Taku
2022 - 3: Basics
July 14 - 18
Fireweed meadow
Photo Album
It's the end of day two.
The evening
sun lights the trees outside and a hermit thrush is singing nearby.
It's another peaceful river evening following a very productive day. I
slept well despite a couple of interruptions and heard my mother get up
and put some water on to boil before I rose. It was the only day
of our trip forecast to be rain-free, so we headed out to the meadow
around 8:00 am
for some birdwatching. I'd packed my backpack the night before and was
antsy to get going, already in a grumpy mood despite the prospects of a
small, stress-free adventure. My mood created the stress, though, and
it
didn't help that we realized we'd left the camp chairs behind when we
got to the meadow. My mother went on to the canoe and I ran back to the
lodge, adding only about five minutes to the trip, but further
undermining my mood, especially as I started to sweat and Cailey shed
her wrist brace bounding over to me in the woods (which I did not put
back on).
Our objective was to go sit by Yellowthroat Island for a stationary birdwatch as we'd done with such success on our last trip elsewhere. Launching the canoe went well and the slough was dead calm under an overcast sky. Birds were singing here and there on the way, including a yellowthroat, though activity was of course much diminished from June. Alas, when we arrived there were no locations that called to us--everything was too brushy or not in the right spot, etc. We wound up going ashore at Pink Salmon Flats, pushing our way through the rushes, but the grass was so tall that there was really not a good place to set up. We wound up tucked between two bushes in a wet area facing inland rather than the slough and the island. I logged a number of birds by song and we did see a lovely pair of yellowthroats in a small willow clump for some time, a Lincoln's sparrow flew right into the tree next to us and stayed for a while, and another bird did the same on the other side, close but too much of him hidden to identify. So I think it was a decent spot, but the dogs were unhappy--Cailey sufferingly so (the ground was soggy and there was no place to rest and not much to do) and Jenny noisily so. I finished my eBird survey and we retreated to the avalanche rock for another try. It was a pleasant place for a bird watch, but not very exciting. There were robins and birds too small to ID on the mountainsides, a yellowthroat and Lincoln's sparrow singing along with an orange-crowned warbler, Townsend's warbler, and fox sparrow, but few showed themselves. A snipe did make a nice appearance, flying by and calling as he descended to the brush on the other side of us. We headed home and had cups of cafe francais, which may have had a hand in livening my sour mood into something approaching happiness.
It was good to walk the trail to the meadow that morning. We'd arrived about 3:00 the evening before, opened up in a most efficient and easy manner, me lighting pilots while my mother went back for a second and final load of gear. We had a drink and ate an early dinner of turkey and stuffing my mother had made and green beans, and then we agreed we were both beat and we'd just chill and read for the evening. I started a couple of new books, then pushed myself out the door in a bid to alleviate guilt and stress. I headed back behind the cabin with two sheets of asphalt starter strips which I split and laid across the plank bridge over the slough, then began clipping the myriad salmonberries that overhung the trail near the meadow. It had grown incredibly thick since it was initially cut some years ago, and I had not enjoyed pushing through them this year. I think I worked there for about half an hour, endlessly clipping, bundling the cuttings up, and depositing them in a mound on the side of the trail. The result was quite satisfying, as the trail itself is well-trodden mud and doesn't grow brush very readily. The alders are beginning to make a canopy, so it's like a tiny alameda.
Back at the cabin, it was nice to have a more home-like evening, reading and doing our own thing, making it feel more like an everyday evening rather than the intense, camping sort of feel we've had for so long. And it was oh so nice to walk into my room and have it feel like my room.
But back to today. I had a snack with my cafe francais (an inadequate breakfast probably hadn't helped my mood), so I wasn't ready for lunch, though it was pushing noon by then. We decided to get the 4-wheeler started in anticipation of attempting to haul the bucked up tree to the back porch, the obvious next step in our bid for firewood. My mom pulled it out (I'd opened everything up the night before), took off everything on top of it (rack, seat, cover), and we popped in the new battery she'd bought (the overwintered battery had lost its charge). It worked perfectly once we extricated it in order to insert the nuts for the screws that secure it on either side of the vehicle's connectors, and then we began contemplating how to secure the rack again. The brackets for it were there, but there was no way we could fathom to fasten them to both the rack and the 4-wheeler. They just weren't long enough and it was totally baffling. Thinking that we'd want it for hauling as much wood at once as we could, my mom found some wire and started wiring it on while I began excavating the soil that had built up around Alder with the little spade. Like Fox Hole, about three inches of sand and soil had built up over the plywood siding and was rotting it away. For once, Jenny was helpful: as I dug out small bits of dirt, she went to town in my wake and pulled on the roots that got in my way. It was actually pretty effective! I'd done most of the right half of the front wall and was working on the downriver wall when the 4-wheeler was ready. My mom drove it up to the back porch, we secured the trailer, and then were off for an experimental load. I advocated for starting with the largest rounds, only two of which would sit in the bed of the trailer at a time, with another on top, so we filled in the spaces between and the rack with bucked up branches. It took both of us together to pick up the large rounds. While my mother began to drive back, I started wading through the chaotic mess of whole branches and bucked up branches on the side of the log and lined the cut pieces up on the larger rounds for retrieval later. It was a pattern that worked well, as I could easily catch up with the 4-wheeler after a useful amount of organizing. The wheels on the trailer were a little low, so I pumped those up with a bicycle pump before our second load.
We made three trips before we broke for lunch, rolling the huge rounds to the ground and stacking the branches on the porch, as many of them won't need to be split and can start drying there. I made grilled cheese sandwiches with smoked gouda and guacamole on sesame buns and we drank Alaskan fruity beers. Feeling like the work was going pretty well, we returned to it around 2:30 and were finished in an hour and a half. Once all the bucked up branches were retrieved from the side of the main tree, I was able to do a few other things between trips like clipping some of the berries and alders on the trail behind the garden box (where the 4-wheeler was driving and was damaging them) and some salmonberries and cranberries on the road to the landing, carrying paddles down to the landing for a future canoe trip, and watering the Tlingit potatoes in their pot, which have grown only a couple of inches out of the ground (as opposed to about 18" in town). But mostly we were hauling and rolling rounds. At some point we took a break from the huge rounds when my mom stopped at the top end of the tree and we instead filled the trailer with the smaller dead tree Talon had bucked up nearby, continuing to work from the top down for a while. On only a couple of loads closer to the top were we able to pick up the rounds individually; most of the time we had to work together. All in all, it went exceedingly well and both of us found the job immensely satisfying and, despite taking so few rounds at once, it went pretty fast. After the last rounds were delivered (with the exception of two that are still slightly attached to each other), we returned to grab the 4x4s we'd brought up and the plywood from the previous trip for making a door to the 4-wheeler shed and delivered them to Alder.
By which time it was after 4:00 and we were beat. We broke for a while, but were so thrilled with our progress, not yet hungry, and the evening was so lovely that neither of us was ready to quit. We headed down to Alder where my mom started sorting and organizing--a long desired project--and I continued excavating around the outside. I finished the downriver wall, spreading all the dirt I'd dug out around nearby, and consolidated all the random pieces of plywood stored there in one place under the broken window (I'd previously picked up all the loose glass and placed it in a box). Then I returned to the front wall and began sorting through the stack of rotting odds and ends of wood and old asphalt shingles that has haunted me for years. I put the pieces to cut into firewood on sawhorses and sorted the rest into trash, PT pieces to keep, and pieces already small enough to burn. Then I began excavating it and, oh....my, does Alder look so much better without that garbage in front! All this work we did in a snowstorm. The cottonwoods nearby were releasing seed down in prodigious quantities and the breeze swept it around the property like snow. The volume was incredible and went on the whole time it was dry, quite marvelous to watch.
I headed in to clean up and start dinner, but found the propane tank empty when I went to heat water. I swapped it out and was lighting pilots when my mom came up. I cleaned up and changed clothes, then made bison tacos for dinner, after which we went for a short bird survey down to the riverfront and thence to the landing. On our way back, a riverboat sailed in--the Bixbies were on an evening cruise to the fireweed meadow and paused to say hello. Now, with a couple of Aleve working, I'm off to read and hopefully have a good night's sleep.
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And that was the last that I wrote on that trip. It's now the following week and I'm scheduled to head back to Snettisham tomorrow for a family trip. My mother set an alarm so we were up early the next day with the hope that we could explore the sandbars downriver on a -4.4' tide with the canoe. All we had to do was fuel the new engine, launch the canoe, and attach the engine, right? Actually, all of that went reasonably well (after scrounging a safety clip for the engine which it apparently didn't come with and discovering that that engine would swivel up just fine once it was on the canoe) except that the transom on the canoe did not fit the new engine. Specifically, the bolts through the transom that secure the wooden block that supports an engine were in the way of one of the clamps, and the engine was much too low in the water anyway. We fought with it for a while and my mom tried to add some soft wood scraps to try to take up the gap and provide support for the clamps at the same time, but in the end we decided it wasn't worth the time to fight it. It had been intended as a fun bonus project to take advantage of the tide and get the canoe in the water, but we had other things of greater priority than a major remodel of the canoe. Plus, looking downriver, we didn't see much in the way sandbars and wondered how much influence low tide was having at that point. We didn't notice any difference in the level of the floats which were then a foot and a half or two feet below the landing with the CFS about 30,000 (so maybe half way between low water in May and high water in June).
So we sucked in our disappointment (and I tried to do the same with my crankiness) and headed upriver with the 2-wheel cart and the 4-wheeler to fetch the other tree that had been bucked up in June. This one was smaller, but was some 100 yards from the nearest place where the 4-wheeler could drive (where Rich and I had bucked up a log several years ago). We first consolidated most of the rounds in one staging area before I began hauling cart loads to the 4-wheeler. While I worked at that, my mom finished stacking the logs on that end, then went to turn the 4-wheeler around and load it up. I think it took eight or ten trips with the cart to move it all, taking more time to load it than to push it through the trees. It took only three loads with the 4-wheeler to move the whole tree which we stacked up top of the other rounds. It was an impressive pile of wood that will surely last us many years, should we only be able to split it! It had only been an hour and fifteen minute project.
After quesadillas for lunch, we went our separate ways. I took a little walk around the property, failing again to find the tittering birds I kept hearing, then finished excavating the upriver side of Alder. Later that afternoon, we all walked upriver, finding a patch of snow still present where the huge mound had been in June, protected by a heavy covering of dirt and needles, and could see more obviously how many trees were over the trail in that area, totally obscuring it. On the way, we spotted a bird at the top of a young spruce where the blueberries are densest at the end of Spruce Alley, and it turned out to be a chipping sparrow. A few feet below him was a Tennessee warbler and soon a ruby-crowned kinglet had joined the crowd. Wow! The whole area was alive with flitting songbirds, a huge mixed flock that included orange-crowned, yellow-rumped, Townsend's, and Tennessee warblers, chipping sparrows, chickadees, and ruby-crowned kinglets; siskins, hermit thrushes, robins, and varied thrushes were also in the area. The action was non-stop and we only identified a fraction of them. We saw at least two Tennessee warblers and chipping sparrows, the latter gathering bugs in their beaks. It was an extraordinary, serendipitous birding encounter. That night we tried to celebrate with the bottle of champagne leftover from the last trip, but still wound up in bed quite early!
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Next day, I snuck out of the cabin as soon as I was up, feeding Cailey outside in an attempt to let my mother sleep in (though it turns out she was awake) and to earn what I hoped would be a leisurely morning on the couch at some point. I filled water jugs from the olive barrel, nearly three full, using the hose my mom had repaired from bear damage, which worked beautifully. While those were filling, I organized and cleaned up the back porch, then cut the remaining asphalt shingles for the porch steps and the steps down to the landing. I also consolidated all the unburnable trash I'd collected around Alder (including the broken glass, a broken glass jar, and many scraps of rotten or shredded plywood) into one large box for disposal in town. I don't recall the other odds and ends I did, but I thoroughly enjoyed washing up and having tea once I came inside. When we headed back out, my mom found the leak in the propane tank that had been fouling the air around the back porch on this and the last trip and draining the tanks. It was on one side of the coupling I'd installed a few years ago (it had been gas-tight most of that time!) and took only seconds to fix by tightening it up. Then, while my mom did her own odds and ends (including tacking down the asphalt and further organizing Alder), I suited up for the rain and headed upriver with a swede saw and clippers and got to work on the trail. I spent a little bit of time on the woods before Debbie's Meadow and then launched into Spruce Alley, starting at the beginning and clipping back all blueberry bushes in the path as well as the reaching spruce branches. When I got to the dense mass of blueberries at the far end, I cleared a section of it, maybe 20 feet, and thinned a bit further into it, but then jumped ahead and started working on the brushy section beyond it rather than spend all my time on the blueberries. Through Spruce Alley, a poor ruby-crowned kingly yelled and yelled at me continuously, poor thing. He must have a nest right there, and I was careful with my clipping just in case. It was a relief to get beyond his territory, for both of us I'm sure.
The brushy area was intense, but cleaned up fairly well, the inch-thick willows and alders cutting like butter. I cleared all the way into the forest with the exception of the large trees that required the swede saw, which I'd lost along the way. After a couple of hours, I was getting weak and decided I'd better turn around as soon as I cleaned up the brush I'd cut, so I left the trees uncut when I did finally find the saw again, returning for a very necessary lunch. We did most of the cleaning after lunch so I felt okay about returning upriver afterwards. In addition to picking up the spruce boughs from the early cutting I'd done, I cut the trees leaning over the trail before it enters the woods where I'd worked most recently.
We headed out at 5:35, about ten minutes before the tide, and had no trouble escaping the river this time. It was calm at the cabin, but the river was very choppy in front of Taku Glacier, which it sometimes is from the shallow water, and we weren't too concerned. It built from there, though, and when we passed Flat Point and entered the Inlet proper, the seas began to get ugly, and got really ferocious as we passed Jaw Point. In fact, it developed so quickly that we had only gone a few minutes into it when we both knew that we had to turn around. Normally I'm up for or resigned to pounding our way home, but these were big, curling, white-capped seas, oddly coming from the southwest rather than the southeast, though we were there exposed to Stephen's Passage. It was crazy, and we knew that it was likely to be much worse in more exposed areas; even if it was just like that, we were awash with seawater over the bow with many of the seas and having an alarming time of it. It was uncomfortable to turn around and we made our way behind Jaw as fast as we could. Unfortunately, because of the direction of the wind, we did not have full shelter anywhere there from the seas, though they did calm down considerably. We sent an inreach message to Ezra asking for a marine forecast and idled for a while, checking for a response every 15 minutes. When it came, it confirmed what we'd seen--gusts to 30 or 35 knots and four foot seas at Bishop, not something we wanted to push through.
Somewhere in there we decided to anchor at the mouth of stream running through a lovely little grassy cove inside Jaw Point. It looked very inviting, but the tide was dropping and the rain was steady, so we had no plans to go ashore. We pulled in toward the mouth of the creek so the current would hold us off the beach and dropped the anchor, only to find ourselves in about six feet of water. We backed much farther out and set the anchor in deeper water and began to settle in. I fetched two emergency wool blankets from under one of the seats, taking for myself the "dog blanket" with many holes in it. It helped alleviate the chill, but I soon changed into the one pair of clean, dry clothes I had and felt immensely better, having gotten quite damp loading the boat, sending messages, using the bucket, and anchoring, all in the steady rain. I dug out the splash of wine in the bag that my mom had backed, rueing that we'd left behind the full box, and we each took a sip or two before we felt a gentle bump on the side of the boat. A log brought in by the swells...? I hoped that was the case, and glanced around to see if I could spot it. What I did spot was a huge rock awash with seas to the left of us, at about the same distance from shore as we were. It didn't just look like a boulder, which would be bad enough, it looked like a shelf of rock. Where were we, and what was underneath us?? Not wanting to settle on the side of a rock for the night, I said "We gotta get out of here!" and rushed to the bow to pull the anchor as my mom dropped the engine and started us up. Naturally, the creek had done a good job keeping us off the beach, so pulling the anchor brought us much closer than I would have liked and brought us right alongside the rock in question. Thankfully we skirted around it and out into deeper water without incident and began looking for a better anchorage. It was very foggy and neither of us were intimately familiar with this side of the inlet (we normally cruise straight from Jaw to Flat), so the little inlets were unfamiliar. As we approached what we later confirmed was the Turner Lake outlet, we saw a ledge of sandbar along the entire shore and figured we'd come to a place we could anchor and sit on mud flats for the night. We puttered in a little and reset the anchor.
It was about 9:00 pm at that point and then we really settled in for the night, finishing the marionberry pie and the wine as the tide receded and left us sitting comfortably on the flats. I thought about lifting Cailey off to let her go to the bathroom, but the mudflats were very wet, mostly covered in a layer of water, which was unnerving, but mostly because I knew that if she walked around on that mud, there would be no way to get it off of her and it would wind up everywhere inside. The boat was already quite damp, the floor covered in the dirt and spruce needles we'd tracked in after loading. I hoped she'd go on deck, but instead (when I used the bucket), she climbed the steps and looked wistfully over the flats, but did not try to escape. Many gulls puttered about pecking at the critters revealed by the falling tide and, in different circumstances (lack of rain, for one), I might have enjoyed a bird survey; as it was, it was getting dark, it was raining, the visibility was poor, and I was not up for it. By the time the tide finished dropping, we were about half way between water and mountain. When we were ready to relax, we moved all our personal or delicate gear to the front of the seats (and the other gear to the stern of the boat, out in the rain), and converted the seats to a bed. We used the sheet from the couch at the cabin (coming in to be washed) on the bottom and a large comforter cover, also coming in to be washed, over the top of us, with our yellow wool blankets in the middle. Cailey curled up on the bed under cover and Jenny stayed on the very wet and dirty dog bed on the floor, refusing to move. Unfortunately, I'd unintentionally left my tablet at the cabin, but I was initially hopeful when I found my "emergency media" folder on my laptop. If only I had charged the spare battery! I always do that, but had apparently failed to do so in this case. We made it through about one minute of a Taskmaster on the existing battery before it died. We tried reading for a bit, but were both too tired to keep it up for long.
Unfortunately, sleep wouldn't come immediately, for as soon as we laid down, we found unexpected occupants in the cabin. Just as I laid my head down, a huge moth emerged from under the seat next to my head, startling me, and began fluttering around the windows making loud clicking sounds. We struggled to release it, only to find three more had joined us. There was so little room to move and so little light that they were very difficult to catch. The first time I caught one in my hand, I shrieked a little and let it go, the big feet or whatever just too much for my palm to bear (despite knowing that it posed no threat to me). We managed to get several out the door and were finally settled in when another began its clicking. This one I managed to ignore and actually fell asleep. I think the peace lasted about two hours before gentle, singing slaps awoke me--the tide coming back to us and lapping the hull. If the noise wasn't enough to keep us up, the rocking of the boat as it began to float would have done so, which just got worse as the boat floated and was again subject to that strange southwesterly swell. But I did try to rest and doze, only to hear voices. Real human voices. At first I thought it was the radio, but eventually I began to recognize Greg Davies's voice. Somehow, Tasmkaster has started playing again on my dead and closed laptop! What a night. I had to fetch it, log on, and close the program to stop it. Still we tried to relax, but the swells began to cause problems, like eerily sliding an orange juice bottle back and forth across the dash without making it fall off, which in the dark just made the cabin look haunted. We fought it out until about 3:30 and then got up for the tide at 4:18. Not wanting to spend another day in the inlet, that would be the tide on which to return to the cabin, there to fall asleep with the wood stove crackling nearby. It was a tempting thought, but running back up the river at dawn and then back down in the evening wasn't enticing, so we poked our head out into the inlet to see about the state of the seas.
They were better. Not great, but better, smaller and with no curling white caps. We pushed for town, passing the point of no return as we approached Cooper Point and the seas built. They continued to build past Bishop where we encountered four foot swells that rolled us and splashed over the windows. They were so large that my mom whispered "How are we going to turn?" as we cruised away from Bishop and toward Admiralty. I suggested we just keep going, hoping that the seas would lay down once we were far enough past the point. They did, just enough to pick up speed and cruise for Salisbury. My mom drove the boat amazingly well, sliding through the seas fast and into the relative shelter of the channel. We docked at about 6:00 am, grabbed minimal gear, and headed home. I rocked so much in the shower that I had to put a hand out to steady myself, and continued to rock in my chair for most of the day (after a good nap in bed). A few days later I went down to the Kathy M with a bucket of warm water and a broom and cleaned it all up, hauling the rest of the gear up to the house and satisfyingly throwing the huge box of Alder trash in the harbor dumpster.
Our objective was to go sit by Yellowthroat Island for a stationary birdwatch as we'd done with such success on our last trip elsewhere. Launching the canoe went well and the slough was dead calm under an overcast sky. Birds were singing here and there on the way, including a yellowthroat, though activity was of course much diminished from June. Alas, when we arrived there were no locations that called to us--everything was too brushy or not in the right spot, etc. We wound up going ashore at Pink Salmon Flats, pushing our way through the rushes, but the grass was so tall that there was really not a good place to set up. We wound up tucked between two bushes in a wet area facing inland rather than the slough and the island. I logged a number of birds by song and we did see a lovely pair of yellowthroats in a small willow clump for some time, a Lincoln's sparrow flew right into the tree next to us and stayed for a while, and another bird did the same on the other side, close but too much of him hidden to identify. So I think it was a decent spot, but the dogs were unhappy--Cailey sufferingly so (the ground was soggy and there was no place to rest and not much to do) and Jenny noisily so. I finished my eBird survey and we retreated to the avalanche rock for another try. It was a pleasant place for a bird watch, but not very exciting. There were robins and birds too small to ID on the mountainsides, a yellowthroat and Lincoln's sparrow singing along with an orange-crowned warbler, Townsend's warbler, and fox sparrow, but few showed themselves. A snipe did make a nice appearance, flying by and calling as he descended to the brush on the other side of us. We headed home and had cups of cafe francais, which may have had a hand in livening my sour mood into something approaching happiness.
It was good to walk the trail to the meadow that morning. We'd arrived about 3:00 the evening before, opened up in a most efficient and easy manner, me lighting pilots while my mother went back for a second and final load of gear. We had a drink and ate an early dinner of turkey and stuffing my mother had made and green beans, and then we agreed we were both beat and we'd just chill and read for the evening. I started a couple of new books, then pushed myself out the door in a bid to alleviate guilt and stress. I headed back behind the cabin with two sheets of asphalt starter strips which I split and laid across the plank bridge over the slough, then began clipping the myriad salmonberries that overhung the trail near the meadow. It had grown incredibly thick since it was initially cut some years ago, and I had not enjoyed pushing through them this year. I think I worked there for about half an hour, endlessly clipping, bundling the cuttings up, and depositing them in a mound on the side of the trail. The result was quite satisfying, as the trail itself is well-trodden mud and doesn't grow brush very readily. The alders are beginning to make a canopy, so it's like a tiny alameda.
Back at the cabin, it was nice to have a more home-like evening, reading and doing our own thing, making it feel more like an everyday evening rather than the intense, camping sort of feel we've had for so long. And it was oh so nice to walk into my room and have it feel like my room.
But back to today. I had a snack with my cafe francais (an inadequate breakfast probably hadn't helped my mood), so I wasn't ready for lunch, though it was pushing noon by then. We decided to get the 4-wheeler started in anticipation of attempting to haul the bucked up tree to the back porch, the obvious next step in our bid for firewood. My mom pulled it out (I'd opened everything up the night before), took off everything on top of it (rack, seat, cover), and we popped in the new battery she'd bought (the overwintered battery had lost its charge). It worked perfectly once we extricated it in order to insert the nuts for the screws that secure it on either side of the vehicle's connectors, and then we began contemplating how to secure the rack again. The brackets for it were there, but there was no way we could fathom to fasten them to both the rack and the 4-wheeler. They just weren't long enough and it was totally baffling. Thinking that we'd want it for hauling as much wood at once as we could, my mom found some wire and started wiring it on while I began excavating the soil that had built up around Alder with the little spade. Like Fox Hole, about three inches of sand and soil had built up over the plywood siding and was rotting it away. For once, Jenny was helpful: as I dug out small bits of dirt, she went to town in my wake and pulled on the roots that got in my way. It was actually pretty effective! I'd done most of the right half of the front wall and was working on the downriver wall when the 4-wheeler was ready. My mom drove it up to the back porch, we secured the trailer, and then were off for an experimental load. I advocated for starting with the largest rounds, only two of which would sit in the bed of the trailer at a time, with another on top, so we filled in the spaces between and the rack with bucked up branches. It took both of us together to pick up the large rounds. While my mother began to drive back, I started wading through the chaotic mess of whole branches and bucked up branches on the side of the log and lined the cut pieces up on the larger rounds for retrieval later. It was a pattern that worked well, as I could easily catch up with the 4-wheeler after a useful amount of organizing. The wheels on the trailer were a little low, so I pumped those up with a bicycle pump before our second load.
We made three trips before we broke for lunch, rolling the huge rounds to the ground and stacking the branches on the porch, as many of them won't need to be split and can start drying there. I made grilled cheese sandwiches with smoked gouda and guacamole on sesame buns and we drank Alaskan fruity beers. Feeling like the work was going pretty well, we returned to it around 2:30 and were finished in an hour and a half. Once all the bucked up branches were retrieved from the side of the main tree, I was able to do a few other things between trips like clipping some of the berries and alders on the trail behind the garden box (where the 4-wheeler was driving and was damaging them) and some salmonberries and cranberries on the road to the landing, carrying paddles down to the landing for a future canoe trip, and watering the Tlingit potatoes in their pot, which have grown only a couple of inches out of the ground (as opposed to about 18" in town). But mostly we were hauling and rolling rounds. At some point we took a break from the huge rounds when my mom stopped at the top end of the tree and we instead filled the trailer with the smaller dead tree Talon had bucked up nearby, continuing to work from the top down for a while. On only a couple of loads closer to the top were we able to pick up the rounds individually; most of the time we had to work together. All in all, it went exceedingly well and both of us found the job immensely satisfying and, despite taking so few rounds at once, it went pretty fast. After the last rounds were delivered (with the exception of two that are still slightly attached to each other), we returned to grab the 4x4s we'd brought up and the plywood from the previous trip for making a door to the 4-wheeler shed and delivered them to Alder.
By which time it was after 4:00 and we were beat. We broke for a while, but were so thrilled with our progress, not yet hungry, and the evening was so lovely that neither of us was ready to quit. We headed down to Alder where my mom started sorting and organizing--a long desired project--and I continued excavating around the outside. I finished the downriver wall, spreading all the dirt I'd dug out around nearby, and consolidated all the random pieces of plywood stored there in one place under the broken window (I'd previously picked up all the loose glass and placed it in a box). Then I returned to the front wall and began sorting through the stack of rotting odds and ends of wood and old asphalt shingles that has haunted me for years. I put the pieces to cut into firewood on sawhorses and sorted the rest into trash, PT pieces to keep, and pieces already small enough to burn. Then I began excavating it and, oh....my, does Alder look so much better without that garbage in front! All this work we did in a snowstorm. The cottonwoods nearby were releasing seed down in prodigious quantities and the breeze swept it around the property like snow. The volume was incredible and went on the whole time it was dry, quite marvelous to watch.
I headed in to clean up and start dinner, but found the propane tank empty when I went to heat water. I swapped it out and was lighting pilots when my mom came up. I cleaned up and changed clothes, then made bison tacos for dinner, after which we went for a short bird survey down to the riverfront and thence to the landing. On our way back, a riverboat sailed in--the Bixbies were on an evening cruise to the fireweed meadow and paused to say hello. Now, with a couple of Aleve working, I'm off to read and hopefully have a good night's sleep.
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And that was the last that I wrote on that trip. It's now the following week and I'm scheduled to head back to Snettisham tomorrow for a family trip. My mother set an alarm so we were up early the next day with the hope that we could explore the sandbars downriver on a -4.4' tide with the canoe. All we had to do was fuel the new engine, launch the canoe, and attach the engine, right? Actually, all of that went reasonably well (after scrounging a safety clip for the engine which it apparently didn't come with and discovering that that engine would swivel up just fine once it was on the canoe) except that the transom on the canoe did not fit the new engine. Specifically, the bolts through the transom that secure the wooden block that supports an engine were in the way of one of the clamps, and the engine was much too low in the water anyway. We fought with it for a while and my mom tried to add some soft wood scraps to try to take up the gap and provide support for the clamps at the same time, but in the end we decided it wasn't worth the time to fight it. It had been intended as a fun bonus project to take advantage of the tide and get the canoe in the water, but we had other things of greater priority than a major remodel of the canoe. Plus, looking downriver, we didn't see much in the way sandbars and wondered how much influence low tide was having at that point. We didn't notice any difference in the level of the floats which were then a foot and a half or two feet below the landing with the CFS about 30,000 (so maybe half way between low water in May and high water in June).
So we sucked in our disappointment (and I tried to do the same with my crankiness) and headed upriver with the 2-wheel cart and the 4-wheeler to fetch the other tree that had been bucked up in June. This one was smaller, but was some 100 yards from the nearest place where the 4-wheeler could drive (where Rich and I had bucked up a log several years ago). We first consolidated most of the rounds in one staging area before I began hauling cart loads to the 4-wheeler. While I worked at that, my mom finished stacking the logs on that end, then went to turn the 4-wheeler around and load it up. I think it took eight or ten trips with the cart to move it all, taking more time to load it than to push it through the trees. It took only three loads with the 4-wheeler to move the whole tree which we stacked up top of the other rounds. It was an impressive pile of wood that will surely last us many years, should we only be able to split it! It had only been an hour and fifteen minute project.
After quesadillas for lunch, we went our separate ways. I took a little walk around the property, failing again to find the tittering birds I kept hearing, then finished excavating the upriver side of Alder. Later that afternoon, we all walked upriver, finding a patch of snow still present where the huge mound had been in June, protected by a heavy covering of dirt and needles, and could see more obviously how many trees were over the trail in that area, totally obscuring it. On the way, we spotted a bird at the top of a young spruce where the blueberries are densest at the end of Spruce Alley, and it turned out to be a chipping sparrow. A few feet below him was a Tennessee warbler and soon a ruby-crowned kinglet had joined the crowd. Wow! The whole area was alive with flitting songbirds, a huge mixed flock that included orange-crowned, yellow-rumped, Townsend's, and Tennessee warblers, chipping sparrows, chickadees, and ruby-crowned kinglets; siskins, hermit thrushes, robins, and varied thrushes were also in the area. The action was non-stop and we only identified a fraction of them. We saw at least two Tennessee warblers and chipping sparrows, the latter gathering bugs in their beaks. It was an extraordinary, serendipitous birding encounter. That night we tried to celebrate with the bottle of champagne leftover from the last trip, but still wound up in bed quite early!
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Next day, I snuck out of the cabin as soon as I was up, feeding Cailey outside in an attempt to let my mother sleep in (though it turns out she was awake) and to earn what I hoped would be a leisurely morning on the couch at some point. I filled water jugs from the olive barrel, nearly three full, using the hose my mom had repaired from bear damage, which worked beautifully. While those were filling, I organized and cleaned up the back porch, then cut the remaining asphalt shingles for the porch steps and the steps down to the landing. I also consolidated all the unburnable trash I'd collected around Alder (including the broken glass, a broken glass jar, and many scraps of rotten or shredded plywood) into one large box for disposal in town. I don't recall the other odds and ends I did, but I thoroughly enjoyed washing up and having tea once I came inside. When we headed back out, my mom found the leak in the propane tank that had been fouling the air around the back porch on this and the last trip and draining the tanks. It was on one side of the coupling I'd installed a few years ago (it had been gas-tight most of that time!) and took only seconds to fix by tightening it up. Then, while my mom did her own odds and ends (including tacking down the asphalt and further organizing Alder), I suited up for the rain and headed upriver with a swede saw and clippers and got to work on the trail. I spent a little bit of time on the woods before Debbie's Meadow and then launched into Spruce Alley, starting at the beginning and clipping back all blueberry bushes in the path as well as the reaching spruce branches. When I got to the dense mass of blueberries at the far end, I cleared a section of it, maybe 20 feet, and thinned a bit further into it, but then jumped ahead and started working on the brushy section beyond it rather than spend all my time on the blueberries. Through Spruce Alley, a poor ruby-crowned kingly yelled and yelled at me continuously, poor thing. He must have a nest right there, and I was careful with my clipping just in case. It was a relief to get beyond his territory, for both of us I'm sure.
The brushy area was intense, but cleaned up fairly well, the inch-thick willows and alders cutting like butter. I cleared all the way into the forest with the exception of the large trees that required the swede saw, which I'd lost along the way. After a couple of hours, I was getting weak and decided I'd better turn around as soon as I cleaned up the brush I'd cut, so I left the trees uncut when I did finally find the saw again, returning for a very necessary lunch. We did most of the cleaning after lunch so I felt okay about returning upriver afterwards. In addition to picking up the spruce boughs from the early cutting I'd done, I cut the trees leaning over the trail before it enters the woods where I'd worked most recently.
We headed out at 5:35, about ten minutes before the tide, and had no trouble escaping the river this time. It was calm at the cabin, but the river was very choppy in front of Taku Glacier, which it sometimes is from the shallow water, and we weren't too concerned. It built from there, though, and when we passed Flat Point and entered the Inlet proper, the seas began to get ugly, and got really ferocious as we passed Jaw Point. In fact, it developed so quickly that we had only gone a few minutes into it when we both knew that we had to turn around. Normally I'm up for or resigned to pounding our way home, but these were big, curling, white-capped seas, oddly coming from the southwest rather than the southeast, though we were there exposed to Stephen's Passage. It was crazy, and we knew that it was likely to be much worse in more exposed areas; even if it was just like that, we were awash with seawater over the bow with many of the seas and having an alarming time of it. It was uncomfortable to turn around and we made our way behind Jaw as fast as we could. Unfortunately, because of the direction of the wind, we did not have full shelter anywhere there from the seas, though they did calm down considerably. We sent an inreach message to Ezra asking for a marine forecast and idled for a while, checking for a response every 15 minutes. When it came, it confirmed what we'd seen--gusts to 30 or 35 knots and four foot seas at Bishop, not something we wanted to push through.
Somewhere in there we decided to anchor at the mouth of stream running through a lovely little grassy cove inside Jaw Point. It looked very inviting, but the tide was dropping and the rain was steady, so we had no plans to go ashore. We pulled in toward the mouth of the creek so the current would hold us off the beach and dropped the anchor, only to find ourselves in about six feet of water. We backed much farther out and set the anchor in deeper water and began to settle in. I fetched two emergency wool blankets from under one of the seats, taking for myself the "dog blanket" with many holes in it. It helped alleviate the chill, but I soon changed into the one pair of clean, dry clothes I had and felt immensely better, having gotten quite damp loading the boat, sending messages, using the bucket, and anchoring, all in the steady rain. I dug out the splash of wine in the bag that my mom had backed, rueing that we'd left behind the full box, and we each took a sip or two before we felt a gentle bump on the side of the boat. A log brought in by the swells...? I hoped that was the case, and glanced around to see if I could spot it. What I did spot was a huge rock awash with seas to the left of us, at about the same distance from shore as we were. It didn't just look like a boulder, which would be bad enough, it looked like a shelf of rock. Where were we, and what was underneath us?? Not wanting to settle on the side of a rock for the night, I said "We gotta get out of here!" and rushed to the bow to pull the anchor as my mom dropped the engine and started us up. Naturally, the creek had done a good job keeping us off the beach, so pulling the anchor brought us much closer than I would have liked and brought us right alongside the rock in question. Thankfully we skirted around it and out into deeper water without incident and began looking for a better anchorage. It was very foggy and neither of us were intimately familiar with this side of the inlet (we normally cruise straight from Jaw to Flat), so the little inlets were unfamiliar. As we approached what we later confirmed was the Turner Lake outlet, we saw a ledge of sandbar along the entire shore and figured we'd come to a place we could anchor and sit on mud flats for the night. We puttered in a little and reset the anchor.
It was about 9:00 pm at that point and then we really settled in for the night, finishing the marionberry pie and the wine as the tide receded and left us sitting comfortably on the flats. I thought about lifting Cailey off to let her go to the bathroom, but the mudflats were very wet, mostly covered in a layer of water, which was unnerving, but mostly because I knew that if she walked around on that mud, there would be no way to get it off of her and it would wind up everywhere inside. The boat was already quite damp, the floor covered in the dirt and spruce needles we'd tracked in after loading. I hoped she'd go on deck, but instead (when I used the bucket), she climbed the steps and looked wistfully over the flats, but did not try to escape. Many gulls puttered about pecking at the critters revealed by the falling tide and, in different circumstances (lack of rain, for one), I might have enjoyed a bird survey; as it was, it was getting dark, it was raining, the visibility was poor, and I was not up for it. By the time the tide finished dropping, we were about half way between water and mountain. When we were ready to relax, we moved all our personal or delicate gear to the front of the seats (and the other gear to the stern of the boat, out in the rain), and converted the seats to a bed. We used the sheet from the couch at the cabin (coming in to be washed) on the bottom and a large comforter cover, also coming in to be washed, over the top of us, with our yellow wool blankets in the middle. Cailey curled up on the bed under cover and Jenny stayed on the very wet and dirty dog bed on the floor, refusing to move. Unfortunately, I'd unintentionally left my tablet at the cabin, but I was initially hopeful when I found my "emergency media" folder on my laptop. If only I had charged the spare battery! I always do that, but had apparently failed to do so in this case. We made it through about one minute of a Taskmaster on the existing battery before it died. We tried reading for a bit, but were both too tired to keep it up for long.
Unfortunately, sleep wouldn't come immediately, for as soon as we laid down, we found unexpected occupants in the cabin. Just as I laid my head down, a huge moth emerged from under the seat next to my head, startling me, and began fluttering around the windows making loud clicking sounds. We struggled to release it, only to find three more had joined us. There was so little room to move and so little light that they were very difficult to catch. The first time I caught one in my hand, I shrieked a little and let it go, the big feet or whatever just too much for my palm to bear (despite knowing that it posed no threat to me). We managed to get several out the door and were finally settled in when another began its clicking. This one I managed to ignore and actually fell asleep. I think the peace lasted about two hours before gentle, singing slaps awoke me--the tide coming back to us and lapping the hull. If the noise wasn't enough to keep us up, the rocking of the boat as it began to float would have done so, which just got worse as the boat floated and was again subject to that strange southwesterly swell. But I did try to rest and doze, only to hear voices. Real human voices. At first I thought it was the radio, but eventually I began to recognize Greg Davies's voice. Somehow, Tasmkaster has started playing again on my dead and closed laptop! What a night. I had to fetch it, log on, and close the program to stop it. Still we tried to relax, but the swells began to cause problems, like eerily sliding an orange juice bottle back and forth across the dash without making it fall off, which in the dark just made the cabin look haunted. We fought it out until about 3:30 and then got up for the tide at 4:18. Not wanting to spend another day in the inlet, that would be the tide on which to return to the cabin, there to fall asleep with the wood stove crackling nearby. It was a tempting thought, but running back up the river at dawn and then back down in the evening wasn't enticing, so we poked our head out into the inlet to see about the state of the seas.
They were better. Not great, but better, smaller and with no curling white caps. We pushed for town, passing the point of no return as we approached Cooper Point and the seas built. They continued to build past Bishop where we encountered four foot swells that rolled us and splashed over the windows. They were so large that my mom whispered "How are we going to turn?" as we cruised away from Bishop and toward Admiralty. I suggested we just keep going, hoping that the seas would lay down once we were far enough past the point. They did, just enough to pick up speed and cruise for Salisbury. My mom drove the boat amazingly well, sliding through the seas fast and into the relative shelter of the channel. We docked at about 6:00 am, grabbed minimal gear, and headed home. I rocked so much in the shower that I had to put a hand out to steady myself, and continued to rock in my chair for most of the day (after a good nap in bed). A few days later I went down to the Kathy M with a bucket of warm water and a broom and cleaned it all up, hauling the rest of the gear up to the house and satisfyingly throwing the huge box of Alder trash in the harbor dumpster.
Future
firewood