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Who Runs Coal Lake?

 

Our bike brakes squealed. Nancy and I stopped next to the overly large pile of bear shit.

There is something perversely thrilling about messing around in country where there are critters that can eat you.

The pile of bear droppings were the first of several piles we passed on another adventure on the Alligator Lake road. They all were fairly fresh.

Without a television in the Yukon, Nancy and I have to create our own adventure channel.  On this day it meant packing lunches, water bottles and cans of bear spray for a mountain bike trek.

Even though the locals call it the Alligator Lake road, it is not really a road. There are a couple of rusted vehicle remains pushed into the bush alongside the trail. Foolish folks who chose to drive the dozen or so miles back to the remote Alligator Lake left behind these artifacts.   The jewel of a lake nestles in a phalanx of mountains. It is named for the nearby gator-shaped Alligator Mountain.  Dall sheep and caribou look down on its waters. Earlier this summer a friend cycled back to camp overnight and had three wolverines pass closely as they loped through their home range.

The road is really an overused, eroded quad (ATV) trail.  It has sections of softball-sized rocks, deep mudholes the color of last week’s coffee, sand that sucks your tires out of sight, and exposed lengths of spruce roots that rattle your teeth as the bike flies over them. Oh and you also have to cross a numbingly cold Two Horse Creek that demands you get off your bike and wade.  A day pedaling on the Alligator Lake road is guaranteed to loosen up your joints, shake your insides, demand keen reflexes, work your lungs and heart and give you a surge of adrenaline.

Our adrenaline factor spiked when we pedaled past several heaps of bear shit.

We examined the first tar black pile, shiny with mossberries. The size of the pile made it clear that it was grizzly and not black bear.

Mossberries, more commonly known as crowberries, are profuse this year. This is good news for bear and human berry pickers.  The low matted shrub, common in tundra and rocky soils, is said to be the most popular wild fruit among the Inuit. Two nights ago I had a fine piece of white frosted cake laced with mossberries.

These berries are full of fiber and tiny seeds. Consequently, the fruit makes its way through a bear’s long digestive system and are left in telltale piles of waste. And no, there were no bear bells, no shreds of clothing in the feces, just the shards of hundreds of mossberries.

The grizzly is an iconic feature of the Yukon and Alaska wilderness. Along the Alaskan coast, grizzlies are known as brown bears and feed heavily on salmon. With this high protein diet, the grizzlies living there are over-sized. The diet of interior grizzlies, like those in the Yukon, can be up to 90 percent plant material.

It’s the other ten percent of their diet that makes me nervous.

I know I need to be bear aware and as I travel and camp in bear country. Statistically, I am more likely to be struck by a bolt of lightening that be attacked by a bear.  But I still know I should hike or bike in groups, make noise to avoid surprising a bear and stay at least one hundred yards from a bear. Further is better.

Passing piles of fresh bear scat gives me sharp focus. Nancy and I simultaneously pedaled and sang or loudly chatted, not an easy task on an uphill stretch. Making noise is probably the best bear deterrent there is. Let the bears know that you are coming and they generally will bid a hasty retreat. As a habit, they don’t go around looking for conflict.

When we stopped to have a much-needed lunch, only a mile or so from Alligator Lake, we were surprised to see two quads drop down a steep pitch towards us. They slowed, pulled up next to us and turned off their machines. The first fellow pulled off his helmet and asked if we were okay. I noticed the rifle scabbard fastened just ahead of his handlebars.

We must have looked like a bad accident as they drove up. We were sprawled on the hillside, resting and eating and the bikes were lying next to us.

We affirmed that we were okay. After commending us on our workout to get back into this rugged country, he asked if we had seen any wildlife. Other than a pair of spruce grouse and a few dashing red squirrels, we had seen nothing. “Oh,” I added.  “We did pass a few big piles of fairly fresh bear droppings.”

Looking far off to his left and pointing, the middle-aged man said, “Yeah, there is a big old grizzly that runs the Coal Lake area.” Coal Lake is not more than a ten- minute bear trot east of Alligator Lake.

After a few minutes of friendly chatter, the two motorists fired up their quads and drove away. I watched the cased rifle disappear and glanced down at the can of bear spray tucked into the easily accessible side pocket of my pack. A recent study in Alaska shows that statistically bear spray is more effective than firearms when defending oneself from a bear attack.  But for the spray to be effective, the bear has to be no more than twenty feet. http://www.fws.gov/mountain-prairie/species/mammals/grizzly/bear%20spray.pdf

What did the quad driver mean by his choice of the verb, “runs?” Did he mean that the bear runs through the Coal Lake area or does he run, as in manage, the Coal Lake area? And if he is he manager of this domain, is he a friendly manager?

We finished our sandwiches and noted the late afternoon sun. We would be negotiating the hazards of Alligator Lake Road in the dark if we didn’t start back soon. Neither of us said a word about what was really driving our decision. We didn’t want to bump into the back end of a certain grizzly that runs the mossberry route.

*Note: the photo used with this blog entry is one of a black bear hind foot. . . also from the Alligator Lake Road. The tire tread is from my mtn bike “bush pony.”

 

Enduring Features

 

The trip to the Tombstone Mountains has been on our “Yukon bucket-list” for a couple of years. Less than an hour after bumping our way down the notorious Dempster Highway we passed the sign welcoming us to Tombstone Territorial Park. (Note: The Dempster is Canada’s one and only all-weather highway that crosses the Arctic Circle. It  is a 640 mile long gravel road that ends near the edge of where North America and the Arctic Ocean meet.)

Other than one trail that limits the number of backpackers, Tombstone Park allows visitors to hike anywhere.  But, once out there, you are on your own. Our first stop was at the  park Interpretive Center to make inquiries about a challenging hike.

The uniformed young woman who helped us was a short, strong, park ranger who looked part warrior and part bike gang member with her nose ring and stubby dredlocks. We made it clear that we liked to get off the beaten trail where we would not likely see people. I saw the flicker of her eyes as she quickly scanned both of us. It was a measuring up type of glance. I don’t know if it was my faded orange, multi-pocketed pants, patched in three loci with silver duct tape or if it was our well-worn hiking boots that prompted her to unfold a topo map and boldly stab a finger on a mountain and series of ridges that she was not familiar with.

“You might try Mt. Boyle,” the park warrior said.  Pausing, she added, “I have not hiked it but it looks interesting and accessible. “But if you climb it,” she smiled,”  you have to stop back here and report to me what you found.” We leaned over the “office use only” topo map, memorized landmarks and headed north on the Dempster Highway to check it out.

We passed critical landmarks and finally slowed to a stop to pull out the binocs to assess the mountain and the shoulders of ridges that might provide us reasonable access. We decided to fix supper here and watch the magic of light play over the mountains. Even though it was mid-August, the slopes around us were already blushing with reds and glowing in golds. We guessed that we were only two weeks from full-on autumnal foliage fireworks.

Up early the next day, we packed water bottles and lunch for refueling ourselves. We  hoped to refill our water bottle as needed from  snowmelt freshets. As usual, in accessing a particular peak, the most frustrating and onerous aspect is the first section of the trek. We had to cross a quarter mile of very soft tundra that was punctuated with countless grass hummocks. With all the high stepping, our thighs were getting more of a warmup than we wanted and we hadn’t begun to climb yet.

We approached a sinuos, thick growth of tall willow. Serpentine stretches of willows usually indicate a stream, so talking loudly to announce our presence to any potential bears, we ducked and wove through the cover.  With a moderate leap, we were across soon out of the willow.

Now we were gaining elevation and the hummocks were behind us and all we had to push through now was a scrabbly hillside of buck brush. Buck brush is the local name  for dwarf birch (Betula nana). These edgey shrubs can grow nearly to my shoulders, but are usually below my waist   a perfect tripping height. Many folks scorn this transition shrub.  It is an apt  gatekeeper for accessing the alpine, but its great escape cover for ptarmigan and other small dwellers of these parts. The foliage of these restraining shrubs tried to hold us back. There fall red colors were not enough to give us pause.

There is a victory of sorts and certainly a surge of well-being when the dwarf birch grows scarcer and scarcer and finally you spy more ground hugging lichens and alpine flora underfoot. Now our greatest barrier became  gravity itself.  The topography here is took on a greater grade of elevation and the bantor between the two of us mostly disappeared with the buckbrush. Talking became laborious and discussion was relegated to short sentences broken by the steady rhythm of louder breathes.

I think of this part of the climb as walking meditation. Concentrate on the breathing. . . big, slow breaths. Occasionally I lifted my gaze to be sure I was picking the most efficient and risk-free route. Nancy claims I am good at this. I find comfort in that honor and feel self important in leading the way.

As I hike upwards I imagined my lungs, heart and leg muscles all working in perfect harmony. It’s moments like this that render me humbled at the marvel of such synchronicity.

Higher we trudged and finally we found a false summit. It’s semi-flat bench offered us a chance to shed our packs, pull out water bottles and a tidbit to eat. The chilled wind urged us to pick up the climb again. Now the column of ragged rock at Boyle’s summit could finally be discerned. At the third false summit, we sat down behind a fold, out of the wind, put on windbreakers and ate our lunch.

We checked in with each other to see how we are feeling. Good. After twenty minutes of lunching and resting, we looked ahead at the route and agreed on it before hoisting the packs again.

The last pitch was a bit dicey but there were enough good footholds and handholds to make our way up to the tip of Boyle. The top was a grass covered pate that was actually large enough to park a car.  Scattered piles of dried Dall sheep droppings gave proof that this was indeed a spot worthy of a lookout.

Here, at the top, the burning pain in the climbing leg muscles and the associated racing heart and big breathing were forgotten.  I almost always feel a giddiness and ecstatic euphoria all rolled into one burst of well-being. My God! Why from up here I can see half way to yonder!  I felt as if I was the pin on which a compass needle balances. And the air, made from the tiny breaths of stoic alpine flora tasted unbelievable! Perches like this, high above the world, with absolutely no human sign in sight, are the kinds of spots that poet Walt Whitman wrote about in his book Leaves of Grass.

 “I inhale great draught of space…

the east and west are mine…

and the north and south are mine…I

am grandeur than I thought…

I did not know I held so much goodness. ”

During our entire trek we discovered no signs of humans.  Not one ATV track in sight. No cell towers and from the top even the Dempster is but a far distant thread.   The only tracks we saw on the climb were moose, Dall sheep, caribou (Hart River herd), and a recent grizzly excavation on an arctic ground squirrel den.

Words are pathetically  inadequate in trying to portray this epic and majestic landscape. In fact with the passing of overhead clouds, the here-and-go sunlight creates a constantly changing kaleidoscope of color and texture. I swear this country could  move the most cold hearted to tears of joy. My happiness index is rarely higher than when I am in the company of summit serenity.

Here, the interplay of sun, wind, water, snow and ice has sculpted mountains and valleys. Diverse habitats from low to high country, from mountain lake to alpine pond, from  meltwater freshet to  rushing river, all give rise to an array of astonishing diversity.

The Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y) <http://y2y.net/> works to create and maintain an interconnected series of parks and wildlife corridors that allow both people and animals to thrive across an international landscape.

In a recent report they mention “enduring features.” The report says, “This includes landforms, bedrock and surface geology, and water bodies—together called “enduring features”. These features are the base upon which Earth’s living skin develops, and where plants and animals grow and evolve.”  I like that marriage of two words. . .endearing features.  These are features that forge emotional bookmarks in my head; those memories that I’m confident of carrying in my pack of life.

After nearly eight hours of climbing and descending we made it back to camp satiated with Mt. Boyle’s offerings. And two days later we returned to the Tombstone Park Interpretive Center where we delightedly shared our findings with an equally delighted mountain warrior wearing dredlocks.

A Northerly Road Trip

After a recent road trip into Alaska and points north in the Yukon, we can now claim to have driven the whole length of the Alaska Highway.

Arguably the greatest feat of road building in the history of the world happened in 1942. In less than nine months, US Army troops and United States and Canadian civilian contractors scraped, filled and constructed 1,422 miles of a road from Dawson Creek, British Columbia to Big Delta, Alaska. Many residents of this remote land thought at the time that such a project was impossible.

Besides being the primary conduit that carries necessary goods and supplies up the highway, it also funnels tens of thousands of tourists to the “last frontier” of Alaska.

More than half a century has passed since the Alaska Highway was built and few arterial roads, particularly in the Yukon and Alaska, have been built off the main highway.

Alaska and the Yukon are mostly roadless. There are just over 12,000 miles of public road in Alaska and less than 3,500 miles in the Yukon. There is one public road, the Haines Highway, between our Yukon home and the Pacific Ocean to the west. That span is filled with mountains, alpine, lakes and spruced river valleys.

I know this because I talked to a grizzled fellow who hiked from our road to the Haines Highway during a three-week stroll in the middle of winter.

Looking like he was sired by a grizzly bear, he added that the jaunt is far easier in the winter because you can go more direct by walking over frozen rivers and lakes.

If I were to trek east across the continent towards the saltwater of Hudson’s Bay, I would cross three to five public roads. That means that between thoroughfares there is a whole lot of wild boreal land latticed with myriads of ponds, lakes and flowages. But somehow I wouldn’t doubt that the old grizzled Yukoner has made that stroll.

Winter traveling through the north is serious business.  I mean traveling in the real north, not the mild and mannered “up north” of my home state, Minnesota. Winter cuts wheat from the chaff.

Nancy and I drove up the Alaska Highway a few years ago early in the month of January. We had flown down to Minnesota for Christmas and were driving our Prius back north to the Yukon.

Prior to leaving the Yukon for the holidays, we sought advice from our born-in-the Yukon neighbor who was a truck driver. He regularly made long runs on the Alaska Highway at all times of the year. He didn’t pontificate. In all seriousness he barked, “Don’t be a cowboy.” I think that meant don’t take any chances. The remote highway can team up with the elements of nature and kill you.

When we left Minnesota that January morning it was -24°F. And with a stout NW wind, I didn’t want to calculate the wind chill. Two, winter-weight down sleeping bags, holiday presents to each other, took up much of the hatchback. We had no problems. In Canada it’s relatively easy finding a motel with outside outlets to plug our cars oil pan heater into.

When we pulled out of the motel the next morning, in the day’s late dawning, the car creaked and thunked frigidly  onto the Trans Canada Highway. The dash lights failed to work in the cold. It was midmorning, somewhere in Saskatchewan, that they flickered and finally flashed on.

We were nearing Alberta when we spied a massive front, bearing a strong Chinook, warming ocean winds hurtling easterly, over the Canadian Rockies and spilling down onto the Canadian prairie.  The giant warming front drove back the cold temperatures and offered us a leap into unseasonably tropical temperatures. That night, in Edmonton, slush was the norm. With the thermometer rising above freezing there was no need to pull out the extension chord to plug the car into an outside outlet.

A day later found us officially on the Alaska Highway under tepid January temperatures. An axiom for successfully traveling the highway at any time of the year is to fill you vehicle whenever you can as services can be few and far between.

Traffic is never really heavy on the Alaska Highway and in the winter we experienced no RVs whatsoever. Actually we experienced hardly any traffic other than a few 18-wheelers and the random car. Summer use is dropping. It could be that folks are hard pressed to make such a trip. Or it could be that fuel costs are simply making the trip too pricey.

After World War II, Canada took over ownership of the highway.  And over the next forty years the entire span was paved. Prior to the completion of a smooth surface, it was not unusual for a traveler to have multiple spare tires and gas cans strapped to the cars roof or back bumper.

It seem like you are witnessing an old newsreel of the Alaska Highway when you still witness cars loaded with tires and extra fuel. Are they paranoid or have they not updated Milepost?  There is no better mile-by-mile travel guide than the most recently Milepost.

Now having said that it is sad to see the increasing number of old service station-café units overgrown with weeds and aspen trees, like cages, growing  around the gas pumps. At one stilled roadside station, I found an old sign laying on the ground half covered with fallen leaves and spruce needles. The other half was covered in splashes of lichens. Brushing away some leaves I was able to read the hand painted declaration: “Best Rhubarb Pie.”

Every year that we point our car up this grand highway, it seems like we discover another business gone silent. The proverbial sheet of plywood leaning against a saw horse or barrel bears the boldly painted word, usually in white,  “Closed.” Perhaps, one of these years we will have no choice but to join the traveling self-service units and be forced to tote extra treads and gas cans.

And while there is a kind of poetic justice in watching the boreal wilderness reclaim itself, I would sure miss the rhubarb pie.

RED-LINING A BIRTHDAY

 

So turning 61 is no big deal. The big “six-oh-oh” is now ancient history and I’m beginning to find that I am quietly celebrating the turning of each decade with more gratitude and anxiousness.

This year found us camping on the outskirts of Atlin, British Columbia awaiting the official kick-off of the annual Atlin Music Festival. But we had hours to fill before the first musical notes would emanate from the big tent.

After a skillet of eggy-vegetable breakfast was washed down with copious amounts of Midnight Sun roasted coffee, we laid out our “younger next year” workout for my birthday.

Younger Next Year <www.youngernextyear.com/> is an excellent book for any middle-aged or older persons. Basically it argues that you can dial back our biological clock. It looks at the latest research on aging and then offers a blueprint for men and women 50 or older to live like 50 year olds until you are well into your eighties.   In the book the authors argue that basically your job for the rest of your life is to move your body somewhat vigorously for at least 45 minutes each day.

Nancy and I loaded our two-wheeled “bush ponies” up on the bike rack, next to Hugh and Cheryl’s canoe.  (We love our new Trek mountain bikes. . . with the 29-inch wheels. Thanks CyclovaXC!!  <www.cyclovaxo.com>.

Hugh and Cheryl were going to paddle and explore Surprise Lake, while Nancy and I were going to pedal into the Ruby Creek area. The plan was to bike until mid-afternoon and then either meet them or we would bike the twelve or so miles back to the campground.

We got on our bikes and headed up and around Surprise Lake with a gradual climb on the gravel road. Then we came to a rugged, single-lane mining road that runs parallel to Ruby Creek. It eventually leads to a molybdenum mine. Almost immediately we began climbing a series of pitches. There were several that had us breathing oh-so-big.

Poet, Walt Whitman would have enthusiastically sang out that we were “inhaling great drafts of space,” . . .in this case, great drafts of oxygen.  While our lungs were mightily inhaling our thighs were on fire as they strained to keep the pedaling cadence that allowed us to purchase the hill. Oh it hurt so good!

The percussion of our accelerated heart rates was drumming loudly in our ears and our breaths were pulling in huge waves of fresh mountain air and releasing equally loud carbon tainted exhalations.

We would face a steep climb only to have a brief respite as we reached what we perceived as level ground. Then we would gasp one or two-word sentences to each other. A hilltop exchange might go as following: “Damn!” Then take in a big gulp of air quickly followed with a gushing exhale “Tough!”

After our fourth steep pitch we paused longer, choking down some water. I was losing my enthusiasm for this idea of getting younger next year but we both decided to push on for one more and see if the road would give us an easier grade to the head of the creek valley. We were now at an elevation that was moving us beyond the tree line. Willow and dwarf birch or “buck brush” was dominating the rough roadside.

We were also encountering more frequent piles of bear shit. On the mining road. Clearly they used this lane for easier access to the high country. Both of us had containers of bear spray in our packs but I couldn’t help wonder if my heart rate wasn’t additionally accelerated.

We both were now in the red-line zone of our heart rate. Red-lining is a zone where car racers know they are flirting with working their race machine too hard. To run too long in this zone is flirting with blowing an engine. I did not want to blow my “engine” on my birthday.

For humans, red-lining your heart zone is making it work at a level that is 90 to 100% of your maximum heart rate. You simply cannot go any higher and it is impossible to stay in this zone for more than a few minutes.  Normally one should consult with a doctor about working your heart at such a high rate.  Not possible for any consultations with the nearest hospital more than a two-hour drive in a car.

Generally, and I use the word loosely, another attribute in aging is an acquired wisdom. And so it was, on the fourth or fifth steep pitch, that my brain overrode all other systems and told me to stop. Now!

Gravity and good bike brakes are a wonderful thing. And in short order, I understood this getting younger idea. The Ruby Creek valley was filled with tandem hoots of unabashed delight as we wove our way down the switchbacks.

 

 

 

Foraging for Twinflower

While the river noise relaxes me, it is the collecting of plants, particularly twinflowers that puts me in a high state of contentment.

I love the little pair of pink blooms that make up this boreal dweller twinflower. Connected by threadlike stolons, or runners, many twinflowers are joined together. And the mat of small green rounded leaves that cluster above the perennial runners are nearly as appealing to me as the flower.

When mats of these delicate flowers emerge, I can’t help but think of Carl Linnaeus, the charismatic Swede of the 18th century who not only was a grand promoter but he had the brainstorm of classifying flora and fauna, giving them a Latin title composed of a genus and species name. This tool, referred to as binomial nomenclature, offered a straightforward way that botanists around the world could understand.

Linnaeus assigned over 8,000 plants and animals with their scientific, or Latin, names. He named one, a favorite, after himself. That was twinflower or Linnea borealis. (Linnea “Linnaeus” and borealis “of the north”)

Some people might consider me greedy, not unlike the red squirrels that frequent these same forests.  The sassy rodent stashes pine and spruce cones for winter sustenance and I collect pressed twinflowers for creative sustenance. I always keep a stash of dried delicate botanical specimens on hand for making wedding, greeting, or birthday cards. I am also partial to small burr oak leaves and the intense blue of alpine forget-me-nots.

However, I am ethical in my collecting. I never take many flowers or leaves from one spot. And if I find only one or even a handful, I will pass them up and wish them well for healthy propagation.

Less than 10 minutes from the Outpost there is an old aboriginal trail that I sometimes hike or pedal with my mountain bike. There is a piece of fairly open forest, composed of lodgepole pine and spruce. There is very little understory here. Hugging the ground are lovely patches of ashen and green-hued lichens interspersed with abundant lingonberries that will warrant my attention in a little over a month when we take to the woods, pails in hand to garner the scarlet, tart fruits.

Most Yukoners and Alaskans call these circumpolar treats “cranberries.” So desirable are these treasure that the local organic bakery will pay pickers $15 per pound to enhance muffins and breads.

But today it is the mats of twinflower and bastard toadflax that hold my attention. You might wonder how something so delicate and freshly pink can keep company with the likes of a plant called “bastard toadflax.”

Surely, the proper Sir Linnaeus frowned at such a degrading common name. So he ignored the back alley name and gave it a more graceful scientific name; Comandra umbellata. Why such a title is fun to sing out! Comandra umbellate! Co. .MAN. .dra   umbel. .LATA!!

Maybe it gets the common name “bastard” because it is a semi-parasitic plant and it is able to absorb water and nutrients from the roots of neighboring plants. Simply put it robs; consequently it must be a bastard. There is no lilting song when you hiss “bastard toadflax!”

Both twinflower and bastard toadflax spread through seeds and vegetatively or through thier roots. A single clone of each species can cover a wide area and flourish for years.

I leaned my “two-wheeled “bush pony” against a pine and carefully sat on the ground so as to minimize flattening any twinflowers. And I began to excise flowers from the hordes. At one point I lay my head on the ground to get the perspective of the red squirrel that was clearly and loudly upset with my presence.  Each twinflower’s threadlike stem is “y-shaped.” From each branch of the “y” dangles a small pink flower that looks like a tiny tapered Victorian lampshade.  I was spellbound peering through the wee forest of tiny pink delicacies.

After a half hour of moving from patch to patch of twinflower, I carefully filled each of my blotter pages in my small plant press with tiny flowers. I carefully packed the press into my daypack next to the bear spray, retrieved my bike.

As I pedaled through the pines and spruce, towards home, I noticed multitudes of twinflower blooms flanking the old trail. It seemed that in my collecting them I was now super aware of their ubiquitous presence.  It was as if I was a two-wheeled float in a parade and the unlikely partners, the pink and bastard bystanders were mutely at attention as I passed. While in the background from beneath the pines was the pregnant pause of ripening cranberries and the unseen scolding of a territorial red squirrel.

 

 

 

 

What the World Needs

 

We had barely turned down the dead end 60-mile road that leads to the northern British Columbia community of Atlin, when we encountered a solitary grizzly grazing on lush July vegetation in the roadside ditch.

We were on our way to the annual three-day Atlin Music Festival. http://www.atlinfestival.ca/ This music fest is less than ten years old but it has become a favorite destination for both musicians and festival attendees. In fact the site is so spectacularly beautiful that some performers have  requested an invitation to participate. This year’s slate of musicians and storytellers included artists from the Yukon, Cape Breton Island, Manitoba, British Columbia, Sweden, New Zealand, Senegal and the United States.

We met friends Hugh and Cheryl at the Pine Creek campground.  The quiet campground is located two miles from the music fest making it an easy bike ride on our mountain bikes. Most of the 1000-plus attendees camp in the old mining town at the edge of the festival.

Besides the amazing music, I loved the gathering of people. Smiles came easy. Children roamed around like small packs of playful fox pups. And most amazing is that they were often alone, without their parents. However, the community of folks here are clearly caring and quick to tend to any young mishaps.

And those human-cubs that were barely able to run, quickly joined those who could as they hopped, spun, stumbled , flew with outspread arms, and dashed back and forth in front of performing bands. There were numerous collisions that result in staggering tearful dashes back to mom or dad. A quick hug and words of comfort always performed healing miracles and the youngster was quickly pulled back into the vortex of little people energy.

The sand pit, about the size of a two stall garage, was littered with colorful plastic shovels, rakes, sifters and pails.It attracted the kids like no candy store could. Once, as I walked by the hump of sand, I paused to watch the kids. There were  thirteen wee ones totally engrossed in their efforts. Most amazing is that each was working alone. Each was fully immersed with their imagination in carving, excavating, building or burying. I wanted to crawl into every one of their brains and listen in to the process.

As a species, we humans have an affinity to gather in tribes rather than keep company with loneliness.  Like iron filings jumping towards a magnet, we tend to merge towards song, dance and food. The Atlin festival provided these critical elements in spades.

Jonathan Byrd*, a highly regarded and awarded songwriter and flat-picking guitarist from North Carolina, repeated a stanza from his song, The Ballad of Larry, “Loneliness is poverty.”

Looking around to the sea of warmth, I felt like a rich man.

Swede-gone-Canadian, Sarah MacDougall, http://sarahmacdougall.com/ who has spent the last few months living in the Yukon, repeatedly pleaded, almost wailed, during the singing of her hit Ramblin’, “I don’t want to be alone anymore.”

Clearly a crowd favorite, she was in no way alone anymore.

Nationally regarded and Yukon-born storyteller, Ivan Coyote told tales that clogged my throat with a wagon train of lumps and blurred my eyes with a surprising surge of tears. She wove tales of loneliness in her growing up and realizing that she was more boy than girl but that she had no choice but to follow and honor her sexuality by boldly and mightily declaring her being a lesbian.

If you were lonely at the Atlin Music Festival it was due to your own sinking spirits.

The festival ended Sunday evening. It didn’t take long for caravans of tired attendees to begin the drive back down the dead end road. I suspect the earlier spied grizz was dining no where near the road on this busy evening.

Suddenly we found all the campsites . . . well . . . a little bit lonely. Nancy and I chose to spend another night so we could have more time with Hugh and Cheryl before they pulled out for the long drive south to their Canmore, Alberta home. After good byes and hugs were exchanged we hoisted our daypacks, loaded with snacks, water and extra clothes, for the hike up Monarch Mountain.

We climbed and climbed, as did our heart rates. Soon we were beyond any vestiges of aspen and into the sub-alpine fir. Climbing higher, out of the fir, we  finally we found the party-colored slopes of alpine. Carefully we stepped around carpets of stoic, stunted and showy flowers. The views in all directions elicited gasps and croons. Here we could see miles and miles of the long Atlin Lake. We spied a white horizon of icefields high in the Coastal Range Mountains.

 

After a picnic lunch, in a wind-sheltered draw where we kept company with the sky-blue blooms of alpine forget-me-not, we reluctantly turned around and began our trek back.  As we crossed the summit alpine we nearly stepped on a female blue grouse. She didn’t feign injury to lure us from any nearby nest or young so she was clearly not alarmed.

I considered pausing to photograph the bird that stood on a smooth rock less than ten feet from us. Nancy whispered, “She’s not a very impressive bird is she?” She was right so we moved on to let her be unphotographed.

We climbed a knoll and were dropping down when we spied a male blue grouse.We stopped to watch the unalarmed bird. These game birds are the second largest grouse species in North America. A Yukon friend always liked to hike up into the bird’s haunts in the sub-alpine fir groves  in late September to secure his favorite Canadian thanksgiving table fare of two plump blue grouse.

The solitary male grouse seemed totally oblivious to us. We grew new smiles when the bird paused, raised his fanlike tail, inflated his bare throat patches and provided us with another Atlin music number.  He elicited a few “booms,” that sounded like a slow series of deep-throated hums.

 He paraded by, not twenty feet from us. His bright orange eyebrows belonged to a Mardi Gras parade. When not hooting, he busied himself by pecking cream-white mountain avens petals off the stunted plants. I eased the camera out and slowly slid on my rear downhill to get closer. I did not make eye contact. Perhaps he thought I was a grazing Dall sheep or caribou.

We listened to his low crooning booms; his own rendition of “I don’t want to be alone anymore.” Maybe, just maybe, on the other side of the flower festooned knob, there was a female grouse that was on her way to the Atlin Alpine Music Festival.

 

*Note: Jonathan Byrd was a major favorite of mine and I highly recommend going to his website http://americanaagency.com/Jonathan_Byrd.html to listen to a sample of his work and check out his tour schedule. He will be in Minnesota in November.

 

Voices of the River

 

Small rivers typically murmur, chuckle, bubble, shusssh, or maybe at best sing. But recently, the fast watershed that passes our Outpost in the Yukon, the Watson River, has shown us that it doesn’t even know to how to murmur or chuckle. No wimpiness or meditative score for this flow. Instead, it has been full-voiced in a bawdy song that at times borders on a rage. This early summer chorus has been a loud, hoarse sea shanty that is a prelude to its destiny of merging with the Yukon River and finally the Bering Sea nearly 2,000 miles away.

With abundant snow in the Coastal Mountains to our west combined with some heavy spring rains, the rivers rose quickly. Looks like the release of snow melt will be a key player in water levels here for the rest of the summer.

We had come north this spring with the intent of putting the Outpost up for sale. Not only is it apparent that our securing Canadian permanent residency is a bureaucratic maze and no longer worth pursuing,  but the housing market in this area is crazy high and if we were astute financial game players we would sell and make a tidy profit. And then there is also the 2500-mile drive back and forth from Minnesota. It is a haul and with gas prices climbing, the trek bears a significant migratory cost.

However, in less than a week after we settled down at the river’s edge, the river in true preacher form delivered a tireless sermon on riches beyond dollars and cents.  The river has shown us that experiences are priceless and clearly the library of life has far more experiences waiting for us to add to the book cart.

Perhaps our feeling of renewed euphoria has to do with the indefatigable, yet restful message delivered to our ears. The constant river pitch is a comforting drone, not unlike the inspiring drone of the famous Highland bagpipes.  Neurologists have found that our brain waves slow and we perceive a sense of tranquility and well-being when we are in the company of droning noise. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Gregorian monk chanting, a bagpipe rallying or even a rushing river; each of them creates a droning sound.

You can even download or buy CDs of running rivers, ocean surf or rain showers.  This collection of pleasing water sounds promises to induce a state of relaxation and serenity.  A dear friend uses a free app of a lively, running river to put their baby daughter to bed. It has such become such a predicable success in creating the ultimate  lullabye that when the cell phone is tucked within a foot of the baby’s head she quickly falls asleep.

I prefer the real thing. So the other day, I headed over to the river’s edge to check out the tunes. As I walked beneath the upper windows of our log home, I nearly stepped on a dead bird. Crumpled in the grass with partially dried eyes, it didn’t invite petting. But I stopped, bent over and gently picked the bird up for a positive ID. It was clearly a thrush and given that there was no sign of any distinct buffy eye ring or reddish rump, I could disqualify a Swainson’s or Hermit thrush. This was another northern cousin, a gray-cheeked thrush.

It seems so unfair that this Yukon songbird that has run the gauntlet of dangers during its thousands of miles of spring migration from Central America back to the sub-arctic boreal forests, flying most of those miles during the night darkness, met its end by flying into a stout pane of glass. To the bird, the window was not a barrier. Instead, it likely looked like a blue-sky portal. I hoped that death came quickly for the thrush.

I walked over to the river’s edge with the dead bird and  reached out to gently set its body on the tossing whitewater.

The river’s tone changed to a droning dirge as the thrush bobbed through the curling waves, surrounded by a constant wash of white noise.  Disappearing and reappearing the bird looked as if it were swimming through liquid clouds towards an eternal spring.

I turned to the house and felt anchored and inspired at the same time. The bird had quickly bounced past the river’s bend, past the two big boulders that kicked up loud waves.

Less than a week later we wove our way through the same rapids in a canoe. Our hoots harmonized well with the river’s tenor voice.

Embracing Edges

Exciting things happen at edges.

Whether it’s an edged tool like a knife or axe or at the blending of two habitat edges like a woods and a wetland or at the humble edge of the passage of time we can be sure of a change. Edges were not so evident as Nancy and I steered our Toyota Tundra northwest out of Minnesota, into North Dakota and into Manitoba.  We were in the first day in our migration to the Outpost in Canada’s Yukon.

The richness of the Red River valley is due in large part to the lake sediments left behind after the ancient glacial lake Agassiz drained away. The land is flat and vast. After all this extinct sea-like lake held more water than all the existing lakes of the world. Finally our eyes were treated to a bump in the topography when we approached  the distinct ridge that marks the western shore of the old giant lakes beach line. Beyond that rise there is still a stretch of hundreds of miles of mostly flat and mostly mundane farmland.  Here the horizon seems to spill off uninterrupted into the spaces of west, north, east and south. All appears the same without distinct edges.

It was during the crossing this span of amazing productive land that I internally reflected on my own personal transition. I have been fortunate to lead an intentionally vigorous and healthy life. Through the years I have pushed my own edges while paddling remote whitewater rivers in the far north, winter camped under diamond bright stars while the cold drove the trees into explosive retorts, backpacked up peaks, rode bicycles up and down mountains and have even looked a grizz in the eye. Living big is what I want to do. But suddenly in the past two months, I have bumped up against the edge of mortality. I am fully aware that driving down the freeway is statistically far more dangerous than running whitewater in a canoe or encountering a grizzly bear, but those things haven’t rattled me like the news that I am afflicted with atherosclerosis, commonly called hardening of the arteries.

Forty seconds of laying perfectly still, flat on my back with my arms extended over my head allowed medical personnel at the Minneapolis Heart Institute to scan my heart. It was the ensuing picture that moved me from the edge of comfort to “yikes.” The smoking gun in determining why fat, cholesterol and other substances build up in the walls of my arteries and form hard structures called plaques was not so easy to discern. It is a very rare day when my wife and I buy any red meat. Basically the only meat we eat is venison or wild game I hunt. We eat wild salmon once a week.  And almost all of our vegetables and fruit are organic raised ourselves or bought. We are both very physically inclined. Cycling, paddling and hiking over the warm months and then skiing, spinning on an indoor training cycle or splitting firewood during the cold months.  I don’t smoke and am only a moderate consumer of alcohol. So what gives? Well it turns out that I was born with a body that likes to create a higher than average level of cholesterol. In other words my family history has brought me to the edge of realizing my own mortality.

The fact that my father died of a massive heart attack while in his fifties was the impetus that nudged me to being proactive and getting a heart scan in the first place.  I have never felt healthier and was training hard on my road bike to cycle solo the 150 miles of the Chilkat International Bike Relay http://kcibr.org/. (Note this will not be possible. For the first time in the 20-year history of the relay, registration filled a month and a half early. Guess who did not get in?) In my 60 years I have had only a very few prescriptions, once for painkillers and a few dose of antibiotics.  And other than the handful of stitches received after I was rendered sterile via a vasectomy, I’ve never had a stitch! Suddenly I am one of millions of folks in America on statins and I don’t like it.  But I will take the chance and hope they help reduce my cholesterol levels.

So while I move along the thin line of good health and suspect health, I will reduce my intake of saturated fats. For me that mostly means sacrificing my butter, cheese and ice cream intake. I will work hard to find it within myself to continue climbing peaks, on bike or foot, drinking great gulps of crisp air in the process. After all, the next transition from my mortal life to one beyond will be no different than a remote wild river bend that is both alluring and frightening. But I can’t imagine not taking that peek.

Our log outpost on the Watson River is positioned with a view of an upstream and downstream bend. It is the stuff that dreams are made of and even though I have been swept in a canoe through the dancing waters of both bends, my gaze is daily drawn towards those edges where the river turns unknown.

I suspect every traveler who drives west across the Canadian prairies or the plains in America sits up a bit straighter when they spot the first glimpse of Rocky Mountains on the horizon feels an alertness that is renewed. In a sense it is going from flat lining to a healthy ragged spike of living. It is that alertness that makes me feel most alive and demands that I pay close attention to life. And in the process be continually astonished. With my own diagnosis of arteries hardening, I have found my own personal peak and it too has nudged me towards a renewed mindfulness of this very moment.

Time to turn north, towards the boreal edge and the Yukon where residents and visitors alike are reminded to “live large.” So be it.

 

Portals to the Right Side

 

 

Admittedly there have been moments in the past few years where one might argue that I have had too much spare time. There are instances, often in the middle of a writing project or some other responsible task, when I suddenly feel overwhelmed by the need to break away and create some whimsical art.  The project is usually fully spontaneous and rolls freely right off my right brain.

Born in the Midwest with primarily a Scandinavian lineage, I am cursed and blessed with a strong work ethic. Some days I forget to eat lunch and other days I am so burned out that I am poor company later in the day. The work ethic can both serve me and imprison me.

So how does one find balance? My wife, Nancy, and I enjoy reading. We have a practice of having a read-aloud book as well as our private reads. Currently we are reading Helen and Scott Nearing’s classic  Living the Good Life. This sturdy couple was the stuff of legends.

One discipline they strictly adhered to was the daily practice of working four hours for their sustenance, they called it “bread labor” (i.e. gardening, tapping maple trees, building fences, buildings, etc.) and then an equal number of hours in grubbing creativity from the right brains. They would read, write, work on speaking engagement pieces or create something for the sheer joy of creation, simplicity, frugality and purposeful living. Operating on low overhead costs, they built their own stone buildings on two farms in New England and they created productive, organic gardens while writing, speaking and living a life committed to sustainability, and social and economic justice.

Imagine if we were not so wedded, or perhaps shackled is a better word, to the notion of working eight plus hours for a minimum of five days a week.

What would your life looked like if you could remove debt, reduce buying stuff and junk? And instead, live frugally, grow your own healthy food, move your body to a sweat every day and then wallow blissfully in a shower or tub and spend the rest of the day learning and creating.

Even if the Nearings had had the opportunity to buy a home computer, I think they would have enthusiastically shunned any such technology.

In recent years, I have come to embrace my affliction of  “spontaneous outbursts of creative expression “(SOCE). Rather than shove them aside, I am more likely to say to myself, “Why not?

Let me share my most recent episode. We had dropped a tall, old red oak that had stood tall next to the yard. Clean up included cutting all the branch tips and hauling the long pieces to brush piles in the woods. These have become cottontail hideouts and, based on past observations, likely nesting haunts for brown thrashers.

I cut the rest of the tree  into firewood chunks. I had gone into the garage to fetch up some splitting wedges to work on the thick butt end of the oak. I glanced over to the wall where I spied a unique old wood door leaning against the wall.   Salvaged  from a long abandoned  farmstead,  it was one of those items that I figured I would someday have a use for. Suddenly, out of the blue,  I had the urge to hang the door. It would fit perfectly at the edge of the yard where we have a trail that heads south through the woods to the edge of a county park.

I erected the door  with no adjoining walls or fence.  While the solo door looked compelling it was utterly lonely. So, like an autumn red squirrel back and forthing to its spruce cone caches, I hustled to my brush pile and dragged oak tree toppings to the door. I leaned them against a pair of slender oak joists that I had raised behind the door. The effect was that the door invites you into a large brush pile. An old barren ground caribou antler and several whitetail antlered skulls are affixed to the door structure. It’s intriguing, inviting and a little spooky all at the same time.

I’ll admit it’s a bit odd to have a door with no walls. This is a symbolic portal to leave the shards of civilization behind us as we merge into the woods. One could argue that the old door with the small round window, a portal eye, is the entry door into the home that best sustains us. Indeed the natural world was our species’ first home and we forget that as a species, we alone are capable of destroying it. I’ve found that upon entering this woodland portal, silence is more likely received than the usual “Hey-I’m-home!”salutation.

Another art project that evolved from a task happened a couple of years ago at the Outpost in the Yukon Territory in northern Canada. It was early April though the landscape clearly looked winter. I had shoveled a path through the heavy wet snow to our fire pit. We were going to celebrate the advent of April by grilling a quartet of moose steaks for supper. With the job completed, and perfect sculpting snow at hand I experienced a surge of SOCE.
I grabbed a few props, I I   I  including the remains of a six-pack of my favorite Yukon Brewery beer, Lead Dog Ale, and carried them to the top of Pulpit Hill. This high knob directly behind our house overlooks the Watson River. I hastily made a bench and then began to roll the three body parts needed to create a snowman. In less than twenty minutes I had created a late afternoon buddy to share a beer with me. I’ll confess the discussion we had was totally one-sided but I couldn’t help but reflect on the “Bard of the Yukon,” Robert Service  and his infamous opening line of the poem, The Cremation of Sam McGee.
“There are strange things done in the midnight sun. .  .”

Hmmmm. I wonder if Service was afflicted with SOCE.

Winter Mosquitoes in Minnesota

I think it’s safe to say that ‘General Winter’ has been beaten back.

In the span of a week, we hiked away from our winter camping site on a quiet lake in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. After several unseasonably warm days, we knew that we would have to pay the piper for the luxury of languishing in the bright sun while ice fishing for lake trout. The payment came in the form of physical exertion on our trip out as we slogged for seven hours in hiking as many miles. Deep slush prevented any skiing and soon I had to take off my snowshoes as I found myself sinking deep into the water and  heavy slush. In the last three or so miles, we found sled pulling was made easier by choosing those places on the frozen lake surface that held open pools of water. Dry feet be damned; we pushed on. The two plastic sleds pulled like boats, literally floating at times. The fourteen-foot birch toboggan pulled heavily in the slush and was made more tolerable by following the wake of the others. After loading up our gear in the truck we discovered that the air temperature was 53 degrees F.

In less than a handful of days following that trek, still in the last days of winter, I have had two mourning cloak butterflies cavort around me like springtime nymphs as I sweated doing outdoor chores. Then that evening as I sipped a glass of wine on our deck, my winter pallid skin was pierced by the sharp stylus of a mosquito and it gorged on my winter-thickened blood before I smeared it with my swat. And the Twin Cities, in Minnesota, had seven new temperature all-time highs recorded over the span of nine days.

Just two days ago, I  spied 4 freshly excavated gopher mounds. I carefully brushed a curious paper wasp from the edge of my coffee cup as I sat out on the deck. I got in a brisk 27-mile road bike ride while the sun and the nearly 80 degree heat put me into a good sweat. And during that bike ride I listened to chorus frogs singing from a small wetland along the road. That evening I heard the lazy song of robins that carried me back to previous May songs. Oops. . . that’s right it’s still winter.

What the hell is going on? To be honest I don’t like it. There are aspects that are nice but in the big picture I find it unnerving. And then I learned that according to the  National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the winter of 2012 has been the fourth warmest on record in the contiguous United States.  Not surprisingly, all of the seven years in over a century of climate data, have occurred since 1992 and over the past 30 years a warmer-than-average winter has been twice as likely as a cool one. All this data is consistent with how 97% of global scientists  agree that climate change is “very likely” caused mainly by human activity. That gives room for El Nina to take some credit. say global warming affects the weather. The average expertise of the 3 percent of scientists who remain unconvinced is far below that of their colleagues if you used rates of publication and citation rates as a barometer of their competence.

The beauty of the scientific process is that laws and theories can be disproved. In other words if someone can repeatedly test that there is not such a law as gravity, then we would have to rewrite science texts. I really hope that overwhelming scientific evidence will show that human activity is the likely cause of climate volatility. But for the time being we would be woefully remiss to wallow in our ignorance and not act to reduce our carbon footprint. So for the sake of showing caution and embracing an opportunity why in heaven’s name do we not move away from the burning of fossil fuels and move to renewable energy sources?

Certainly we need not to continue doling out  billions of dollars in subsidies to the oil and gas industry. According to Earth Track, in 2006 federal subsidies to oil and gas, mostly oil, totaled about $39 billion. And subsidies to oil-using systems are even bigger, estimated in 1998 at $111 billion a year for autos alone!

Do the math and one quickly understands there is an unfair market advantage for renewable fuel research and start-ups.

Yet even without opulent subsidies last year saw record levels of investment in solar, biofuels, and wind energy.  According to Clean Energy Trends 2012,  those three markets rose 31% to $246 billion!  Business is starting to get it and amazing opportunities will emerge which will result in far more sustaining jobs and a healthier planet, than a shovels-in-the-ground pipeline project.

Defense funding, the sacred cow of all USA funding, has a budget that keeps us at a level far beyond “super-power.”  No country comes remotely close in such spending. In fact the following top ten or more countries do not collectively come close to our spending. And yet, the Pentagon is extremely concerned about climate change because of the ramifications it has on food and water security around the world. And they, more than most businesses, understand the vulnerability of trying to move fuel and supplies to remote areas through hostile routes. They do believe and hope for a system that better utilizes electricity to move vehicles and better yet if that electricity can be generated via solar technology.

I am tired of the hollow chants of “Drill Baby Drill!” We already pay some of the cheapest gasoline prices in the world. In fact, last year the United States, for the first time in nearly two decades exported more oil than we imported.

Politicians promise that projects like the projected Keystone Pipeline will drop the prices. Are you kidding! That fuel will go on the global market to the highest bidder. With the emerging economic powers like India and China, the scramble will be costly.

It’s time to get serious about reducing the release of carbon into the atmosphere. I don’t like butterflies flying around me during a Minnesota winter. Nor are winter mosquito bites reasonable.  To continue fat subsidies to rich oil corporations is just not right.

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