June 13
Morning, the sky again threatening rain, though idly, quietly, with none of the rumble rumble of other skies. Another full night of sleep, in a bed, with walls around me, however paper thin. Now, at the kitchen table, I hear Roy’s intermittent snores through the sheer folding door between us. Or earlier at two a.m., when he got home from work, the successive clicks of the beer cans opened & downed in a matter of minutes. We will know each other’s habits well, I suppose.
Yesterday afternoon took one of the government bicycles from our white tent up to Headquarters to obtain a pass on one of the tour buses for tomorrow. Rode down to the Wilderness Access Center afterwards, near the entrance, to translate it to a ticket for a ride tomorrow to Eielson almost sixty miles into the park (no vehicles other than tour buses are allowed past mile fifteen). Half of me balks at voluntarily committing to more time in a vehicle, but the other half recognizes where I am again & spurs me convincingly. I’ll better know the lay of the land from that drive, anyway.
So today I’ve not decided yet between the Mt. Healy overlook trail or heading down to Savage River at mile 15 & just heading into all of that untrailed wilderness. From the top of Mt. Healy, if you look north, you see the dip towards the Stampede Trail & the Teklateena River, where McCandless made his entrance those years ago. Sean, my boss here, resents the film born of the book, since now countless devotees make pilgrimage to the bus twenty-five miles in; & since it follows a notch of land outside the park, ATVs & Jeeps are permitted to take in tours. People want to see now where Emile Hirsch ate breakfast, where Sean Penn hunkered over a camera. Celebrity’s magnetism. Where it used to be the odd hiker with a backpack & a wilderness permit, a paperback stuffed into a back pocket, now it’s a group of fan page bloggers. This, at any rate, is Sean’s complaint. He worked as a safety manager on the set & had little positive to say about either Penn or Krakauer. Me, I liked the movie & the book. I might have to hike at least a leg of the Stampede, if I get a gun first.
So. Arise & walk. I’ll let my coffee do its work now.
***
Opted for the Mt. Healy overlook trail, which I’ll describe in due time, but first, I still shake a little from coming upon a grizzly a quarter mile from finishing up the hike. I had been clapping & whistling every 200 yards for the majority of the hike but had fallen into thinking & lapsed in awareness. I heard a rustle off the path, paused, & perhaps twenty feet away I saw the ass of a grizzly. I wondered, this path meandering through boreal forest, if this might not be a black bear or some ungulate in disguise, maybe a mottled sheep or a particularly hefty moose with abnormally short legs. It’s too early in the season, though, for a black bear to be that large, & its fur had the grey patches that lend the grizzly its name. Upon realizing what it was, I was surprised at my reaction, which did not involve panic or sudden incontinence. I put my hands up, I murmured low that I was a human & only passing by, & I took slow & steady steps past it. Because of its angle, continuing along the path made the most sense. After ten yards I began to walk normally, keeping an eye over my shoulder, the adrenaline coursing my veins. I was inordinately lucky in that the bear simply could not be bothered a jot. It went on foraging without so much as a glance my way. I continued along to the trailhead, my blood buzzing in me.
Prior to the bear, it had been an uninterruptedly beautiful hike, with 2500 feet of elevation gain over about two miles. Boreal forest giving way to scree giving way to a ridgeline trail that fell over towards the Healy valley on one side & out over Denali’s sprawling wilderness on the other. A mist clung to the mountaintops—a cloud really, that turned & started pouring a steady rain on me as soon as I reached the summit. Up top, the little peaks rose like haystacks from a water, or those long, thin mountains one sees in photographs of China. & all along, this one thin path winding the ridge. Just before the rain came, I chanced on a wolverine perched on top of a boulder & got a few photographs. A mottled ptarmigan screeched in & started following me for a bit, looking for some handout. I was pleased to have seen the wolverine—itself a highly secretive animal that one doesn’t frequently come across. An eventful hike. Along the way down the flow of people upward looked familiar—the Brits with tweed hats, the father & son with matching crew-cuts & army t-shirts, the family with docile teens with ear-buds snaking down to ipods in their pockets. Vacationing. Which, I suppose, I am doing all summer.
At the end I told a couple on their way up to make a good deal of noise a quarter mile along. I told them there was a bear, though he or she had probably ambled along by then. Grizzlies usually will stay in flatter land, in the tundra, but they’ll follow calving moose without hesitation for a sure meal. They don’t, so far as I know, prefer to dilly-dally in such places.
What a thing. What grace to witness. I can’t say really that it was a face-to-face encounter. I didn’t see the dish-shaped face of the bear, its brown eyes, its snout or its teeth. I suppose it was a face-to-ass encounter, even though that rings a bit less & invites the comical. There was a runner on the North Fork Road in Homer who was mauled by a grizzly he startled, & in an interview afterwards he said that in that briefest exchange before the violent swing of the claw, he regarded the bear & thought not of his safety or of what was happening in any urgent way, but only, calmly, how beautiful this creature, how breath-takingly beautiful. For me, walking away from that, my heart pounding, a kind of energetic thrumming all through my body, I thought, how simple, really. There are things we can know, after all—
Yesterday afternoon took one of the government bicycles from our white tent up to Headquarters to obtain a pass on one of the tour buses for tomorrow. Rode down to the Wilderness Access Center afterwards, near the entrance, to translate it to a ticket for a ride tomorrow to Eielson almost sixty miles into the park (no vehicles other than tour buses are allowed past mile fifteen). Half of me balks at voluntarily committing to more time in a vehicle, but the other half recognizes where I am again & spurs me convincingly. I’ll better know the lay of the land from that drive, anyway.
So today I’ve not decided yet between the Mt. Healy overlook trail or heading down to Savage River at mile 15 & just heading into all of that untrailed wilderness. From the top of Mt. Healy, if you look north, you see the dip towards the Stampede Trail & the Teklateena River, where McCandless made his entrance those years ago. Sean, my boss here, resents the film born of the book, since now countless devotees make pilgrimage to the bus twenty-five miles in; & since it follows a notch of land outside the park, ATVs & Jeeps are permitted to take in tours. People want to see now where Emile Hirsch ate breakfast, where Sean Penn hunkered over a camera. Celebrity’s magnetism. Where it used to be the odd hiker with a backpack & a wilderness permit, a paperback stuffed into a back pocket, now it’s a group of fan page bloggers. This, at any rate, is Sean’s complaint. He worked as a safety manager on the set & had little positive to say about either Penn or Krakauer. Me, I liked the movie & the book. I might have to hike at least a leg of the Stampede, if I get a gun first.
So. Arise & walk. I’ll let my coffee do its work now.
***
Opted for the Mt. Healy overlook trail, which I’ll describe in due time, but first, I still shake a little from coming upon a grizzly a quarter mile from finishing up the hike. I had been clapping & whistling every 200 yards for the majority of the hike but had fallen into thinking & lapsed in awareness. I heard a rustle off the path, paused, & perhaps twenty feet away I saw the ass of a grizzly. I wondered, this path meandering through boreal forest, if this might not be a black bear or some ungulate in disguise, maybe a mottled sheep or a particularly hefty moose with abnormally short legs. It’s too early in the season, though, for a black bear to be that large, & its fur had the grey patches that lend the grizzly its name. Upon realizing what it was, I was surprised at my reaction, which did not involve panic or sudden incontinence. I put my hands up, I murmured low that I was a human & only passing by, & I took slow & steady steps past it. Because of its angle, continuing along the path made the most sense. After ten yards I began to walk normally, keeping an eye over my shoulder, the adrenaline coursing my veins. I was inordinately lucky in that the bear simply could not be bothered a jot. It went on foraging without so much as a glance my way. I continued along to the trailhead, my blood buzzing in me.
Prior to the bear, it had been an uninterruptedly beautiful hike, with 2500 feet of elevation gain over about two miles. Boreal forest giving way to scree giving way to a ridgeline trail that fell over towards the Healy valley on one side & out over Denali’s sprawling wilderness on the other. A mist clung to the mountaintops—a cloud really, that turned & started pouring a steady rain on me as soon as I reached the summit. Up top, the little peaks rose like haystacks from a water, or those long, thin mountains one sees in photographs of China. & all along, this one thin path winding the ridge. Just before the rain came, I chanced on a wolverine perched on top of a boulder & got a few photographs. A mottled ptarmigan screeched in & started following me for a bit, looking for some handout. I was pleased to have seen the wolverine—itself a highly secretive animal that one doesn’t frequently come across. An eventful hike. Along the way down the flow of people upward looked familiar—the Brits with tweed hats, the father & son with matching crew-cuts & army t-shirts, the family with docile teens with ear-buds snaking down to ipods in their pockets. Vacationing. Which, I suppose, I am doing all summer.
At the end I told a couple on their way up to make a good deal of noise a quarter mile along. I told them there was a bear, though he or she had probably ambled along by then. Grizzlies usually will stay in flatter land, in the tundra, but they’ll follow calving moose without hesitation for a sure meal. They don’t, so far as I know, prefer to dilly-dally in such places.
What a thing. What grace to witness. I can’t say really that it was a face-to-face encounter. I didn’t see the dish-shaped face of the bear, its brown eyes, its snout or its teeth. I suppose it was a face-to-ass encounter, even though that rings a bit less & invites the comical. There was a runner on the North Fork Road in Homer who was mauled by a grizzly he startled, & in an interview afterwards he said that in that briefest exchange before the violent swing of the claw, he regarded the bear & thought not of his safety or of what was happening in any urgent way, but only, calmly, how beautiful this creature, how breath-takingly beautiful. For me, walking away from that, my heart pounding, a kind of energetic thrumming all through my body, I thought, how simple, really. There are things we can know, after all—
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