Before we left, the forecast was calling for rain or snow all weekend with clear skies on Monday (perfect timing for our departure).  Instead, Sunday dawned partly cloudy and the day was spectacular.  Cailey slept better, so I was up earlier (7:30); we had a leisurely morning and were underway at 10:15, this time heading downriver past the big slough and into the meadows beyond.  When we reached the low bank beyond the slough, we skied up into the willows that line the banks there, most of which stuck above the snow only a few feet.  We intended to ski back to the small stands of spruces closer to the mountain but were immediately stopped by the myriad tracks crisscrossing the willows.  Again, they were degraded, but the size and narrowness suggested fox.  I was excited to find some of the tracks leading to two large piles of scat and figured this would identify the animal for sure.  But, the more we investigated, the more puzzled we became.  The two piles, sunk several inches in the snow, were unfamiliar, and certainly not canine or weasel.  Nor did they appear to be rodent or lagomorph.  The scat was formed into cylinders an inch or so long and piled atop each other—a surprisingly large volume for a single visit and there weren't enough tracks to suggest multiple visits (in fact, just one track leading to it).  It was gray-green in color and some had some whitish tips and they appeared to have vegetation and seeds inside.  Along with it there were several dollops of old scat that could have been from a fox or other carnivore, which we saw elsewhere among the willows later, but it was too old and soft to identify.  It wasn't until I'd been in town several days that I stumbled across the answer while searching for photos of scat; the animal in question was not a mammal at all, but a bird!  The culprit or culprits were most certainly ptarmigan or possibly ruffed grouse.  That would explain the trident shaped footprints my mother kept mentioning but which had escaped my attention (the tracks were so degraded I did not put much store in their shape).  In the end, we agreed that ptarmigan or grouse was even more interesting than fox!

Having found such rich tracks in the willows along the river, we skirted the willows north of us along the slough on our way to the spruces.  We were rewarded with several more patches of buried, slimy brown scat with wolverine tracks heading right through them, probably on the way across the slough to meet up with the tracks we saw the day before.  We crossed the tracks and made our way to the nearest line of spruces where I saw large shapes flitting among the branches.  In the distance I heard a Steller's jay call and these individuals turned out to be two members of a group of at least five jays noisily moving among the branches.  Cailey irritated them by roaming around under their trees and we continued to hear jays in other trees as well. As we were leaving the trees to follow the wolverine tracks south, I stopped again to listen and, among the many calls I heard, I suddenly recognized a sweet, soft, gurgling sound and realized that I was hearing the local version of Bebop's subtle and florid song sung by a wild Steller's jay (Bebop is a blind education bird I care for with the Juneau Raptor Center who introduced me to the Steller's jays lovely and intricate song).  I wondered if that was a family group settling into their nesting territory for the summer.

Delighted, we skied on.  The location and the day could hardly have been better.  The sun was out, glittering off the undulating snow fields, the many sloughs creating wonderful variations in the landscape.  There were no noticeable glacial moraines in these meadows, but the whole area was crisscrossed by meandering sloughs, all frozen and covered in snow, and delightful to ski down and along.  There were gusts of chill wind coming up the river, but we were warm enough in the sun and I didn't believe I could be more content.  Unfortunately, the photos seem rather dark and really do not do the scene justice.  We skied around sloughs and clumps of willows before heading straight inland through a dense stand of trees to look for more tracks.  We found none beneath the closely spaced spruces, but broke out on the other side into a meadow enclosed on three sides by trees; sheltered from the wind, the sun was unbearably hot and I stripped down to long underwear again.  We turned south again and skied through the barrier trees and immediately down into the bottom of a slough that skirted the edge of the grove.  I saw two narrow, unnatural looking holes in the snow a couple of inches in diameter, one of which had some dirty snow nearby that had been scuffed by an animal.  I suspect it was an access hole to the slough--probably mink based on the size--but I was unable to confirm.  Around the corner and close to the mountain, the slough was open to the air and a large patch was lit by the sun.  We saw several salmonid fry--one a couple of inches long--swimming in and out of the shadows.  The ones in the sun cast shadows on the rocky bottom.

From there we skied up the other side of the slough and continued south near the edge of the mountain, continuing to follow our wolverine.  We saw in a couple of places where he changed from his typical three-footed gait (meaning the tracks showed up in sets of three, the middle one appearing to be duplicated) to a faster bounding gait (I think) of sets of two.  Some of the tracks were well enough preserved that we could see and feel the outline of his pads with our fingertips and even convince ourselves that we could feel the five toes.  At the last spruce in that part of the meadow, right near the mountainside, there were suddenly two sets of prints, the one we'd been following (backwards) and one that emerged from the tree going in the same direction we were in about the same condition of degradation.  My mother kept along the upper tracks and I started following the lower tracks, but they were parallel and close enough together that we soon abandoned the separation and skied in line, keeping both sets in sight.  We wound up skiing along the very bottom of the mountain (which rose nearly vertically to our left) at the edge of a small slough.  After a few hundred yards, the tracks going in the same direction as us took off straight up the mountain and disappeared into the trees.  We agreed it looked like perfect wolverine habitat--steep slopes, rocky outcrops and boulders, rugged conifers.  Most of the trees on the slope were small and scrubby, adding to the effect.  A little later on, the other set of tracks also climbed up the slope and we thought we lost them, but they reappeared here and there as we continued the ski the narrow shelf of land between the mountain and the small slough.  We then reached the large waterfall that drains the cirque lake above, openings in the snow revealing stunning worlds of icicles and rocky overhangs.  Water flowed actively into the pool below and, though there were snow bridges over the main flow, we opted not to risk them.  The wolverine had no such reservations.  We suddenly discovered that we'd found the "end" of the tracks; we had, in fact, been tracking the same animal.  The tracks that had been going in our direction crossed the waterfall above us, then curved down on the other side to cross the low snow bridge in front of us and head back the way we'd come, disappearing back into the woods a short distance on before dropping down to become the tracks we'd started following much earlier.  Though we'd seen them over two days, we guessed that all the tracks we saw were probably laid down within about an hour!

When I reached the tree where we'd first seen the second set of tracks, I carefully circled it, knowing that the wolverine must have entered from somewhere and that I should be able to track it unless it happened to rest there while a heavy snowfall obscured its tracks in, which seemed unlikely.  The next tree was pretty close, and we'd already observed that the wolverine rarely passed up an opportunity to pass under the base of a tree on its travels, so chances are he'd come from there and other spruces beyond.  I eventually found extremely faint depressions between the trees and left it at that.  Although we were hungry and a little chilly (having been exposed to icy gusts of wind for some time), we decided to make one try to cross the big slough coming from the waterfall we'd visited, thinking it might be frozen farther from the mountain.  There was a patch of spruces close to the mountain on the other side that my mother really wanted to explore--as did I--so we high tailed it across the open meadows to the edge of the slough.  We found a lot of large chunks of ice floating in it, but nothing to allow us to cross (see photo to left).  We'd have probably had to ski all the way to the river and cross there so we convinced ourselves that there was probably nothing exciting in those trees anyway and turned around in search of a sheltered place for lunch.  The one wolverine I've seen in person years before was treed in that stand of spruces by my dog Nigel and I wondered if it was the same wolverine, or possibly its progeny, that we'd been tracking.  My toes were also pretty chilled by then, and my legs rather tired.  We started out the day sinking a couple of inches through the crust formed the day/night before from thawing and freezing temperatures and, as the day progressed, the snow only got softer in the warmth of the sun and my feet were wet.. As we headed back, the gusts seemed to die down a bit, so I wound up picking a spot more scenic than wind sheltered.  It was on a low slope directly below a slide area and was littered with boulders that made the snow into pyramids.  We climbed on what must have been a huge triangular boulder with a fantastic view of the whole meadow and Taku Glacier.  We enjoyed another lunch of bread, cheese, snacks, and chocolate as the sun warmed us and the breeze chilled us. The view was really spectacular and we agreed it was the best day yet.

From there we stuck close to the base of the mountain on the way back to the slough, coming in and out of clumps of willows, alders, and spruces and up and down sloughs.  Several of the sloughs in that area were so high and steep that they necessitated side stepping precariously down and up the other side.  We saw more wolverine tracks, one of which was along an almost vertical rock face; all other clues aside, that alone suggested wolverine, for what other animal would travel such an unnecessarily precarious route?  Eventually we descended the gradual slope to the main slough a few hundred yards from the river near where it bends to the north to parallel the mountain.  On the other side we skied up to the woods, intending to follow the edge of the timber back to the river to look for more tracks.  Along the way I spontaneously dipped into the trees and was immediately rewarded with a new set of tracks that we quickly determined must be martin.  They were the right size and gate and much fresher than the other tracks we'd seen, so we could discern better the shape of his pads.  We turned into the woods then and found many sets of martin tracks as well as one old set of tracks he'd crossed that looked like lagomorph tracks--big back feet and little front feet.  We'd never heard of snowshoe hares in the valley, so we were initially quite excited, but later realized that they were actually squirrel tracks.

We continued upriver following martin tracks and, instead of dropping to the river when the trees got uncomfortably dense, we pushed on ahead until we came across the little guest cabin at the edge of our property.  We failed to find the trail through the woods from there, though, so we dropped to the river for the rest of the way home. We drank snow-cold beers when we returned and my mother made fantastic bison burgers for dinner.

On to Day 4

Mom heading downriver	Willows at the edge of the meadows	Ptarmigan/grouse tracks
Ptarmigan/grouse scat	Scat pile	Wolverine tracks in the willows
Wolverine tracks	Skiing the undulating meadows	The terrain is wonderful for skiing
Mink hole?	Mink hole?	Salmonid fry in a slough
The wolverine changes gaits!	We track the wolverine at the edge of the mountain	Two sets of tracks along the mountain
One set climbs straight up the mountain	The pool below the waterfall	Mom skiing to the waterfall
The tracks loop back to us	Frozen waterfall	Looking over the grassy meadows
The slough from the waterfall	View from lunch spot	We lunch
Skiing back along the mountain	Some of the sloughs are deep and steep!	Wolverine tracks along the mountain (look close)
Martin tracks	Martin tracks	Old squirrel tracks
Martin tracks	Crack at the riverbank	Climbing up the riverbank

On to Day 4