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 auroras gentle in their sway & the sky so vast & clear & cold one can scarcely hope to describe it.

On the overland trail from East fork to Sushana, along the northern boundary, there is a swath of tundra so wide it conjures the feel of a massive caldera, the ridges distinct off in the distance, the mountain seeming so close in its formidable vertical rise. & in that vast valley a herd of caribou out along a drainage, a single male bucking in a swath of snow. A ribbon of spruce where the roots will find purchase against the winds. & knowing, knowing that you are the only human out there. Fucking extraordinary, beyond all measure. One simply cannot imagine that scope, the way we can’t grasp infinity or the like. It is perhaps the most beautiful place I have ever been.

Four days of snowmachining, then back to work for three, then two days of running a seven-dog team out to Sanctuary Cabin & back. I think myself irrevocably changed.

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