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Showing posts from 2011

December 22

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The manufacture of all dreams goes forward unabated still, in spite of the long silence. We are back from the Sheep Mountain 150, in which Kristin ran happy, healthy dogs through 150 miles of winding, altitude-laden, blizzard-touched trails down off the Glenn. I was her handler, along with Jess O, which meant helping get everything prepared, dropping dogs the night prior, axing meat into snacks, lining out the team, laying underneath the stars with K after her first run, watching the dogs while she slept inside, standing on the break at the appropriate times & generally worrying a bunch while she was on trail. I suppose that what it really meant was getting to witness something absolutely beautiful & awesome & ridiculously wonderful, which was K fulfilling a dream. & like any good dream, it meandered from stunned terror to mild confidence to intransigent doubt & again to a kind of joy that I think could rightly be called incandescent, or exuberant at the very least.

October 25

October this year already appareled in white, after weeks upon weeks of peaking autumnal pyrotechnics. We are finally installed in the new cabin at Skeeter Creek, with thirty-seven dogs of the highest caliber outside our back window. I went out with Kristin a few days ago during ATV training around the Inter-tie, & it was nothing short of amazing to see these dogs work—heads steady, gaits set on smooth repeat, focus palpable in each of them. Twelve miles an hour & one or two among them still in a steady trot, which is ludicrous. & Kristin is back in the throes of dog ecstasy again, looking anxiously at the clouds as if to will them into rupturing forth in billows of snow. It’s a wonderful thing. I went around the Inter-tie two days ago in the same speed as the dogs, which was curious & informative, since it means I’m apparently running quite a bit faster than I thought. I have officially signed up for the Little Susitna 50K down in Big Lake this February, to be run alon

September 22

There are two things lodged in my mind now between other thoughts-- the first is the Eliot line about the "negative wisdom of humility," & the second is 5:13:57, my finishing time in the Equinox Marathon up in Fairbanks last week. Its completion means the world to me, & there is, as I anticipated, a renewed sense of self in me now. But very clearly buttressing that is a renewed sense of where I erred, where I didn't offer ample respect to the endeavor, where I thought my ego might possibly fill in where my training was lacking. & so I imagine it was my ego, coupled with the thrill of a race & the odd presence of other people at all during a run (I never run with others & rarely if ever see runners on these mountains), pushing me to a quick start. At the nine-mile mark my time was at a respectable-but-ludicrously-fast-&-in-no-way-tenable-for-me 65 minutes. I came out gunning with 7:22 miles, hanging with the first quarter of runners for some reason.

September 9

As of tomorrow morning, I will be counting down seven days to the Equinox Marathon in Fairbanks, wherein I will at long last consummate my long-standing courtship with long distance running. Each morning now I glance out the window at the thermometer & past where it hangs to take in the distant tableau of mountains either bathed in alpenglow or cloaked completely in roiling grey cloud. Each day in running I feel for anomalies in my feet, I survey the trails for jutting roots, I yell my hey bears the louder the closer I get to the date of the race & the more berry-dense shits I see scattered along the way. & in spite of my chosen terrain, I’ve been incredibly fortunate thusfar— tripping & falling three or four times with no lasting issues (a comical shitshow with all three dogs attached), seeing a couple bears with no negative consequence, trying new shoes with no resulting hot spots. So I feel this odd cautious optimism. Last time I tried to this I was hamstrung with pe

September 3

The fledgling signs of winter’s approach now over the painted hills & mountains, snow line down lower along Healy Ridge & down south over Panorama. & all the fireweed gone red. Running twenty miles yesterday, the leaves underfoot along the trail vermillion & crimson & gashing gold, rain-slick or lazing unhurried from white bough to black dirt. & a few days ago, running on a sheep trail on top of Sugarloaf, a gargantuan hyperphagic griz sauntering about in the berry patches just below, so that to reroute I had to sidehill a steep scree-field for a mile. & here it is September, already. The moose in rut, temperatures to thirty overnight, the autumnal crispness attending the mornings or carried in the breeze. & the colors in this place pyrotechnic & endlessly beautiful again. On the property we’ve been stalled by busy-ness & marathon training. I hauled the concrete piers out a few days ago in five trips totaling somewhere around 700 pounds. Didn

August 8

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Ready for post holes.

July 25

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Maximus rests under the feathered shade of a spruce bough with his paws tucked under his body & his chestnut eyes following each swing of the mattock. Intermittently, we hear the rising sound of Wils & Moose crashing through the willows, seeing the bush-tops jerk in rapid succession before they both burst out onto the clearing with great wide smiles, tongues wagging & eyes bright. I’ll pull at the tundra, around the swath I’ve axed out, & use the pick to pull the heavy duff & soil to the brush pile. & look over & see Kristin cursing a root buried deep under the top-layer while she brings the pulaski down over & again. & look past her to see Healy ridge off to the south, dusted with vestigial snow from the cold snap last week, bathed in a uniformly crisp light. Past it, the ridgelines we finally found up past Sugarloaf, a kind of alpine running paradise. To the East, Dora & Jumbo & Walker Domes, & the endless strip of tundra yawning out pa

June 27

I’ve run up the game trail on Antler Creek before, through the brush & along the scree falling off the ridge, up toward the point where you have to cross-hill to attain the saddle that lets you get to the peak, but I’d turned around before crossing over to see the other side. Earlier this week, ground-pounding for a search & rescue that ended favorably, I finally eased over the cusp & saw a great swath of unbroken tundra spreading easy & rolling toward Savage River. & just south of it, the complete opposite: an interconnected network of narrow ridges that gave out on a steep bowl criss-crossed with sheep trails winding down to the headwaters of Dry Creek, tucked in where the sun can’t find ample purchase to melt off the mazarine shelves of ice lingering on well past their season. & though I’d hiked up at a brisk pace under grave enough auspices, I still marveled at it & couldn’t help but eye routes for longer runs. It’s astonishing to me how this landscape o

Gates of the Arctic

More will come on this, but in the enduring absence of text, those few curious among you can see some things here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/apinalaska/.

April 30

Spring break-up now, the snow soft & thinning into a rhizomatic patchwork of puddle & brown runnel, & the tundra scrub peaking through the black dirt, tired & distended with water. & then come those waning hours of darkness, the stars become fugitive already, the windows covered over in the hope of some small night’s sleep. The bears already roaming at every altitude, the throngs of people already doing the same, & that perfect quiet of our winter opening again unto life & busyness & externality in all of its incarnations. It starts like that, a little bird-call, isolated that way, & then turns to the madrigal & the chorus & then that becomes the familiar ringing in your ear summerlong. There is that attendant hesitation to participate, that part of me that doesn’t want to loosen my grasp on winter & all of its insular comforts. But we are animals, after all, & hibernation gives way to the pulse of things around us. & once the rot

April 16

I think I could live a dozen lifetimes & not scratch the surface of what I want to do in this state. Looking over pictures of Bering Land Bridge & Kobuk Valley has spurred in me a new yearning to head north & west, toward those unfathomable sweeps of tundra valley & those rolling, languid rivers. & all of it, all of it unpeopled. I see the patchwork of vermillion & blazing gold, the heavy cerulean sky with its spires of slow cloud, the maars at Devil Mountain, & I want to start walking. Or I see the undulating hills that conjure to my thinking a hugely amplified facsimile of western Iowa, covered entire in thick, wind-driven snow, back-dropped by looming ranges in the distance, & I want to harness a dog team & mush into it instead. & the more I think about the purpose of preserving wilderness (the more I talk to Kristin about it & the more I steal an education in it from her), the more I think a place like Kobuk or BELA would feel like home.

April 9

It’s a swift work time does, & then there’s our inclination toward epochism hanging over it, begging its taxonomies. Call it an ocean when it’s a multitude of wave & current. Call it a river when it’s eddies & silt & braided channels & fluxing limns of shore. I think of the last decade that way, thinking it through its recognizable consistencies, as if they speak to some breed of continuity, or as if they need to. Somehow that sense that we tame the past in the discovery of its patterns, that we stitch a quilt of its disparate parts & are somehow contented to pull it over us in sleep. It’s an odd inclination, tamping things down when at their base there’s really only disparity. (Even comparison actively calls attention to fundamental separation, even as it yokes together). It makes you wonder. This morning, it makes me wonder at how we revise experience, & how those revisions alter over time. What clings to them, what falls away, & what within us finds g

March 12

I reckon it’s likely a function of age, of arriving at a certain point in the trajectory when you do some accounting & take the measure of the currents running around you, the loose ends you’ve ignored, the errant sinuous goals & projects left undone, the gravid light of newer dreams just beginning to blossom. & so I weigh these things against each other, let my grip loosen around some, clutch others the tighter for it, let the entire thing shift how it wants to, how I want it to. & lately, the object is to open a space wherein my actual desires can take root & flourish, where I can cultivate them & work towards them in tangible ways, make them my goals, & adhere to the plans that will bring those goals to fruition. All to say those goals seem to be solidifying these days, around a few specific things, or persons, or dogs. It’s odd, my enthusiasm for life has worn a curious garb these many years. It seems to me I’ve used certain goals to justify the absence

February 26

Ree Nancarrow gave a slide show presentation last night about life in Denali over the last forty-five years. When she came to the country, there were no actual roads, & local travel required a good dog team or an airplane or a great deal of patience with the ongoing tendency of Alaska to brutalize an automobile. Her cabin was built by hand, as were all of the outlying structures on the property. When the snow fell heavy decades ago, her husband built a bridge over it. When they decided to dig a basement, he did it by hand, with a shovel & a wheelbarrow. In permafrost. & when they ordered groceries, initially the order was placed through mail to Seattle. In the absence of an electric grid, they built their own generator. & in the absence of a well, they melted snow enough to water themselves & their dogs every day. At that time, the entire Denali fleet consisted of seven trucks, one snowgo & twenty-eight dogs. Rangers (the two of them that were here) spent the en

February 6

Woke up thinking about Thales, who famously fell into a pit as he was walking with his eyes upturned to the stars. Last night the auroras were snaking & fluxing, a limn of purple along the bottom of the green band, & then those vertical tears that shimmer & fade above the long arc below. To the south, meanwhile, the Milky Way like a bucket of soap water cast out over asphalt, the stars bright punctures in the ever-dark sky. It’s been some time since I stood slack-jawed staring at the firmament. Driving home last night, we passed the metal sculpture of a team of dogs that lines the top of a gateway just next to my pull-out, silhouetted black against the surging green behind. It’s a structure like you see at the beginning of ranch roads, two huge spruce posts & one cross-beam, & in this case, it signifies passage into the Kingdom (all the land once or presently owned by now retired musher Jeff King). There was some small tug in me though, seeing it, knowing that every

January 30

I had two strange memories flood over me this week while I thought to notice myself rooting down here. The first was the recollection of seeing the Dick Proenneke PBS special for the first time years ago, its images interspersed with a lulling quiet. I recalled specifically two things: the fact that he fashioned his own tools & tool handles on site (recalled mostly because that takes a committed bad-ass), & the sound of his oars in the glass-smooth water of the lake. Resourcefulness lending itself to recreation, that sort of thing. & then the second memory involves meeting some random friend of a contemptible peer at DU who was visiting & discussing plans to make a film featuring Alaska. At the time, I was reading a history of the state & so came to the conversation academically. Which, really, is entirely implausible. The guy, it turned out, was every bit as much an insufferable ass as his friend, but what strikes me now is the absence of the senses from that brief

January 21

Odd how standing in the cabin, feeling the sun pour down over me for the first time in months, there awake the quietest intimations of spring already. It is twenty-seven below, with a dusting of new snow, but in that bath of light there is a kind of stirring. Your eyes note the chickadee instead of the raven or the magpie. You note that the gloaming comes later & lingers a bit past the late afternoon before the moon crests above the range blood-orange or silver-white. & all at once, I clutch the more tightly to the winter & lean into the thought of warmth. So many miles yet to mush, & at the same time, I feel a bodily need for sunlight again. Before the winter came, we all told ourselves that in its frigid months we would have time to slow down, reacquaint ourselves with ourselves, work on projects & the like. & now, halfway through it, I am no less busy, only more quietly so. My busy-ness does not involve hundreds of calls & blips & beeps at work, &

January 16

So much of the park I’ve seen in the last ten days, on the back of a snowgo or from the runners of the dogsled. Out in the gloaming mornings on the tundra before the trail narrows in to the Sushana, with the sky a muted pink & the Alaska Range stirring into focus, the great cleft wedge of the mountain rising gargantuan from the dark. The yawning cornices windblown & hanging delicate over the rolling hills above the river. The tussocks with spiny copper-wire willows bare & twisting under. The river-ice of the East Fork River, a quarter mile across it seemed, steaming over sinkholes, stepping over fissures or giving in to overflow & slush. The sound the ice makes, those quiet, travelling strings of cracking that spread vermicular underfoot in sudden spells of lightning terror. Seeing your sled slide parallel beside you when it ought to be pulled behind. & then the warmth of the wood stove, the pots boiling down the snow, the dogs curled with noses under tails, the aur

January 4

A new year, & with it, the strange effects of the Chinook casting warm temperatures & gale-force winds & clouds roiling in violent torsion through the sky. Each day now a little longer, measurable for us by the line of the sun on the ridge to the north of the cabin, which each day gets closer to draping over the valley on Stampede. Not yet, not yet, but closer. Tomorrow I join the kennels folks & a ranger & head out from Stampede to the Lower Toklat, with night stops at Sushana & East Fork along the way. If you look at a map, you’ll see that after the Tek we still have a ways to go. That thumb in the park boundary gives way to a gaping landscape, the topography of which pushes us down to the East fork before ridging over to the Toklat. North of the Wyoming Hills. A part of the park I’ve never seen in any season. I’ll be starting out on snowgo, alternating from time to time with the three mushers I hope, taking the teams along a circuitous route that isn’t often