You can thank me for the snow that’s falling at sea level today–after weeks of near-spring weather, I finally decided to take off my studded tires. Instantly, the slick returned to our roads.
You’re welcome.
My bike light battery died tonight.
Luckily, nature provided a backup.
How do we get to the tunnel?
Just look for the pile of old mining crap in the woods and take a hard right.
Which pile of old mining crap?
This one will do.
Don’t worry, there’s a string attached so we won’t get lost.
Even in a one-way tunnel it’s nice to know that the string is there, just in case.
The Takus have taken their toll.
The end was where it all began.
I found cities where I least expected them…
…and other wonders smiling at me from below.
Now I understand how Godzilla must feel.
Never underestimate the power of a lunch hour stroll (or a lens cleaning cloth).
It was a Monday. I desperately needed to decompress after a full day of looming deadlines—by the way, if you ever stop by our office on a Monday and we’re short with you, don’t take it personally.
Instead of accepting an invitation to watch the Olympics, which in retrospect perhaps I should have, I decided to take a trip that has been on my mind for months. In fact, this trip is what inspired me to invest in new, lightweight camping equipment last summer. Camping equipment that, to be honest, didn’t get much use until this very night, the night I set out for Dupont.
Having been a Thane resident for a few months now, the trail has been calling my name. I have occasionally walked the first few hundred feet of it, usually stopping at the waterfall and turning around.
One fateful night a few weeks back, I thought I would run the trail in the evening, long after the sun was gone. As you may have read in a previous post, it ended badly.
A few days later, I went back in hopes of painting a prettier picture on the trail that had previously left me signing my name in blood on the ground. This time, I went maybe a mile in or so, but it fast became too rooty for a proper run. I didn’t want to get overconfident and create a repeat of last time.
Now on this Monday, after all the deadlines had flown away into the night like moths to the moon, I knew that if I didn’t do something exciting I’d probably end up sitting on the couch eating Bon Bons, for lack of a better analogy. (I don’t know who taught me that one. Maybe my dad.) So I quickly packed up—sans Bon Bons—and headed out.
Now, it’s mid-February, a time that under normal circumstances an Anchorage girl wouldn’t dream of going camping, especially alone in the dark. A California girl certainly wouldn’t. But, at a balmy 40-something-degree, precipitationless evening, it seemed like the perfect thing to do.
The trail was somewhat treacherous and, given our history together and my lovely knee that causes me to behave like a 75-year-old woman at times—not that there’s anything wrong with that—caused me to act a bit overly cautious while hopping from root to root. I sort of felt like a character in a video game.
I got to camp at about 9 p.m., just in time to wander around on the beach, in the dark, try to learn about my surroundings, in the dark, and pick out a place to pitch my tent, in the dark.
Now, I’m still using the same headlamp that failed to indicate the root on the trail that left me trippin’ a few weeks back. It’s not so great for sightseeing, but it does the job. I also had a spare flashlight in my pocket just in case my batteries ran out.
I found a nice place by a creek and set up camp, played a few games of solitaire on my phone? (What, did you think I was going to completely avoid vegging out?)
Now, had I planned this a little bit better—or at all—I wouldn’t have picked a morning on which I had an 8:30 meeting, or I wouldn’t have done it in February when the sun isn’t up until long after the morning has begun. When I awoke at about 5, it was perhaps even darker than it was when I fell asleep. I still could not see the supposedly beautiful surroundings that I only can assume were there, as I had yet to actually witness the light touching them for myself.
I packed up and headed back home, in the dark.
I tell you what, this trail may be even rootier on the way back than on the way in. It’s also quite full of fallen trees, which I know is typical this time of year, but it really is quite disorienting. (Is this the trail or is that the trail?)
But generally speaking, any trail discrepancies were clarified by taking the high road; if I had the option to go downhill or uphill, I chose the latter. This proved to be correct on almost every occasion.
People will probably read this and say, “What kind of idiot goes out to a trail they’ve never been on alone in the dark, carrying a heavy pack filled with only one bottle of water and a Snickers bar?”
(The Snickers survived the trip, by the way.)
Well, this kind of idiot does that. It’s as if I couldn’t have done anything else. As if the wild was calling me out of me urbanity. As if I don’t get enough “nature” living in a cabin in the woods, five miles from the nearest convenience store.
The only way I can explain it is like this: in trudging farther and farther from my residence, over rocks and stumps and mud puddles, I was heading toward where I was supposed to be, toward a home of sorts, if you will. If someone or something had come at me in the dark I may have become afraid of the dark of the night, but on this evening it felt more like a blanket clothing me from the nakedness that city life can strip us down to when we let it.
Trust me, after staring at the pages of the Capital City Weekly as they are being formed on a screen for hours straight without blinking, you’d want to go camping in the dark too. Not that one is any better than the other, necessarily. They both serve their purpose for me. And on the following Tuesday, as the sun rose and my eyeballs returned to the screen, I was fulfilled. Stinky, sweaty, but overall fulfilled.
We do whatever it takes for shots.
We brave barren wastelands,
traveling deep into the bowels of the great unknown.
We lose ourselves amidst the abyss,
far from clocks and computer screens.
In the process of losing it, we find even more.
(Follow the Wednesday Adventures from Kenneth’s perspective at checote.blogspot.com.)
Wrangell has many positive qualities.
interesting beaches
friendly residents
fancy sucker holes
intense skyscapes
I’m in the best seat in the house. Alone, in the dark, front and center on the M/V Malaspina. It’s a February evening and the view from beyond the railings on deck is completely invisible in the night, save for a series of blinking and steady lights guiding our captain through the Wrangell Narrows. A crew member cut the inside lights a while earlier, explaining that any ambient light from inside the vessel may hinder the captain’s navigation through the channels.
I feel the vessel twist and turn, as if meandering through a parking garage or snaking through rabbit tunnels. A spotlight is flicked on, the light hitting an island maybe forty feet off the starboard side. We twist again in darkness. The spotlight comes on again, this time pointing straight ahead at yet another island. Another twist.
The buoys flash with green and red lights; red on the right, green on the left. As we navigate the narrows, we come closer and closer to the buoys, sometimes only ten feet on either side of the ferry.
I’m no longer alone. A few fellow passengers have come to watch the show as well. One of them explains to the others what we’re seeing, and luckily I’m within earshot.
“This is one of the most intricate channels that I’ve ever seen,” he says. “Sixty-two marks from beginning to end.”
The range marks, he explains, are pairs of orange lights on individual towers coming out of the water or on land. Depending on where a range mark is viewed from, the lights may line up vertically or at an angle. When they’re vertically in line, the captain knows he is on the right track.
“Okay, now he’s going to have to veer left,” the man predicts. The vessel veers, seemingly never slowing a single knot.
More onlookers have gathered, fascinated by the array of blinking spots that seem to continue endlessly in the distance, like an 8-bit video game.
The glow of Petersburg illuminates the clouds ahead, allowing us some perspective as to the landscape around us. We press on until only one more pair of red and green blinks before us, continuing long after we’ve passed.
