Closing Thoughts on Alaska

Closing Thoughts on Alaska

    At this point, I didn't want to title this "final thoughts" for my vacation adventure covered just the tiniest speck of a rather large land and final is, well, final; in my mind there would likely be many more thoughts to come especially of this different part of the world.  But as with so much of the planet, there was and is simply so much to see and learn and take in that one could feel the increased yearning to return and to keep exploring.  So it was indeed a bit ironic that I ended up reading an older piece from the Anchorage Press about Dall sheep, those big curly-horned rams that crash head-on into each other come mating season (further south they are simply categorized as Big Horn sheep).  During our flight over the fjords we were lucky enough to witness several mountain goats; but we discovered that most of the large Dall sheep venture further north and settle into the vast expense of Denali National Park.  Said author Bill Sherwonit in his piece: Both sexes of adult sheep have horns, though only males grow the large, sweeping, and outward-curling horns so often seen in photos.  As rams mature, their horns gradually form a circle when viewed  from the side and reach a full circle or “curl” in seven to eight years...Those of females are shorter, slender spikes that resemble the horns of mountain goats, which sometimes causes people to confuse the two species.  But goat horns are shiny black and sharper than sheep horns and goats also have more massive chests.  Besides that, their ranges rarely overlap, goats being most common in coastal mountains and sheep inland...Unlike the antlers of moose and caribou, horns are never shed.  Their growth occurs only from spring through fall; winters are marked by a narrow ridge or ring.  So, much like a tree, the age of sheep can be determined by counting their “annual rings,” also called annuli...Lambs usually do fine their first summer, when food is abundant, but half or more may die their first winter.  Sheep that survive their first couple of winters may live into their teens, though biologists consider 12 to be “very old” for a wild sheep.  Mature rams in their prime may weigh 200 pounds or more, ewes 110 to 130 pounds on average.

     Sheep?  It seemed that as much as we managed to see, we obviously also missed a lot.  There was still so much to learn of the First Nation peoples and other early settlers of the land (much as our native Americans in the U.S.), their ways and customs.  Totem poles were family or clan histories and only special woods were chosen, as were special trees for stripping bark; what else was there to learn?  It was a time back then of working with the land and the animals, echoed in a piece on native farming on Oahu, the home of Honolulu and its overflowing population.  When the native people and practices in the wetlands of the city of Heeia on the island were removed for sugar cane crops and grazing, the native plants and animals and birds also got shoved out.  So when an effort was made to return the land to its original state and to save its nearby reef, marine biologist Kanekoa Kukea-Schultz decided to look back and listen to what the early settlers practiced...taro farming.  After all, conservationists had pretty much given up on the area.  But Schultz discovered that the taro plants thrive in swampy areas prone to heavy bursts of rainfall.  Berms were built to trap the floodwaters, which slowly penetrated the soil.  Now nearly 10 years later, the working taro farm (which means working in mud that goes up past your knees) is clearing the reef of sediment, native birds have returned, and he told the Nature Conservancy, "...the cultivated area can capture 14 million gallons of water, slowly dissipating that throughout the Heeia wetlands area."  What would we have learned from the native people and their practices in the Alaska area?  Likely far more than we could have soaked in in just a few hours or days...

    We also missed a few impressions for as much as we saw, some things were simply destined to be etched only in memory, sights and meetings that words and pictures seemed unable to capture.  Still, Jonathan Frazen captured some of my thoughts when he wrote about Antarctica and described his own view of glaciers for The New Yorker: ...spiky black mountains, extremely tall but still not so tall as to be merely snow-covered; they were buried in wind-carved snowdrift, all the way to their peaks, with rock exposed only on the most vertical cliffs.  Sheltered from wind, the water was glassy, and under a solidly gray sky it was absolutely black, pristinely black, like outer space.  Amid the monochromes, the endless black and white and gray, was the jarring blue of glacial ice.  No matter the shade of it—the bluish tinge of the growlers bobbing in our wake, the intensely deep blue of the arched and chambered floating ice castles, the Styrofoamish powder blue of calving glaciers—I couldn’t make my eyes believe that they were seeing a color from nature.  Again and again, I nearly laughed in disbelief.  Immanuel Kant had connected the sublime with terror, but as I experienced it in Antarctica, from the safe vantage of a ship with a glass-and-brass elevator and first-rate espresso, it was more like a mixture of beauty and absurdity.

The glacial valley leading to Desolation Lake

   Much of this came to mind as my wife and I settled back into our routines, the weather hot and a far cry from the mild and temperate weather we had left.  But as we went for a hike, we were far from melancholy.  We had had a wonderful time, a notch taken off of our bucket list and a realization that there were still places that were basically wild, places so remote or so steep or so rugged that one could only gaze at them from afar or from high up (even though we were told of kayakers who regularly make the 1100-mile journey from Seattle up the Alaskan coast).  But in our own back yard was equal beauty, the rains of late spring and early summer fueling the growth of the meadows and forests, themselves relative newcomers to the glacial canyons of our area.  It was there, and there, and there...beauty all in the eye of the beholder.  Alaska, our hike, your own backyard porch...all there just waiting for your yearning to return.