We rewarded ourselves after two long days of tundra and river travel with a rest day, getting out for a shorter hike and reading. Peter and I traded Pielou’s A Naturalist’s Guide to the Arctic and Barry Lopez’ Arctic Dreams back and forth. We also both finished Pollan’s book, In Defense of Food.

Then we were ready to get out and explore. The Nigu River is known for its ancient man sites, seasonal buildings of the Nunamiut, “people of the land,” a group of Inuit which lived inland in the winters and then moved to the coast to trade in the summers. Most of these sites were downriver of us, though we had heard of one possibly closer to the headwaters. Looking at the maps, though, it looked like ten miles out which in tundra terrain was not within our range for a day’s travel. Still, we headed upriver.

We stopped to sit and watch the wolf den from a distance for a half hour or more, but the entrances sat silent and dark, as before. We continued on. As we crested a small knoll thick in willow and dwarf birch, a rancid smell floated up on the breeze, normally clean and almost sweet with the tundra scents. “Can you smell that?” I asked Peter, doubting myself. “It’s really awful!” He could. “I wonder if it’s a kill.” I yelled across the tundra around us in case I had missed seeing something around us and pulled out my bear spray. “I hope it’s a wolf kill and not a bear kill,” I said tentatively. Bears will defend their kills by an aggressive attack, and I wasn’t sure wolves would be quite as concerned about us, though I didn’t know. Peter started scouting around, and I looked hard up and down the slopes around us, feeling a tickle of apprehension creep up my spine. Then we saw a brown area on the tundra below us.

The stench intensified as we approached the spot. Tundra plants in an area approximately 10 feet by twenty feet were matted down and had browned. A caribou leg bone, still attached by ligaments by completely free of flesh, lay curled as if it may have been sleeping. The hoof and hair above the hoof was intact. Bones scattered the area, all picked clean, beetles finishing the job on many of them. Many bones were no longer intact or had been pulled apart; it was a long way from an intact skeleton. And yet the kill was recent enough to still permeate the air with the smell of death and decay.

Pielou mentions in her book the human propensity to anthropomorphize and romanticize wolves because of their similarities to our domestic canine companions. But she notes that one only has to watch a wolf bring down a caribou and begin to eat it while it is still alive to quickly dispel these notions. Bears will frequently come to steal a wolf kill, which, according to naturalists, wolves will relinquish. Because of the proximity of the kill to the wolf den it seemed reasonable to assume that this had been a wolf kill, but there were also two piles of bear scat on the scene. The kill had been shared, intentionally or not.

Most astonishing was the utter decimation of an animal. If there was any proclivity to bestow upon the purity of nature any notions of pastoral peacefulness, coming upon a kill will rapidly change that understanding. And yet this animal had been returned, utterly and completely to the land which had produced it. Violently, surely. But completely.

I was happy to continue on. Crossing the river, we headed across a boggy area and then up onto a long ramp of tundra, climbing several hundred feet. Beginning our ascent we heard a familiar howl, and saw at the top of the ramp a quarter mile away one of the dark wolves, pacing and howling. The wind was strong, so that his howl carried to us in waves. By the time we reached the top, he was gone.

At the top of the ramp though, standing against the strong cold wind, a circle of stones stood out. We investigated. It was a small circle, about six feet across and a foot or two high, looking out and down into the valley with a view to the east and the west. “Well, there aren’t any boy scout troops out here to build this,” Peter said. As far as we could tell, it was remnants of the heavy Nunamiut activity here years ago. Nunamiut built structures to hunt and to live, stone fences to corral caribou into lakes where, slowed by the water, they were easier to shoot. Ninety percent of the Nunamiut diet was caribou.

While the land itself lent a sense of the ancient, the undisturbed and timeless, considering the human presence here hundreds and thousands of years ago added a layer of history incrementally closer to our understanding. It connected us to this place all the more, weaving together the strands of land, animal and human history into the original tapestry of the earth. The sense of completeness seemed to support and buoy us as we hiked. We continued on the side of a mountain, past several small lakes draining one into the other, before turning back.

Opting to give the wolf den a wide berth again, we hiked back on the opposite side of the valley and through what turned out to be a marshy bog, at times deteriorating to what amounted to reeds growing in a shallow pond, mud pulling at our boots with every step. It stretched well over a mile, and I despaired of my boots, now soaked. Peter’s leather boots fared slightly better. Finally we saw a small tundra protrusion ahead and aimed for it, then planning to turn back toward our camp.

The feel of dry tundra under our boots was a relief. After slogging through the bog, I was exhausted. We leaned onto our trekking poles and talked about our dinner plans when a movement ahead of us startled me. “What is that?” Four ears poked into the air just above the willows. We took another step, and tiny heads and bodies came into view- two wolf puppies, one light, one dark. They looked at us with surprise but not alarm, and then turned around and disappeared. “let’s look over the mound!” I said. “Maybe they are just playing!” Another step forward, and Peter said “I think it’s another den.” “But the main den is by the river back there! Why would they have two?” A quick look revealed that Peter was right. Puppy scat littered the ground just outside another hole into the earth, and several bones lay around, notably a section of vertebrae with partial ribs still attached, perhaps brought back from the kill site we had discovered. We backed away, and waited at a distance for a long while, but the pups did not reappear.

We later learned that there is frequently a rendezvous site where pups are brought away from the main den to play and explore, and that must have been what we had stumbled upon, despite our efforts to keep a reasonable distance from the den we knew about. Though we had more bog to get through to get back to our campsite, we walked back hardly aware of the mud through which we walked.

The Arctic had given us more gifts than we deserved, far more than we expected, far more than we had even hoped. Perhaps that is the gift of all wilderness, and all life. If we only allow ourselves to be open to it. But to allow us to feel a part of this timeless and primeval land, to see the circle of life pulsing through it, and to know that we were a part of that energy even as we had separated ourselves from it in our normal daily life – that was the gift we have now that we will never lose.

From the deck of the MV Columbia

We left Ketchikan after a couple mile run- I’m not sure if Teton or I enjoyed it more, and lunch with Peter at the New York Café. I had the recommended curry carrot soup and a salad, which leapt with flavor especially in contrast to our ferry food; Peter’s roast beef and grilled cheese sandwich- light on the horseradish- he enjoyed as well. Internet is 12 cents a minute, so we were able to post our first blog entry. Two of the massive cruise ships were in port, and it’s clear where the line is between cruise-ship-Ketchikan and the rest of it. The cruise ship part of Ketchikan is cute, frontier style buildings and even a small board-walk on either side of Ketchikan Creek, a small rocky river. The rest is typical Alaska, sprawling dirty, and unmaintained. For some reason architecture of all sorts in Alaska is completely uninspired as a general rule. Maybe it is because people would rather be out in the wilderness than worrying about their houses. Which in this place is a hard thing to argue with.

The Tongass National Forest begins just south of Ketchikan and runs northwest up the Alaskan panhandle. At 17 million acres, the Tongass is our largest national forest, and it is part of the world’s largest temperate rainforest running from south-east Alaska to northern California. As much as 200 inches of rain fall very year. It supports the world’s largest concentration of bald eagles, and 7,000 grizzly bear, as well as five species of Pacific salmon. Trees soar over 200 feet tall, and some are more than 500 years old.

Despite its size, it is worth remembering that only 2-4% of our nation’s original forest remains. Although a million acres of SouthEast Alaska’s coastal rainforest have fallen to clear cut logging, the Tongass still has almost 30% of the world’s remaining, old growth, temperate rainforest. And even as a National Forest, the Tongass is still constantly threatened with development. The 1980 Alaska National Interest Land Conservation Act (1980) requires that the BLM report any potential for development on all public lands, and as a result there are either identified opportunities for- or full blown development of- silver, zinc, and gold mines, uranium mine (within a National Monument), and even a request for oil and gas leases- all within the National Forest. Only 5.8 million acres of the National Forest is designated Wilderness. We mentioned in the last post how unchecked or careless development ruins the habitat of salmon- just one of hundreds of species in the cycle- which in turn adversely impacts salmon development which comes back to hurt the forest itself. Given the tiny amount of our original forest remaining, is that really how we want to treat them?

It’s tricky. The Forest Service is managed by the Department of Agriculture. The BLM, like the National Park Service, is managed by the Department of the Interior. Many people and at least as many interests have their hands in the pot of the nation’s public lands. The charter of the Forest Service is to manage public lands for shared use- development and conservation. They are looking at the balance sheet as much as they are the environmental considerations.

Canada might give us a cautionary tale with their tar sands oil development. In order to harvest oil from sand and feed the economic demand, Alberta, Canada is wiping out miles worth of boreal forest, and scraping off tons of the peat and soil below those soils to process the bitumen from the sand for oil. The result is absolute and complete destruction of the land, as well as massive quantities of toxic tailings.

I hope as a nation we might realize that these threatened lands are ours, and that we speak out about how we want to protect our public lands.

As we left Ketchikan, we cruised through the narrow channel where the Bridge to Nowhere was to be built, connecting the town of Ketchikan to its airport, which currently is connected by a small ferry. Given the very short distance the ferry from the mainland to the airport travels, and the enormous height which would be required to span the distance and yet be out of reach of the cruise ships traveling through (or ferries for that matter) it seems ludicrous someone would have considered a bridge. Though as one of the MV Columbia officials noted, Ketchikan residents were a little miffed at the term “nowhere.”

Heading through the Clarence Strait between the coast and the third largest island in the U.S. after Hawaii and Kodiak, Prince of Wales Island, I woke up from a nap on the deck to someone shouting- two whales some ways off were breaching. Again and again they breached, maybe twenty times, explosions of water erupting as they crashed back into the sea. Several hours later, a lone humpback swam south, coming to the surface to breathe and send spray into the ocean air on a gentle and rhythmic course south. Both are reminders that we are the least of the travelers on this journey north.

Something about humpbacks I’m hoping to see someday. Although they are generally more solitary than orcas, for example, who travel in pods, between mid-June and mid-July they do something called “bubblenet feeding”. As the pod finds a school of small fish, such as herring, one whale dives below the herring, blowing bubbles, disorienting and driving the school of fish to the surface. The pod of whales dives together and, in one choreographed movement, bursts from the depths to the surface, vaulting out of the water as a pod with wide mouths gaping, swallowing thousands of gallons of water and herring. I’ve only seen photographs, but I can hardly imagine anything more spectacular. The occasional boat caught in this feeding pattern has been snapped in half. Lest we think we are above the destruction Canada is seeing with their development, the herring population in Auck Bay and around Juneau has been declining precipitously since the 1970s, ostensibly as a result of development and overfishing. Understanding how all of our systems are interrelated we should respond with humility- and action.

In addition to humpback whales, gray whales, killer whales (orcas) and even, amazingly, the blue whale are making the journey. Gray whales should be between our current location and a bit further north at this point on their 10-12,000 mile migration. Bowhead whales – the most important sea mammal for native peoples from both the cultural and subsistence standpoint- and beluga whales are already north- their migration is circumpolar, as they are well adapted to remain in arctic waters. The reminder all of these mammals bring is just how much life is constantly present in the arctic seas, as inhospitable as they may seem to us,  as well as how much life arrives annually.

A short stop in Wrangell, a tiny town of 2,500 tucked into the forested hills, 15 minutes, just enough to get Teton out for a quick walk, and we already want to come back and spend time here. The mountains into Wrangell are gorgeous-they are the Coast Mountains, considered to be the tallest coastal range in the world. We are heading toward the “mountain kingdom of the northwest”, the largest national park in the country, Wrangell St. Elias National Park, htough we wont reach it for several hundred miles.  It is the largest collection of glaciers and peaks over 16,000 feet on the continent. This area is particularly known for its beauty and spectacularly poor weather. We are anxious to see the St. Elias Mountains, but the Coast Mountains themselves are incredible.  Just off shore of Wrangell are a number of small, forested islands begging a coastal exploration by kayak. We determine to get back here to spend some time. I remember a recent issue of a magazine highlighting surfing in the SE. Apparently in areas it’s very good, though it sounds cold.

All of the little towns- including our second to last stop, the moderately sized state capital of Juneau, are accessible only by boat and air. As a result the Alaskan legislature has been known to start or end late due to bad weather interrupting travel. The towns are coastal, but bounded by a range of steep mountains pitching up from the sea which, especially combined with bad weather, makes air travel precarious. In the 70s an Alaska Airline flight carrying over a hundred people crashed into a mountain taking off out of Juneau, and in the 80s a National Guard plane crashed into the same mountain. The sparse road system shared with Canada starts in Haines and Skagway. This travel by boat is having the hoped for effect of slowing us down, though. We can read, sleep, do a little work or watch the ocean- that’s it. With no internet access we can’t even check email- something of a blessing, though I can’t do as much research as I’d hoped. Maybe that’s ok. Sometimes it is good to have time to just sit.

A little bit more fun before bed. The route from Wrangell to Petersburg on the Alaska Marine Highway is through the Wrangell Narrows, initially a thin valley carved by glaciers. We are on the largest boat in the fleet, and apparently the largest vessel passing through the Narrows. The Narrows are dredged to 24 feet, and the Columbia draws at 17 feet. Parts of the Narrows are 150 feet between buoys, and the Columbia is 85 feet wide. I have to imagine it’s a lot of work to pilot the ferry through with parts of the channel nicknamed Christmas Tree Alley, Twisting Nightmare, the Ditch and Pin Ball Alley for the number of navigational aids and turns required. It does give us the chance to see a mother moose with her calf just on the shore, barely visible in the twilight, and only ten minutes later another mother moose and two calves. The proximity to shore on this part of the journey is special.

The Columbia broke down again in Juneau, so we’ve transferred to the MV Malaspina (all the boats in the fleet are named after glaciers) and now have a few hours to head into town. The typical SE weather has settled in now, light rain, low ceiling and clouds drifting in and out of forested and snow capped mountains.

We have a fabulous breakfast at The Sandpiper Cafe, get a few groceries at the Rainbow grocery, and a really good chai at the Heritage Coffee Shop where the internet is also free (with our chai). Juneau is a beautiful town with narrow streets, neatly maintained roads and buildings with character. Most impressive are the mountains which climb straight up behind town with waterfalls and fog drifting in and out of the spruce and cedar. Soon we will be back on the water and heading toward Haines.  And looking forward to the chance to explore the Tongass National Forest more on our trip south!

Special thanks to Ray Massey of the Forest Service for corrections and suggestions.