The Yakutat Journals, Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven: In which I give JJ reason to sing.

While JJ went off on another hike, I set up my propane stove and started boiling drinking water. The creek where we got clear water was only a couple inches deep at best. Everything else was turbid with glacial silt—ground up rock.

JJ dipping water from the only clear water source in the vicinity.

Eventually I figured we had enough sanitized water to last a couple days, so I lay on my bunk and tried to read. My abysmal showing in the river non-crossing department weighed heavily and my eyes frequently wandered from reading a novel on the Kindle to the far wall of the cabin.

I’d lost “it.” I’d gone citified, as scared of bears as any Cheechako coming into the country. I’d crossed rivers before, for Pete’s sakes. Why, put me on the trail of sockeye salmon and the Russian River had no place I wouldn’t wade into. But that was years ago, and I don’t even go fishing there anymore.

I understood how this all happened. I mean, when you get married, you tend to give up a lot of things if your spouse doesn’t participate. I kept my dog team, but my dreams of running the Iditarod race were over when I said, “I do.”

What I didn’t understand was “why” I let this happen to me. Or is it the other way around, I asked myself. Did I understand “why” but not “how?” Well, I told myself, now you’re arguing semantics. Then another part of me answered, that’s okay, I’m not anti-semantic. And that was pretty much the end of any serious discussion with myself.

Finally the storm cloud we’d see over the Yakutat forelands on the other side of the bay reached the cabin and I fell asleep to the sound of rain on a steel roof. When I woke up, JJ was back.

She was all enthused about tomorrow’s hike. She said she’d found the perfect place—a wide, dry pathway that paralleled the beach. She continued to talk about it as we each prepared our separate dinners on our tiny stoves. She had freeze dried lasagna; I had freeze dried chili with macaroni. This was the first freeze dried food I’d had in thirty years, and I can tell you it has certainly improved in quality.

JJ's stove.

I should tell you something about JJ. She became a full-time Alaskan after retiring a couple years ago from her teacher’s position in California. She’s six years younger than me. Last summer she ruptured her ACL in one knee while on a bike ride up in the mountains—by herself. She managed to get her and her bike out, then had surgery.

This Yakutat trip was designed for getting her knee back in shape. JJ hikes all over tarnation, and she has the most worn and annotated copy of the Alaska Atlas I’ve ever seen. Photos, notes, GPS locations, birds spotted, you name it. It’s written in her atlas.

My pristine copy of the Alaska Atlas.

So, not only was she calm in the face of bears, fearless at wading swift rivers, and more adventuresome than anyone I’ve ever met, but she was crippled. If that didn’t beat all.

Tomorrow, I promised myself, I’ll see about getting my groove back.

***

I woke up to another sunny day…and the discovery that JJ had already been out exploring.

A while later, we set out on that day’s exploration. That required first crossing Esker Stream. JJ showed me where she’d crossed yesterday, and I followed. Whew. Count one river down.

Crossing Esker Stream.

Then she led the way to the area she thought would be good for hiking. It seemed to be a dry estuary bed, in between the forested inland and a twenty-foot high vegetation-covered dune. The dune kept the cold onshore wind away from us.

It also gave shelter to the mosquitoes, which swarmed me so quickly I thought the sun had disappeared and it was night. That didn’t make sense. It’s summer. It doesn’t get dark in the summer. I dug out the mosquito net and donned it. At last I could breathe without getting tickling little insect legs in my nostrils. They didn’t even seem to notice that JJ was right beside me.

Ever so casually, JJ mentioned that this “dry estuary” also seemed to be a bear highway. I looked. Sure enough, the place was littered with bear tracks of all sizes and it continued that way for as far as we went.

Here’s the number one advice when you’re in bear country: Make lots of noise. Let them know you’re around. They don’t like to be surprised, and will attack the danger, even if it’s little ol you and your little ol’ can of bear spray, which is just pepper spray and what we call “seasoning.”

JJ changing out of her hip boots and into hiking boots. This dry estuary bed is where we walked this day, the protective dune at the left and the inland vegetation on the right.

Most of the time, they don’t want anything to do with you and they’ll leave. Unless, of course, you get too close to their cubs, or they’re just ticked off for some reason known only to bears.

Bear bells on your pack? Dinner bells. Come and get it. Or, as JJ said, bears think the bells are just birds and don't pay attention.

A typical bear trail in vegetation. Notice how far apart the foot[prints are and that they ground cover is gone. Bears always step in the same spot when walking on trails multiple times.

Half jokingly, I called out a dog musher’s term for wanting right-of-way on the trail: “TRAIL!” Well, that seemed more appropriate than, “Yo, bear. Here we come,” so I continued to use it. Frequently.

When we weren’t talking, JJ sang songs from “Oklahoma!”

“Oh, what a beautiful morning…. Oh, what a beautiful day….”

I would have joined in, but every single lyric from every single song I ever knew skittered out of my head. All but one: “Pore Jud is daid, Pore Jud Fry is daid…”

Not appropriate, so I kept my mouth shut.

No, these aren't flowers for Jud. These are red Indian paintbrush, which we don't see in our part of Alaska. Yellow and orange, but not red.

We reached another river, this one a little wider, but not as swift. I was going first this time. I took a couple steps in the same place a large brown bear had crossed. On the next step, my foot found no bottom and I aborted that crossing.

We went upstream and this time JJ went first. Once across she assured me there was solid ground under several inches of muck. Feeling my way with my hiking pole, I crossed the shallow, gooey stream.

Eventually we came to another glacial stream, this one a perfect example of the rule, "Still waters run deep." That was as far as we could go, so we explored a ways inland and worked our way back towards the dry bed in the direction of the cabin. Two sets of fresh black bear tracks had crossed our footprints a short distance down the trail. How to tell the difference between brown bear and black bear tracks? Claws, my friend. Brown bears have five inch claws and those leave marks.

JJ next to the large lupine at the river that stopped our progress.

And me at the same spot.

Still waters run deep.

By way of another feeble excuse for my bear phobia, I told JJ about a dear friend of mine, Richard, who had fought with a brown bear sow and lived to tell about it. I didn’t go into too much detail about his injuries, though I might have mentioned his larynz was torn out, and he was scalped and you could feel the grooves in his skull where her teeth slid across it, and that the sow had picked him up by his shoulder and shook him like he was nothing but a rag doll.

JJ started singing again.

(A couple days ago when we were swapping photos, JJ said to be sure to tell you that when she’s in bear country, she’s on full bear alert. She listens, looks, and smells for bear. “Make sure,” she said, “you write how you talked about your friend getting mauled while we were out there with all those bear tracks around!” How ‘bout that? JJ’s scared of bears, too. Doesn’t stop her, though.)

Knee-high chocolate lily.

Back at the cabin, we had a conference. JJ got out the rented satellite phone and called the air service to pick us up at noon the next day. We had decided the rivers blocked us in each direction—except inland where we couldn’t see the bears until they were on us.

Home at Esker Stream.

JJ went out for a walk and I gathered up some shredded (bears) debris outside the cabin. Then I walked a couple hundred yards to the site of a demolished cabin and “organized” the debris there, trying to stack it all in one area instead of having it spread around a larger area.

JJ on the beach the morning we left for the town of Yakutat.

Trying to manage the mess from a previous squatter's cabin. Wasn't much I could do except retrieve the stuff scattered in the bushes and try to gather most of it in one place.

I made freeze dried beef stroganoff for my dinner that night. Then I started getting my gear together to haul the quarter mile to the beach in the morning.

It was time to explore Yakutat and its surroundings.

(to be continued)

To see where we were, follow the border between Alaska and the Yukon Territory down towards the Gulf of Alaska. The word Yakutat is written right below where the border heads east. The town of Yakutatis located at the end of the word. We were across the bay (north) and just to the right of the longitude line. Click on the photo and it should enlarge. On my computer, I can click a second time and the enlargement again magnifies.

The Yakutat Journals, Chapter Six

Chapter Six: In which I confront an unpleasant epiphany...and sulk.

I reckon y’all have this image of me as some female Alaskan mountain man. You know—I catch a limit of red salmon and have them canned or in the smoker before breakfast.

Hubby and I with sockeye and king salmon from the famed Copper River. He caught the biggest. Guess who caught the most.

Then I buck, split, and stack a cord of firewood. Afterwards, my pal The Sarah and I hunt and field dress a bull moose. She goes to a Tea Party to speechify while I butcher and freeze the best cuts, and make Genoa salami, and Polish and Thuringer sausage from the rest, saving the nose for jellied moose nose, which is a lot like head cheese.

The 10x40 ft. woodshed I built and filled with 15 cords of split firewood. That's not barbed wire around my dog pen. They are cracks on the original Polaroid print.

When I’m done with that, I might hitch up the dogs for a run to the post office, or maybe pick a five-gallon bucket full of cranberries and make sauce for the Thanksgiving turkey, and quarts of cranberry liqueur for sipping in front of the wood stove.

Moose sausage ready for smoking.

In between, I pick up litter along a few miles of highway—just for some exercise.

Yeah, I reckon that’s what y’all think. And if I've written anything here to give y'all that impression, well, believe me, it was purely intentional.

Well, I have a confession to make about that mountain man thing.. Been there, done that.

Me in red, my dog team on the spruce pole "bridge" at the Nizina River.

Except for the The Sarah part. I kind of fibbed about that. Not the moose part—the Queen of Quit part. Never met The Sarah, so she can’t possible be my hunting buddy.

The jellied moose nose? Once was more than enough of that stuff.

And the rest of it? Mmmmmm---I seem to have outgrown all that.

Not my fault, either. For that, I lay the blame squarely on the man-who-would-be-my-husband. He lied to me.

This is the guy my mother should have warned me about. Before I married him.

It began when we were in that getting to know each other stage, talking about things we liked to do. He mentioned motorcycles, snow machines, ATVs, and fishing and hunting. Oh, boy, I thought. An outdoorsman. I mentioned things like downhill skiing, dog mushing, backpacking, camping, and fishing.

“Oh,” he said about the backpacking/camping, “I’d like to learn how to do all that.” I saw a future stretch out before us--a sunlit trail through the forests and into the alpine meadows, wildflowers all around us, moose and Dall sheep and other exotics on the nearby slopes..

Too late I discovered his idea of sports equipment all involved attached internal combustion engines. And when he found out tents didn’t come with indoor facilities and hot and cold running water, well, that was the end of that learning experience.

“Camping” now involved large recreational vehicles, preferably diesel pusher Class A motorhomes.

Whacking pushki to make a trail to the outhouse. Note the heighth of the lupine.

I was thinking about all this on our first morning at the Wrangell-St. Elias park service Esker Stream cabin as I whacked down pushki to make a sap-free trail to the outhouse.

JJ wanted to hike the beach towards Hubbard Glacier at the head of the bay, so we loaded our backpacks with lunch and hip boots and headed for the beach. I also wore a fanny pack pulled around so the pouch was in front to keep the bear spray at the ready.

When we topped the rise and could see the bay, I said to JJ, “Look at all the ice.” Before us the bay seemed clogged with chunks of ice calved from Hubbard Glacier, and the retreating tide left hundreds of pieces of ice on the beach.

A crisp breeze kept us bundled up and moving. Eventually we reached the first of many fast-moving glacial streams. We checked it out for a good crossing point. That’s when I realized I really didn’t want to wade it. It wasn’t so much its depth that was dangerous. It was the swift current and silt-laden water. I’d been raised near Cook Inlet, whose clay and silt beaches have been fatal to the unsuspecting many times.

JJ, though, put on her hip boots and walked into the silty water, feeling her way with two hiking poles. I stayed behind and took pictures. Then she came back safely. I looked at her and said, “I can’t swim.”

JJ feeling her way across the glacier stream.

Reaching the far side.

Well, that was a feeble excuse and I knew it. Nobody can swim with hip boots full of water. I knew she was disappointed, She had studied the maps of this area and had planned carefully. Too late she learned she’d hooked up with a wimp.

This ice berg reminded me of a backward-looking carousel swan. The dark areas contain lots of silt--rock ground up by the glacier.

We started back, and then paused for lunch while we watched a large cruise ship progress up the bay towards the glacier. I felt bad—bad for JJ’s ruined hike and bad for me. Not only was I scared s—tless of the bears and afraid to cross the streams, but I had realized something about myself.

Note the cruise ship on the far side of the bay, heading towards Hubbard Glacier.

More than thirty years had passed since I’d thrown a forty-pound pack on my back and wandered off into the wilderness for a week. Thirty years in which a series of ever-growing recreational vehicles became my way of camping. Thirty years.

The Hubbard Glacier.

The cruise ship will round the point to the right and enter Russell Fjord.

It was a quiet walk back to the cabin. Every so often I’d turn around and watch the cruise ship. Then, it disappeared around the point and sailed into Russell Fjord.

When we reached the cabin, I said I would start boiling water for eating and drinking. JJ went out on a hike by herself.

Front paw print of brown bear and my hand.

Bear tracks are joined by wolf tracks--a double whammy of predators.

As I waited for the water to boil, I admitted something to myself: Who was I kidding? I wasn’t some female version of a mountain man. I’d grown soft.

I’d lost my edge.

I no longer had that awareness that helped keep me safe in the wilderness, that ability to enjoy the wilderness while remembering that humans rank below predatory, carnivorous mammals, fish, and reptiles on the food chain.

I may as well have been a city kid.

(to be continued)