Walking through the woods

As I walk down the path from Glacier Spit to Glacier Lake, I always try to stop at the location in the top photograph. Whether it’s cloudy or sunny, the bright green moss always seems to illuminate the path through the spruce. The spacing of the trees often allows for dappled light. As the trees continue to grow, they will eventually block the sun that currently makes its way through their trunks. Fifty years ago, they would have barely shaded the ground.

The tree in the lower photo makes a statement about perseverance. Occasionally, trunks snap due to high winds or heavy snow loads. When this happens, the tree can turn one of its limbs into the new trunk. This spruce turned six of its limbs into new trunks, and now they all reach toward the sky.

Forests tell stories that are longer than human lives. It’s always difficult for us to connect in a meaningful way with the environment as it was before and how it will be after us; we often base our perception on the baseline of the world as we came to know it when we came into it. Walking through the woods gives us an opportunity to peer into the past and future. 

On the rocks

When the tide goes out in Kachemak Bay, you can walk into a world defined by water. By lifting rocks and parting algae, or even just stopping to stare for a while, you begin to see how many animals surround you as you visit the intertidal zone. This is one of the richest marine environments in the world.   

There are worlds within worlds on the beaches of China Poot Bay. Each curve of the shoreline, each change in the size of the rocks, and the wave action each shore receives help define which animals live in a given area. Every tide pool and every rock create shelter for a certain community of creatures.

I know a biologist who measures the amount of life on a beach by picking up a fist sized rock and counting the number of species on that rock. Here, just in front of the lodge, he found a single rock on which he identified over 80 animals.  As you look at the pictures here, try to see how many creatures you can find. Both of these rocks were about a foot wide. Right away, you can see the chitons and the brittle stars. Can you find the urchin, the tube worms, and all of the mollusks? How many more intertidal animals do you think you might find on the adjoining rocks?

Pace

Twice in the last week, I’ve found myself floating near sleeping otters. I mistook one of them for a log until he rolled over to take a glance at the canoe I was paddling. After he checked to make sure I was nothing of concern, he went back to sleep. 

Grewingk glacier sits at the back of a lake in Kachemak Bay State Park. If you get the chance to see it from above, it looks like a river cascading through a valley. And really, that’s what it is; a very cold river that’s taking its time to reach its destination. Does the water get impatient as it slowly slides down the mountain? I think it’s enjoying the ride.

Some days I’d like to live like an otter with the patience of a glacier. The summer rush is here. It’s a season of nonstop movement. No time to sit, write, or catch up on chores. It’s the short window in which life in Alaska prepares for the long winter. Thankfully, there are a few exceptions on land and in water to remind us that not all things are based on short seasons. 

Listen

When you look at the pictures in this post, try to hear hundreds of seagulls calling to each other, a bald eagle in a nearby tree twittering to his mate, and an otter cracking clams on his stomach. In China Poot Bay, there is never silence. There is far too much life to create a quiet world.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words is a soundscape worth? New research by Bryan Pijanowski of Purdue University and his associates is looking at how ecosystem health can be determined by the sounds that you hear in a given place. This research not only looks at what you can hear, but what you no longer hear that should be there.

The world we live in is so dominated by human sound. We become so accustomed to the buzz in the background, that we don’t notice it’s there until we go to a place where that buzz no longer dominates. In those few places in the world where human sounds are the exception rather than the rule, I believe we can truly listen to ourselves. If we listen for what’s there as well as what’s not, we may even be able to hear how we can begin the heal the ecosystems we have impacted. 

The taste of summer

Every place I’ve lived has fruits and vegetables that define summer. Growing up in Colorado, I knew the end of spring was near when the asparagus began popping up in the fields. In Alaska, summer is full of wild berries.

Watermelon berries have a light sweet taste and are often the first to ripen. I can never resist eating the first tart blueberries, even though they won’t be truly ripe until at least August. Soon, salmon berries that range in color from yellow to nearly purple and resemble giant raspberries will fill the sunny slopes near the trails. Most of the berries are just beginning to grow, some are still flowers, but in a matter of weeks they will fill the woods.

Summer is the time to taste the world around you and celebrate what it provides. Whether you are looking forward to the first fruit that drops from the trees or watching your garden as it grows, there is a certain magic to both gathering and growing your own food. It’s a way to celebrate life. 

Land of the midnight sun

I watched the moon rise over China Poot Bay a few minutes before midnight last week. The sun had only set an hour before, so it was still bright in the west. When the moon rose and added to the light, the world took on a soft glow.

Already, a month before summer solstice, there are nearly twenty hours of visible light every day. The stars make only a brief appearance each night. Even then, they don’t glow against the black background of a dark sky; they peak through the twilight of the early hours of dawn.

Long days in late spring invigorate nearly all forms of life in Alaska. The silence of winter has faded and been replaced by a symphony of a world recently woken. As the symphony reaches its crescendo, the world will continue to increase in color, light, and sound.  

 

Cliffs and connections

The cliffs of China Poot Bay are like a fine work of art. As you stare at their twists, folds, and subtle colors, you can find patterns and shapes in the chaos of the rock. The cliffs here tell a story.

One story they tell is of billions of plankton and their journey from the middle of the Pacific Ocean to the coast of Alaska. The rock the cliffs are made of is radiolarian chert. Radiolarians are protozoans that can still be found floating in our oceans today. During a population boom millions of years ago the ancestors of today’s radiolarians lived, died, sank to the bottom of the ocean, and became sedimentary rock. On the slowly sliding Pacific plate, the rock that they became made its way north where it was scrapped onto the North American plate and pushed onto the Kenai Peninsula.

It’s incredible how much of the world you can find here. Rock from the middle of the Pacific Ocean forms the cliffs in China Poot Bay. Dust from storms in the Gobi Desert sometimes makes its way here. This time of year, shorebirds from thousands of miles away are beginning to land on the beaches of Kachemak Bay. The salmon will soon make their way back from the ocean to the streams they spawned in. Despite Alaska’s remote location, much of this place is defined by its connections to the world.