Tag: hiking

Snow in April

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April is fooling with us. A winter storm has blanketed the Tanana Valley again. We gape at twelve inches of snow that have accumulated overnight. Is winter never going to end? We are not even asking for daffodils and tulips, like the ones we jealously regard in Facebook posts by friends in the lower 48 States. We would be content just knowing that great boulders of ice are jumbling and crashing as the frozen rivers break apart. It would reassure us that Spring is, indeed, on its way. Alas, nothing so far. No pussy willows clinging to stark branches. No crusted riverbanks re-emerging. No patches of dirt beneath the snow.

Instead, snow is piling high against the window ledges. Before long we’ll be able to slide off our rooftops with sleds. On Cleary Summit, Skiland has extended its season until the end of May. In Nenana, where a betting game has people casting their vote as to when the ice will go out on the Tanana River, people are changing their guess to early June. The sound of snowmachines fills the air again. Perhaps we put our snowshoes away too early.

We’ll simply have to outsmart winter, Rebecca and Tara and I decide. If Spring is not coming, we can still walk along the trails in the woods with the dogs. We are Alaskans. We will not succumb to a little snow. Our friend Dawn and her pup bowed out for our walk today. Thus, our typical group of four musketeers has dwindled to the present three stooges. Equipped with dog leashes and a resolve to tackle the snow, we set off with four bounding dogs. 

We encounter no one on the snowy trails. We are spared the humiliation of meeting the black labrador retrievers, a group of five dogs that we have encountered often on previous walks. They were so well behaved they put our mixed bunch of dogs to shame. While the black labs sat unmoving beside the trail to let us pass, not even twitching a tail and quietly heeding the commands of their owners, our dogs catapulted past them in a snowy cloud of general chaos, completely disregarding our reprimanding shouts. We have earned our name of “bad dog squad” multifold.

We walk in single file in the deep snow. Rebecca breaks trail. I follow. Tara is the caboose. Every so often one of us yells “Incoming!” as the dog chase each other and shove by us. We brace ourselves for impact as Fitz, the alpha female, whips by with a branch in her mouth. Buddy, Jack and Elias, the boys, are trying their best to get it from her. Knees bent, we exhale. We are still standing. We keep an eye out for moose, often a close encounter in the woods. Jack and Elias, the younger ones, would charge right after them. We yell at Fitz when she finds moose poop along the trail that she sees fit to eat.

“Can you shorten your steps?” I pant after Rebecca, whose stride is longer than mine.  I try to follow her deep imprints in the snow. “This snow is too much for me.”

Behind me, Tara grumbles. “I should have just stayed in New Zealand on the trip I took last year.”

Why on earth do we choose to stay in Alaska? I am the “newcomer” with twenty years under my belt. Tara has been here for close to thirty. Rebecca has called Alaska home for her whole life. Typical of long-term Alaskans, we gripe about the weather. Did we imagine, even for a moment, that we wouldn’t see snow again?

Today our walk took us twice as long as usual. Deep snow drifts made our plodding progress more slowly. We are soaked through with sweat at the exertion. When we emerge from the woods, however, we feel more energized than when we started. This is why we stay in Alaska. Sometimes it is enough to go for a long walk with old friends, even if the snowy day falls into April. We can be content to watch a group of dogs romp and wrestle. We still marvel at a landscape turned exquisite with new snow. Even as we shake the snow from our coats and mittens and load wet dogs into car trunks, we know that the gentler season is ahead.

“In the depths of winter I finally learned that within me lay an invincible summer.” – Albert Camus

Blueberry Alaska

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August in Alaska and the blueberries are fruiting, a sign that summer is drawing to an end faster than usual this year. It has been cooler, more rainy, and, because of the pandemic, a more withdrawn summer. The end of summer rituals, however, hold fast.

“Let’s go blueberry picking,” I suggested to Helen, my youngest child. “Before it’s too late.”

She sat at the kitchen counter, looking up, distracted, from her laptop. She had been contemplating the college course catalog, thinking about classes she might enroll in for the fall. In just a couple of weeks, she will depart, leave Alaska, the place she was born and raised in, the home that built her. She is eager to go to the lower 48 States, to embark on the adventure. Her excitement, however, is tinged with worry. “Will it even be a normal college experience?” she asked.

Amid the Covid pandemic, she signed a school contract, one in which she promised to social distance, to wear a mask, to abide by one-way hallways, plexiglass partitions, “grab and go” meals from the dining hall, to not gather with friends in her dorm room. Many lectures will be held online. Some hybrid courses might offer a face-to-face encounter with the professor. The planning is still tenuous.

“I’ll never make any friends.” She sighed, shutting her laptop, and went to bed early. She was not holding her breath.

My heart ached for her. She had hollered and whooped when she received her college acceptance letter, staring solemnly at a second letter describing a scholarship award. Her smile had lit up her face. All was well with the world then. It was a surge, after a high school senior year that ended abruptly, classes finishing online. She had to abide with a high school graduation that took the form of a car parade, with friends at a distance and a diploma sent in the mail. Contrary to her usual companionable nature, she could not even celebrate with her friends, hugging everyone in sight.

 

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In the morning, we drove to the heights of Murphy Dome, packing in dogs and water bottles and plastic containers. We picked up our friend Rebecca and her pup on the way out of town. Spirits lifted, the day promised sunshine and extended vistas from the slopes. Rebecca chatted with Helen in the car, about Oberlin College and the dorm room in Burton Hall that Helen had been assigned to, on the coveted fourth floor, with its dormer windows. Helen’s face brightened as she told Rebecca about wanting to take courses in biochemistry and philosophy, about playing soccer, about the bedsheets and desk lamp and posters she wanted to ship to college. I caught my friend’s gaze in the rearview mirror and smiled.

On the higher slopes of Murphy Dome we found wild, lowbush blueberries growing in abundance. We made our way along a trail, stooping down towards the carpeted blueberry patches near the woods, relishing their deep indigo color. The dogs, bounding ahead, returned to “help” by eating berries right off the twigs. When we reached a wide, alpine meadow we sat, reaching out for the berries that surrounded us, taking in the vista of the hills falling away below us. Our talking segued into companionable silence as we methodically picked, lost in our own thoughts. I didn’t think so much about picking the blueberries for their health benefits: lowered blood pressure or improved cognitive functions or essential nutrients. I gave little thought to the culinary pleasures of jam or pies or muffins they could result in. Instead, I celebrated the fruit and its harvest more for the sake of spending a closing afternoon with a daughter on the verge of leaving home and an old friend who has been as much of a mother to her as I have.

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Helen will shine at whatever she attempts to do once she leaves home, I told myself. She will flourish, regardless of obstacles, like the tart blueberries that grow, hardy and cold tolerant, on the Alaskan mountain.

She is ready to go, I realize, even if I’m not.

 

 

 

 

Backcountry Alaska

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Not far from the Canadian border, still on the Alaskan side, Nick shares with me a “secret garden,” his favorite camping spot on the Eagle Trail. Although not technically “backcountry,” since it is still connected to the sparse Alaskan road system, it nevertheless feels as though we have the world to ourselves. We set up our camp near the Clearwater Creek, its gurgling and sighing the only sound we hear. In a few days, on the 4th of July holiday weekend, some more campers may arrive. For now, it is only us.

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Nick has come here often, over the years, and is eager to go mountain biking on a practically empty road, with fireweed and lupine and forget-me-nots blooming alongside. We pedal, with a deep view of the Alaska Range in the distance. In reverse, the view is of the Wrangell-St. Elias mountains. A world of snow-covered peaks, one grander than the next. We leave our bikes and drive on with the truck, to get a little closer to those distant peaks, to feel even smaller in the vastness that surrounds us. The road is uneven, damaged by last winter’s frost heaves, and forces us to slow down to take it all in. We see wildlife – a couple of elegant arctic swans drifting on a lake, moose on the edge of the forest, a bald eagle, our campsite’s namesake.

The next morning, we hike up onto the mountain behind our campsite. The path is the historic Eagle trail itself, first blazed in 1885, from Valdez to the Klondike gold fields near Eagle. The trail was used by miners and trappers when Eagle promised to be an important mining center, only to be abandoned later when gold was found near Fairbanks. We follow a portion of the trail, thick with history, then veer off to climb steeply through a dense spruce forest. I am glad we have taken bear precautions, spray and bells and attentiveness, because our sight is limited due to dense vegetation. Suddenly and unexpectantly, we reach a rocky outcropping at the top and emerge to an overlook of the landscape. The vista opens up extravagantly onto the Tok River Valley. We pause. It was worth every breath of exertion on the climb up to it.

EagleTrail

In the early evening, with the summer sun still high in the sky, we sit by the rushing water of the creek. We bring our books, intending to read for an hour or two, but I relish only the sound of the water, the sun still warm on my skin, the gentle breeze in the spruces. The images from the mountaintop are still engrained in my mind.

“Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.” The author is unknown to me. The sentiment, however, is firmly entrenched.

TokRiverValley2

White Mountains of Alaska

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It is a favorite place in the White Mountains of Alaska, on the banks of Nome Creek, where clear water trips over polished riverbed stones and the mountains turn rust colored in the evening sun. We have camped here often in years past. Just shy of high country, the mountains above us are still dotted with snow melts, even in early June. We climb a rocky trail that is sprinkled with pieces of white quartz until we are beyond the tree line. Tiny white dogwoods and purple Arctic lousewort blossom on the alpine meadow. We pause, breathless, to take in a vista, immense and timeless.

The landscape has not changed in hundreds of years. We, on the other hand, have.

Antarctica

 

In the blink of an eye, the children have grown into young adults. Just yesterday they played “Antarctica” on remnant snow patches near the creek. They sat on the spongy tundra, picking blueberries, circumferentially, as far as their arms could reach. They held forked willow sticks into the campfire, willing marshmellows to brown rather than blacken.

Years later, some players in the group have shifted. The camaraderie, however, has remained unchanged. They stride ahead on the trail, their chatter constant, their laughter braided. A hike onto Tabletop mountain started in sunshine. Near the summit we are caught in sudden hail, pelting us sideways. We hasten our descent, drenched and cold, but have to laugh at this weather change, so typical of Alaska, always capricious and unpredictable.

Tabletophike

Later, as we sit around a campfire with the mountains silhouetted by the midnight sun, the “kids” share their stories – from college, about holding jobs, of managing on their own. Soon the Alaskan summer will be over, a juncture, and we will part again. Somewhere embedded, we will remember the mountains and the creek and the trail.

It is a place of lastingness, even if we are just a tiny measure in time.

Mountainsilhouette