Lake Eva, Baranof Island, Peril Strait
Tides of clouds bring the weather and take it away on muddy forest trails where brown bears come and go, bears that make ghosts of themselves, shape-shifters; silent, their sovereign tracks beneath grand Sitka spruce and western hemlock. We trundle the Lake Eva Trail and stare into so much that is larger than ourselves: the delicate sounds of birds, the magical mystery tour of rivers and rain, the gifts of gray and green, the mossy conifer crowns one hundred feet overhead, crowns enriched with marine isotopes, isotopes from salmon, salmon that connect all things. Consider this: it takes a fish to feed a forest. The salmon return to spawn. Weak and near dying, they are pulled from the water by hungry, sovereign bears. But the hungriest bear still leaves a little fish uneaten, a little that over time is a lot, a little that rots into fertile ground and provides nutrients and isotopes for tall trees that grow taller still. John Muir was right. “Whenever you try to pick something out from the universe you find it hitched to everything else.” He was right a second time when he said, “I only went out for a short walk but decided to stay out until sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”
We finish the morning with a round of Zodiac tours and kayaking, zipping about in those rainbow boats of yellow, orange, blue, red, purple, green and gray. What skilled paddlers we are after a week in Alaska.
With a little extra time, we cross Chatham Strait to visit Hood Bay on the west coast of Admiralty Island. Then it’s Sitka-bound down Peril Strait, and from there, home, back to all that is familiar and yet different, not quite what it was before, a home colored now with the overlay of Alaska, the wildness that resides in each of us, wildness that sharpens our wits and enlivens our senses and makes us ache, yes, our knees a little taxed, but our hearts and minds younger, stronger, kinder from the acts of hiking, paddling, laughing and learning together, making friends in the bounty of open space.
Tides of clouds bring the weather and take it away on muddy forest trails where brown bears come and go, bears that make ghosts of themselves, shape-shifters; silent, their sovereign tracks beneath grand Sitka spruce and western hemlock. We trundle the Lake Eva Trail and stare into so much that is larger than ourselves: the delicate sounds of birds, the magical mystery tour of rivers and rain, the gifts of gray and green, the mossy conifer crowns one hundred feet overhead, crowns enriched with marine isotopes, isotopes from salmon, salmon that connect all things. Consider this: it takes a fish to feed a forest. The salmon return to spawn. Weak and near dying, they are pulled from the water by hungry, sovereign bears. But the hungriest bear still leaves a little fish uneaten, a little that over time is a lot, a little that rots into fertile ground and provides nutrients and isotopes for tall trees that grow taller still. John Muir was right. “Whenever you try to pick something out from the universe you find it hitched to everything else.” He was right a second time when he said, “I only went out for a short walk but decided to stay out until sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”
We finish the morning with a round of Zodiac tours and kayaking, zipping about in those rainbow boats of yellow, orange, blue, red, purple, green and gray. What skilled paddlers we are after a week in Alaska.
With a little extra time, we cross Chatham Strait to visit Hood Bay on the west coast of Admiralty Island. Then it’s Sitka-bound down Peril Strait, and from there, home, back to all that is familiar and yet different, not quite what it was before, a home colored now with the overlay of Alaska, the wildness that resides in each of us, wildness that sharpens our wits and enlivens our senses and makes us ache, yes, our knees a little taxed, but our hearts and minds younger, stronger, kinder from the acts of hiking, paddling, laughing and learning together, making friends in the bounty of open space.
