The Resurrection Pass Journals, Chapter Four

Ever wonder where you'd end up if you took your dog for a walk and never once pulled back on the leash?  ~Robert Brault

Day One, Part Two

I walked on in temperatures in the low 70s.  My mini-breaks became more frequent.  My feet hurt, but the rest of me was fine.

Where the trailside vegetation was higher than my head, I grabbed my little bear bell and rang it for extended periods.  My friend JJ says bears don’t pay attention to bells because they think they’re birds. 

My bell definitely didn’t sound like a bird.  It sounded like a frantic dinner bell.  That’s a joke.  Dinner bell for bears?  And the bear spray, which is really hot pepper spray?  Flavoring.

Dinner bell and flavor spray.

To make sure everything out there knew I was in the neighborhood, I sang:  “Take a load off, Gully.  Take a load off now…  Take a load off, Gully,”  And in my deepest basso profundo,  "Sit your butt down now." 

I really empathized with that song and I sat frequently.

I truly was alone now.  I  met no others on the trail.  The vegetation turned from tall spruce, birch, and cottonwood to shorter spruce and more open spaces, indicative of a higher elevation.  

I had no map of this trail.  I'd gone into the Forest Service office in Seward the day before I started and picked up a map for Resurrection Pass North trail, not realizing that I also needed South if I wanted the entire trail.  Then, when I changed my starting point, I tried to download the South map, but the website was down.

All I had with me was a topographical map and a printout of someone's mile-by-mile blog to guide me.  The blog noted all the side trails and tent sites along the trail.  I had to rely on the blog to know there was a tent site with a bear box at mile 6.9.  The blog noted the site was just beyond a small wooden bridge, but also pointed out there were a number of small wooden bridges in the area.

I also had a sheet from the Forest Service that noted the mile points of tent sites and bear boxes on various trails in the greater area, but no map showing where they were.  This trail is minimalist in its markings.  Only where the trail intersected other trails were there mileage marks.  The more my feet hurt, the more I wished for mile markers, but I totally understood the lack thereof.

A lovely light lavender lupine.

By referring to the topo map, I was able to pinpoint where I was but had no way of knowing what trail mile that was as I'd not copied the map's legend. 

More walking.  More breaks.  Feet hurting.

Over-grazing on an Arctic rose.

“Hello, Dolly!   Well, hello Dolly!....”  I made noise.  I talked to myself out loud.  Not gonna git et by a bear when I’m so close to 70 years old. 

I crossed a wooden bridge over a small creek.  A hundred feet farther a 4x4 post in the ground noted the tent site.  I almost wept with relief.  The last two miles had been painful.  What a dope—seven miles on the first day with a heavy pack.  Only the promise of that bear box had kept me going.

Oh, yeah.  This massive pile of bear scat is exactly what I needed to see a short distance from where I would camp this night.

In a grove of spruce trees, the brown bear box waited for my supplies.  Another post indicated tent sites farther back in the woods. Not a good idea to camp near the bear box.

The bear-proof steel box for storing food.

Finally.  It was now 8 p.m.  I was averaging a mile and a quarter an hour, even with all my breaks and picture-taking.

I selected a spot in a mossy clearing and got rid of that pack as quickly as I could.  The boots were the next to go and with great relief I slipped my feet into those surf shoes.

Blessed relief from the boots.

The bugs had already found me.  Mosquitoes, moose flies, white sox gnats, and no-see-ums swarmed around me.  I dug the mosquito headnet out of the pack and put it on.  Next I donned a long sleeved shirt that was for protecting skin from the sun, but worked just as well for ravenous biting insects.

All netted up.  This was the only time I wore a long-sleeved shirt on the entire trip, quite unusual for Alaska.

I walked back to the bear box and stored my food bag.  Back at the campsite, I erected the tent and situated everything, discovering that my pack fit in my tent perfectly and I could lean against it to read. I stretched out for a rest.

Sleeping bag draped against the backpack for a lounging pillow.

By this time, I’d exhausted my water and lemonade supply and had only the bottle I’d filled at four-mile, so I walked down to the creek, refilled and treated two bottles.  This wasn’t working at all.  I needed more water than this and waiting four hours for the treatment to work wasn’t cutting it.

I also wasn't hungry.  I lay in the tent thinking that if I didn't eat anything, I'd still have the same amount of weight to carry the next day.  I'd been looking forward to diminishing the weight by diminishing the food supply.  Sigh.  I made myself get up.

Back at the bear box, I boiled water for re-hydrating Chili-Mac.  I polished off the last of the treated water from four mile.   This really was a lovely spot.  I could tell it had been used often.

I ate all I could of the Chili-Mac.  Even realizing that I had to carry the weight of reconstituted freeze-dried food couldn’t make me finish it.  I left it and all the cooking gear in the bear box.  Returning to my tent, I crawled in, turned on the Kindle, and stretched out for a rest. 

It was 9 p.m. and the sun was shining in the tent.

My one-person tent, just wide enough for one sleeping bag.

All those nasty insects were crawling around between the mosquito netting top of the tent and rain fly.  I started to snicker at their hopeless searching, then thought better of it. Best not to tick off the biting insect gods. I already had a mosquito bite on my right wrist that was itching but which I knew would go away within a half hour.

I found a BB-sized red spot of unknown origin on my right arm.  White sox bites on my neck and the palm of my left hand wouldn’t start to itch until the next day, but would continue itching for more than a week.  Those were the only bites I would suffer for the entire trip.

This huge pile of shredded spruce cones caught my eye.  The squirrel held perfectly still, apparently thinking I couldn't see it.

I stuffed foam earplugs in my ears so every noise during the night wouldn’t be a bear.

The temperature was too warm (high 60s) and the sun kept me awake.  Sleep was long in arriving on this first day of my late-in-life experiment.

 

 Follow my progress from the start, lower left, about four and a half section squares until  the trail heads somewhat straight up.   Note Trout Lake on the left.  I camped the first night in the area where the creek from Trout lake crosses the trail.  I think.

The Resurrection Pass Journals, Chapter Three

"To know the road ahead, ask those coming back."
-   Chinese Proverb

"Let no one be deluded that a knowledge of the path can substitute for putting one foot in front of the other."
-   M. C. Richards

 Part One

Call it a premonition.  Call it an informed decision.  Call it damned fool stupidity.  Once I made the decision to change my route and start at the southern end of the Resurrection Pass trail, most of my bear worries dissipated.

The odds of running into a black or brown bear on the trail were still high, but my anxiety had disappeared, that same anxiety that had kept me awake for a couple hours the previous night.  I had to force myself to think of something other than bears so I could get to sleep.



Where this late onset, outlandish fear of bears has come from, I can’t say.  I’ve lived around bears all my life, they’ve been in my yard, waked up my driveway, scavenged for salmon in the little creek behind my house.  I almost walked smack into a bear years ago and would have had it not grunted when I was less than eight feet from it.  I still remember the look of disbelief on that bear’s face and how my insides turned to liquid when I saw it.

I finished my peanut butter and jelly sandwich and lifted that heavy pack, balanced it on my left knee. and slipped my left arm through the shoulder strap.  That was the hard part, compensating for a worn out, arthritic, frozen shoulder.

I bent over, letting all the weight of the pack settle on my back while I struggled to get the right shoulder strap in a position where I could get my arm through it.  I fastened the waist cinch strap and stood up.  Then I pulled the shoulder straps tight.

The bear spray went into its makeshift carrier.  The chest strap was threaded through my camera case and snapped.  I clipped my bottle of lemonade onto the waist strap with a caribiner and picked up my hiking pole.

All saddled up.  Time to start this experiment.  One foot in front of the other. 

I started at the red line, left, bottom.  I would either continue on that line to the top of the map, or take the side trail to the right.  My condition and the weather would determine the route.

The trail began with a series of switchbacks through birch and spruce and cottonwood trees, and wildflowers, to gain elevation.  Eventually I could see bits of the Kenai River far below as the route led slowly, slowly inland yet continued to parallel the highway.  I met a couple day hikers coming down the trail.

Beginning the hike through a series of switchbacks to gain elevation.

Farther upwards, farther inland, following the Juneau Creek canyon, the trail was lined with wildflowers on both sides.  Arctic roses, monkshood, lupine, Jacob’s Ladder, geraniums, fireweed, all kinds of flowers.

Click to enlarge, then click again to see all the wild Arctic roses.

And then:

Fairly fresh, but such a small amount.

Paint brush and wild geranium line the trail.

In an area where the cow parsnip and fireweed was over my head, I encountered seven people.  A woman was leading a pony and a dog.

“We call this our dog and pony show,” she laughed.

I love this spot.

I walked and walked.  I could still hear highway noise.  Ever so often, the vegetation thinned and I could glimpse the river and Gwin’s Lodge far below.   Always.  Every time I thought I was farther north along the highway, I’d look down and I could still see Gwin’s Lodge.  I began to hate Gwin’s Lodge.

Down below is a glimpse of the Kenai River. 

I met a group of five and we stopped to chat. 

They asked where I was going and I said I didn’t know yet.  I was on a journey to nowhere in particular.

Serendipity slipped through the wildflowers and joined the conversation.

Where was I from?

“Moose Pass.”

“Oh, do you know B-----?  She bought our house in Anchorage.”

“Of course I know B-----.  She bought your house?  Then….   How is she?”

“She’s well.  She had her cancer treatments and is doing well.”  They elaborated.

The conversation turned back to the trail.

The beautiful poisonous monkshood and, behind,  its partner in crime, Devil's Club.

 “Beautiful camping spot at Juneau Falls,” they reported.  “If you come to a bridge, you’ve gone too far.”  I made a note to check that out, even though the falls was only four miles in and I wanted to go farther than that. 

“Any bear sign?” I asked.  This was a question that became a constant, asked either by me or hikers I encountered.

“There’s fresh bear scat on the trail that hadn’t been there when we detoured to Juneau Falls, and we were only in there a half hour at most.”

Arctic rose against spruce trunk.

Ducky, I thought.  Then we went our different ways.

Yikes. 

I found fresh bear scat.  Should be close, I thought.  The side trail, not the bear.

I came to a post on the side of the trail.  A tent icon was carved into it, an arrow pointed up the trail, and ¼ mi. below that.  I misconstrued that to mean the side trail to Juneau Falls was a quarter mile yet.

I came to the bridge-too-far.  I wasn’t going back.  Another post and an arrow pointed to camping spots along the creek.  For the first time, I took off the pack and declared an extended rest stop.  I’d had a few mini-breaks so far, when the trail sides offered a place to sit where I could take the weight of the backpack off  without unsaddling.

Jacob's Ladder line a small creek.

As soon as that pack was on the ground rather than on my back, I had a fleeting sensation of floating.  I dawdled around, refilled a water bottle and dropped in a treatment tablet.  I’d walked four miles so far.  According to the info I had, a tenting spot with a steel bear-proof box for storing my food was 2.9 miles away. 

That, I decided, would be my destination for the day.

Out of Touch

Message to everyone expecting me to be in contact:

I am taking advantage of a miraculous moment in which both the electricity and telephones/Internet are working at the same time to let you know that I have not been in contact because they weren't.

Working at the same time.

It's been quite a weekend.


The phones/internet were out much of ... was it Friday?

The highway south of here was closed all Friday night because of two tragic accidents, resulting in long lines of traffic stalled for ten hours.

The electricity was out all of Saturday night.

The phones were out most of today.

The power went out again a short time ago.

Summer.  Salmon are running.  Time for everything and everyone to be out.  Be careful out there.

See ya soon.   Maybe.   Depends.  How many miracles can one have in one weekend.

The Resurrection Pass Journals, Chapter Two

WEIGHT AND BALANCE

Part Two

My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty.  She's ninety-three today and we don't know where the hell she is.  ~Ellen DeGeneres

Ounce by ounce and pound by pound, the weight of my backpack continued to increase.

The weather forecast was for two nice days followed by rain.  That meant I had to take rain gear and some warmer clothing.  I decided on layering with a microfiber long-sleeved pullover and a light fleece pullover.  I added a rain shell plus a warmer jacket, both made of microfiber.

Wore some, carried some.

I figured rain pants over my hiking pants would be more than enough to keep me warm during a mountain rainstorm at 2400 feet elevation.  I knew very well that mountain rainstorms are never warm, usually accompanied by wind, and hypothermia was always a factor.  

An emergency plastic poncho, the kind the gift shop at Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island in Hawaii sells to tourists, and a rain cover for the backpack went into the pack. 

Maps, first aid kit, bug wipes, trowel, extra battery for the camera, kerchief, TP,  sunscreen, rope for hanging food in necessary,and personal stuff.  Plus an ID bracelet in case a bear came calling.

Dinner bell and flavor spray.

Eight and a half lbs. of clothing, including that which I wore minus the boots, caused a huge jump in the weight of my pack.  I added a pair of surf-wading shoes to wear in camp, bemoaning their weight but knowing I would appreciate having them.

Knowing that I eat little when hot and working, I had to compromise what would be a poor appetite with eating enough calories to continue working.  I figured on a six-day supply, still leaving open the decision on routes.

Peanut butter and jelly on multi-grain sandwich thins sounded fine for breakfast.  A piece of cheese and a chunk of sausage for lunch, Fiber One bars for snacks plus a small baggie of gorp, went into the bag.  Then I added six Mountain House freeze-dried dinners, plus a few tubes of sugarless Crystal Light lemonade.  And some Constant Comment tea bags.

This is not preprandial; this is postprandial.  I would have been fine on a quarter of what I took.

The shock came when I stuck two full liters of water into the pack.  That increased the weight by five lbs., but I had no choice.  I’d purchased treatment tabs that took four hours to work.  I had to carry water. 

I added three essentials:  a journal, write-in-the-rain pen, and my Kindle.  I could lie in my sleeping bag and play Every Word on the Kindle while I waited for sleep.  Altogether, they added only a pound.

What was I doing, I wondered again.  Almost seventy years old, haven’t backpacked any distance since I hiked the Chilkoot Trail in 1973, bad feet.   Was I trying to prove something to myself?  Prove I still had it?

Aleve for what hurts.

Or, could it be that I was hoping to open new horizons…..and re-open old ones?

 

By the time Erin dropped me off at the Cooper Landing trailhead, my pack weighed forty-two lbs.  Too much, too much, but I couldn’t ditch the water.  Once again I wondered why no one worried about giardia forty years ago when I was backpacking frequently.  We’d never treated our water then, just drank right from the stream.

To compensate, I ate one of the peanut butter sandwiches and looked at the trail ahead of me.

The longest journey begins with a single step Attributed to Lao-tzu ( c 604- c 531 bc ), founder of Taoism.

Wherefore Wert Thou, Carmageddon??? Right Time, Wrong Place

So the much-feared Carmageddon never materialized in Los Angeles last weekend, huh?   I can tell them why:  They had the location wrong by about 2400 miles.

You know what Carmageddon was, don’t you?  The 405 freeway was closing for the weekend for maintenance and the LA powers that be expected massive traffic jams—more massive than LA’s legendary traffic jams already are.  So, they scared the bejesus out of everyone and things went well.  Not with a bang, but a whimper.

The 405 even opened well ahead of its schedule Monday morning opening.

As I said, they had the location off by 2400 miles.  Carmageddon happened, all right.  It happened right down the highway from me at Tern Lake.

They never realized Carmageddon wouldn't be in LA, but right here at sleepy Tern Lake.

This is how the perfect storm of conditions collided over a peaceful, shallow little lake where the terns and ducks and gulls are raising their young.

When you leave Anchorage and head south, you have one choice of route—the Seward Highway.    About ninety miles south, you reach a triangular-shaped junction where the Sterling Highway meets the Seward Highway.

Junction coming up.  Straight ahead to Seward; right to the southern Peninsula.

At the top end of this junction, there’s no problem.  Traffic heading for Moose Pass and Seward continues straight down the hill on the Seward Highway.   Traffic heading for Cooper Landing, Kenai, and Homer veers off to the right on a one-lane road to the Sterling Highway.   No stops, no merges, no nothing.  And certainly no traffic lights.  Just keep cruising’.

See?  Seward straight, Home right.

Traffic going back to Anchorage, however, drives the Sterling Highway along the shore of Tern Lake and comes to a stop sign at the Seward Highway.  Just a stop sign.  Look left for traffic coming down the hill from Anchorage, right for coming from Seward, then make a left turn and you’re on your way to Anchorage with no traffic control until you reach the city.

The two white vehicles at the right are waiting to make a left turn and follow the black truck up the hill towards Anchorage.  The white SUV in the center in coming from Anchorage, heading towards Seward.

Most of the time, it works just fine and the lower part of the junction is quiet and almost sleepy.

Wait for traffic, make a left, head for Anchorage.

Then comes that perfect storm I mentioned before.

Imagine this:  a weekend; absolutely spectacular weather; low tides for clam digging; the fabulous Kenai River and Kailof River dipnet fisheries were open; and, a more than a quarter million salmon leaving Cook Inlet and swimming en masse up the Kenai River—right into the waiting nets of all the folks standing waist deep in cold water holding onto fifteen foot long poles with a huge net strung on a hoop at the end of that pole.

They say you couldn’t miss.  They report multiple catches in one net.  They claim one woman caught five red salmon at one time.

Add the final ingredient:  all those people heading home.  All those people driving up the Sterling Highway on the narrow two lane highway through Cooper Landing and reaching the junction with the Seward Highway.  Each vehicle had to stop, look left and right, wait for all the traffic leaving Seward after a weekend of touring, hiking, fishing for silver salmon, halibut, and rockfish, plus all the traffic coming down the hill and heading to Moose Pass and Seward.

Add in  all the delivery trucks, the fuel haulers, the cruise boat busses, the normal everyday traffic of back and forth, the motorhomes and campers and fifth wheel trailers, trucks pulling boats, the drive-by tourists, the mountain bikers and hikers heading home after communing with mountains and mosquitoes.

What happens????

Carmageddon at Tern Lake is  what happens.   Miles and miles of vehicles backed up waiting to make that one-lane left turn onto the Seward Highway.  All the way back ten miles to Cooper Landing, some swear.  For four days it was like that.

Then, Sunday, the State Troopers came to the rescue.  In bright yellow safety vests, the troopers directed traffic, allowing those left turns more frequently than usual.  

Mid-Sunday afternoon and the troopers, whose vehicles are parked at right, have the traffic jam well under control.  They're just allowed a long line of vehicles to make that dreaded left turn, holding up traffic heading for Seward, which  usually has the right of way.

Carmageddon died Sunday afternoon, thanks to the troopers.  ‘Bout the same time the 405 opened ahead of time in LA.

The Resurrection Pass Journals, Chapter One

Weight and Balance
Part One

God made the world round so we could never

see too far down the road—Isek Dinesen

I like to plan ahead.  I like to know where I’m going, what to expect when I get there, and what I need to take.  Most times, I over-plan.

In preparing for this hike into the mountains, I had four major concerns:

      

            1.  Brown bears.

            2.  My feet, specifically the bunions on both feet that are rearranging the positions of my toes.

            3.  The rest of me.

            4.  Black bears.

It wasn’t that the territory was unfamiliar, though it had been something like forty years since I’d been in there during summer.  I’d traveled part of it by dog sled a couple times, and once by snowmachine.

On Trout Lake,  1973

I accompanied my husband and a good friend once on a moose hunt.  The friend rode his horse, other horses carried our supplies, and my hubby and I had a horse to share.  At the outset, we quibbled over who got to ride and who had to walk.  After a few miles, we were arguing about who got to walk and who had to ride.

As to my first concern, the bears that inhabit this area, I checked with a friend who said she’d seen lots of bear sign at the Hope end of the trail and none near the Cooper Landing end.  I immediately changed my plans and decided to start at Cooper Landing, and exit Resurrection Pass by the Devil’s Pass trail that intersects the Resurrection Trail at its mid-point, a distance of somewhere between twenty-six and twenty-nine miles.  (Sources vary.)

I read about a brown bear attacking three bike riders and learned that while they were carrying bear spray, it was in one of their packs. I decided I wanted my bear spray ready for quick draw.  A Coleman semi-rigid  container for keeping beverages cold was the answer. 

I cut two slits in the container and threaded the cinch strap on my backpack through them.

El perfecto!

My camera went into a small padded case on the chest strap of the pack and a water bottle hung from a caribiner on the cinch strap.  My pink handkerchief from Parker Ranch in Hawaii was tied to a shoulder strap. 

In the tiny pockets on the cinch strap were Zip-locs with Aleve and insect repellent wipes.

There wasn’t much I could do about the weight of the essentials:

Empty backpack                       6.2 lbs

The tent.

Tent and ground cloth                3.5

Sleeping bag                              3.5

Air mattress                               .5

Personal gear                            1.5

Cook pot, stove, fuel, misc.       2.5

Cook pot, folding bucket in orange pouch, red case for stove, Pocket Rocket stove on fuel canister, soap leaves in yellow plastic, stormproof matches, water treatment tabs.

Already the pack was up to eighteen pounds and I still had to add food and clothing. 

(to be continued)