An empty parking lot at the trail head promised solitude and we have it to enjoy for a few minutes. After the complaints of a disturbed eagle fade away it is quiet. Taking advantage of openings left by crumpling devil’s club leaves we leave the main trail to follow a faint path over to the river, There, 10 feet above the water we look down on two sand bars divided by a tea colored stream. Two sets of track, one bear and the other wolf parallel each other on the near bar and I wonder if they were left last night by two friends going to a party.

Aki quickly finds a way down to water level, sprints across the near bar, fords the stream to gain the other bar where she dashes up and down, ears flapping, tongue hanging carelessly to one side. After this brief but exuberant indulgence she returns to my feet and we return to the main trail.

Farther along sound like that made by a confusion of gulls carries from across the river. It’s made by children yelling, lot of them. With any chance of solitude gone I turn into Sister Anna Marie and my tormentors become Mouse Powers and I sharing a joke in the confession line. On realizing this I forgive the river children in the way Sister had to forgive us for bad church behavior.

With distance the irritation fades and we enter a dessert without wild sound or sights. The beach where we turn around is empty except for two ravens that fly back and forth over our heads, wings sounding like whisk brooms in the hand of angry janitors. The party is over for another year. Ravens might stick around to clean up but with the salmon spawned out there is nothing to attract life here but bugs in the water and bones on the beach.

We spot four nervous mergansers—local boys—-but no swans or cranes or geese. After the fish ducks fly off  only a small series of rollers make sound as they hit this gravel beach. With better luck we might have heard the creaking gate sound of migrating sand hill cranes.  That song use to dominate the brief Fall on the Kuskokwim River.

In the absence of wild sounds or sights we have a greater appreciation of the color of leaves dying so their plants may live. Death with a guaranteed resurrection. Today even the smallest clump of beach grass produces beauty in the dying.

This gravel road climbs up from Glacier Highway like it was built for logging. Wide enough for an timber or ore truck it rises past a gravel barrow pit then up through an old growth spruce forest that has never seen professional logging.

At first we are eye level with the forest understory plants, mostly berry brush and devil’s club displaying the reds and yellows of fall. Tall spruce trunks rise naked above the color. Further up the trail we look directly into the thick canopy growth that would block out the sky if we walked beneath it.

The trail flattens out before we rise above the tree tops and then cuts through a muskeg meadow marked by all terrain vehicle tracks. Here, rather than man’s road, we find bear scat darkened with blue berry juice. The bushes lining the meadow have been picked almost clean. I find one berry, late to ripen, that taste as sweet as store bought candy.

After returning to the road we move up to where the cloud cover reaches into the forest to obscure the spruce tops. With Spanish moss drapery distorting their shape the big trees look like ancient Scotch giants about to descend on the Peterson Creek spawning beds.

Aki walks past the giants without concern but stops where the road cuts through thick brush. Like the fool she know me to be, I move ahead. Fifty feet later she joins me at a gallop. Another fifty feet and she discovers something that she practically sucks down into her stomach and then runs large circles around me. Her victory dance.

My glasses fog up each time I try to focus the camera and moisture builds up on my face as we move further into the clouds. The road ends before we are fully enveloped. I’m tempted to follow a rough trail leading to whatever develop that justified construction of the road but turn back just before water logged brush can soak my unprotected jeans.

Shaman island, gloomy in early morning gray, stands exposed by the minus tide. It’s our Mont San Michel but without a monastery or crepes. Named for the Native holy man buried there, it usually enjoys a barrier of salt water.  Crossing the drying causeway we find a beautiful blend of wildflowers just above the high tide land — yellow Indian Paintbrush, red Columbines, and purple Harebells.

We start to circumnavigate the island but stop after realizing that every step around the island’s back side would crush a dozen barnacles. Most of the island lacks a beach. Here, on the back side, waves reach the base of a step slate cliff that protects the bones. Elsewhere on the island a thick tangle of spruce discourages the curious from entering its interior. I’m drawn to the cliff by displays of Harebell and Fireweed flowers that have somehow anchored themselves into the lichen covered rock face. The flowers have spaced themselves to mimic offerings left at a columbarium. Below thins sheets of fallen slate crack under my boots sounding like knackebrod being broken and shared on a Swedish picnic.

Pink salmon jump in the nearby sea, waiting for the flood tide to carry them to their birth waters in Peterson Creek. The small fry, crows and gulls, fight for scrapes on the creek mud flats. Eagles and Ravens squawk and jostle for position in spruce trees lining the beach. They wait for a more bountiful meal.

We leave over the temporary causeway for the trail home, passing a trusting song sparrow and a nervous deer. 

Late yesterday afternoon I was rode a bike along the Chena River under a strong northern sun. Where the Chena merges with the Tanana a woman exercised her German Shepard dog in the big river. The current drew me toward the river too with the promise of movement and coolness on a hot day.

Today it rained hard but brief leaving the smell of drying northern wildflowers and ground. We don’t have an opportunity to smell drying ground in Southeast Alaska for our dirt never dries out from frequent soakings of tide and rain. Its a gift enjoyed by dessert dwellers and subarctic people.

Midsummer, hot, sunny and still only two or three families are using this beach.  With the tide out, it forms a broad sloping border between sea and the spruce forest that has grown over the old Native village site.  Aki chases her frisbee while we pass the canoe haul out ground. This space, now covered with flowering shrubs and berry brush once accommodated large ocean going canoes formed from huge red cedar logs. Fast and stable, they could carry subsistence harvesters, hunters, or warriors quickly to their goal. Canoes from here in 1794 scared Captain Vancouver’s men of the Royal Navy into a retreat to the back side of Admiralty Island.

Today the beach is clean, swept by the solstice tide. Only Aki’s tracks and those of shore birds mar the canvas of sand. Small waves touch the beach in groups of threes and fives, giving a family of children an excuse to squeal.

Moving on we head for a lunch on the Eagle Scout bench at Lena Point. Here the Princess Kathleen, on its way to Skagway sank in 1952. It was a beautiful, well maintained ship with a bow line dropping straight to sea and triple stacks amidships. Too bad it was poorly handled on the night it wrecked.

Only a small buoy bag, attached by rope to the wreck, marks the Princess’ grave. Wild geraniums, now showing translucent purple blue flowers line the cliff above the wreck as if left by mourners   Over the site a school of salmon give away their location with multiple leaps into the air. On returning to sea from each jump they shatter the glistening calm of water at slack tide. From here we could have watched the Captain Vancouver’s long boat running for Admiralty Island.