As of January 7...

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Crow Pass Crossing

There was a point there, sliding on my ass down a hundred-yard snowfield rippled with minute waves of ice & buried rock, when I wondered if perhaps I ought to reorient myself in order to avoid slamming into the jagged boulder looming below. & there was a point while loping across another pitch of snow sidelong wherein I noticed I might well slide a mile off course if I didn’t hit the footholds. There was incessant rain, beating down from the report of the starting pistol until the finish line, & a fierce firn wind weaving through the willows, the Devil’s Club, the sedge-green grass. & the feeling on the far shore of Eagle River of wholly numb legs wobbling underneath me. I completely ate shit a half dozen times, tripped & recovered a dozen more, stubbed my twice-broken toe, stepped knee-deep in beaver ponds, slid & slopped through mud, leapt over twenty piles of fresh bear scat & clutched looming thistles to right myself, committing the ensuing mile each tim
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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
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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
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