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Silence

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I bring a digital recorder along on this walk to record descriptions of the sounds we hear while rounding the False Outer Point headland. But, the day’s calm, gray skies provide no wind to rattle the spruce boughs or drive surf onto the shore. Early on we pass an eagle but it never belts out its usual high-pitched cry of annoyance. Red Squirrels eat spruce seeds on the headland cliff without chitterling at Aki. Only discarded seed casings spiraling to the beach give evidence of their presence.

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A scattering of scoters floating between us and Shaman Island mutter when we enter their privacy range but stop after they paddle ten meters further into Lynn Canal. The faint crow of a crow floats to us from the island where a raven is imitating a barking dog. Soon both fall into silence.

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I waste the gifted silence by crunching through a midden of empty mussel shells and then a frozen drift of severed rockweed. Most of the steps the little dog and I take dislodge beach rocks or pebbles. They produce a bottom-of-the-well sound when they strike each other. When we stop walking, we can hear a stream flow down the headland bluff and over beach gravel to salt water. In the stream, ice has formed an inverted bass clef at the edge of a tiny waterfall. I’d like to ask the little dog why the sound of sparkling water rushing over gravel calms. Aki drinks the clear water and then calmly looks to me.

In fifteen minutes blasting will start at a nearby barrow site. I have to get Aki to the car before the first explosion. Otherwise the little dog will panic and hide herself in the thick woods on the ridge of False Outer Point. That would be a sad end to this walk of silence.

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Winter Quiet

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Aki and I leave Chicken Ridge early, before the scheduled start of the Women’s March. In a half-an-hour our escape route down Main Street will be blocked. The sun crowns above Pt. Salisbury, infusing wispy clouds above the channel with Easter-egg colors. It’s cold and windy but the little dog and I are dressed for it and the colder temperature we will have along the Eagle River.

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The big meadow that feeds migratory birds Spring and Fall wears a new covering of snow, untracked except for those left by a cross country skier and a clutch of snowshoe hares. One bald eagle skulks near the meadows edge where it searches the riverbanks for food. Small lines of surf roll up river and the incoming tide lifts and cracks new ice. We have to take a long detour around the normally dry meadow channel because chucks of heavy ice now slosh against each other on tidal water.

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This early (It’s sunrise) I expect solitude but we meet a group of young woman chattering and sliding over the new snow on skis. They fill the air with something like tropical bird song, a impression reinforced by the flash and color of their hi-tech clothes. Soon winter-quiet returns. The sun breaks over a forested hill to sparkle the new snow and the great blocks of river ice stranded on the meadow by the tide. In the forest I find a single high bush cranberry set to glowing by a streak of sunlight that managed to penetrate the old growth. Made sweet by the winter freeze, it tastes as good as it looks.

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Desert Dreams

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I wonder if Aki ever dreams of other climates when we walk down a rain forest trail on a hard day. I do. On this wet, windy transit of a north Douglas trail, I pretend that it will soon lead onto the south rim of the Grand Canyon just as the sun rises to set off the sunset colors of layered rock and sand. But the trail will never lead me out of this land of greens and browns so subtle that they could be shades of gray. It will take me to a beach exposed by an ebbing tide.

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The rain stops when we reach the beach. A gang of surly looking gulls watch us as a formation of four harlequin ducks patrols offshore. Further out, white caps tromp across Lynn Canal and clouds from today’s storm obscure the mountains. Small, unexpected waves of contentment wash though me, keeping time with the ones dying on the shore. As fat drops of rain again soak her fur, Aki gives me a look that might be an accusation that I have lost my mind or a plea to book us both space on a jet to Arizona.

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Sun and Silence Before the Storm

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There’s rain in Downtown Juneau, brought by a curl of clouds that rode in last night on a Pacific low. But north of town, where the little dog and I walk along a Lynn Canal beach, it’s sunny. A few miles south, clouds push up against a weakening high-pressure ridge that reaches back to the Yukon Territory. Soon, gray clouds will blanket our sun, but not before we reach a little pocket cove where we’ve seen whales, sea lions, seals, and once an ocean-going beaver.

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We work our way over rocks made slick by spray and moss to where the cove opens into the canal. I wait for the magic, for a brace of seals to round the headland or an eagle to pull something from the sea. It too late for whales but I strain to see one out in Lynn Canal. It is empty as is the sky and the trees surrounding us—empty of wild things but also of those made by man. All summer prop planes and helicopters flew over this place while fishing boats and whale watching rigs made noisy passages up the canal. Today, there is silence broken only by tiny waves strikes. Silence, and sun before the next storm.

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