Alaska brief -- an oldie, am putting it here for storage
Most tundra greens are red, and matted low in a thin layer above permafrost. Stooping, one finds blueberries, cowberries, and a lacework of lichens over the leaves and rocks. Lichen are the caribou's staple, while waist-high are willow, the moose's favorite brush, now a bright yellow. Purple-streaked stalks of wild celery also stand taller than the rest, but most are keeling over as their season is coming to an end. Across the valley, one sees a spectrum on the mountainsides: red to black-brown to a peek of icy white just before a peak of invisible, shrouded by cloud.
We saw tundra at our highest elevation, after a long and bumpy school-bus ride with the other tourists at Denali. The park is set up so that a single unpaved road injects us into the middle of protected wilderness, while sequestering us from its wildness and vice versa. So as not to sensitize the animals to the road, or desensitize them to the human voice, we are told only to whisper once windows are opened and everyone is jammed to one side of the bus, because someone has said, "wolf pack at three o'clock!" or spotted bears bobbling on the slope. When we see the wolves--two gray and one black moving together, and two more gray ones at first along the river, then into and out of the brush, then one leaping in clear, thrilling sight across the ridge--our whispers turn to silence, as we realize in awe that we also hear their howling.
Moose and caribou also make multiple appearances during our lucky intervals on the road (later we hear others mutter, "slow wildlife day"). Far from the road, the backcountry trekkers and their gear cut a peculiar profile: giant potatoes with skinny legs, a species all their own.
At lower elevations the tundra red rises into the curling blades of fireweed, shin-high, whose white filaments at the top resemble smoke, thus the name. Spruce, aspen, and paper birch green the landscape below timberline, and only sparsely at first, like "little sticks" (as one bus driver translated "taiga," from Russian). Some kind of tree is turning yellow before the others and looks to me like bursts of flame in the distance, or an exotic kind of snow where its leaves strew my path.
That day we accomplished three easy hikes, between bus rides down from our turning point in the tundra. The next day, we broke up our drive back to Anchorage with two more strolls--actually the latter required a considerable detour, for the pleasure of walking up to and on top of a glacier, which we reached just as the sun was setting at its generous, high-latitude pace. This gave us enough time to poke at the glacier, photograph it, and puzzle at its properties. I saw glaciers again the next day, but this time from an airplane's height. Still, they were a marvel, and I fantasized skiing their pristine powder, which I knew was really hard ice. Later, Vancouver emerged, its boats, bridges, logpiles along the shores, and sunlit grid of homes and skyscrapers sparkling with civilization. After a while, the only lights I saw were electric. Descending the purple fog, I watched the patch of orange pinpoints expand and resolve into the familiar as our plane touched down in San Francisco.
(September 2003)
- - - - -
Later Aziz commented: just like you, in the presence of the tallest mountain in North America and obsessing over the 3-inch high plants...
We saw tundra at our highest elevation, after a long and bumpy school-bus ride with the other tourists at Denali. The park is set up so that a single unpaved road injects us into the middle of protected wilderness, while sequestering us from its wildness and vice versa. So as not to sensitize the animals to the road, or desensitize them to the human voice, we are told only to whisper once windows are opened and everyone is jammed to one side of the bus, because someone has said, "wolf pack at three o'clock!" or spotted bears bobbling on the slope. When we see the wolves--two gray and one black moving together, and two more gray ones at first along the river, then into and out of the brush, then one leaping in clear, thrilling sight across the ridge--our whispers turn to silence, as we realize in awe that we also hear their howling.
Moose and caribou also make multiple appearances during our lucky intervals on the road (later we hear others mutter, "slow wildlife day"). Far from the road, the backcountry trekkers and their gear cut a peculiar profile: giant potatoes with skinny legs, a species all their own.
At lower elevations the tundra red rises into the curling blades of fireweed, shin-high, whose white filaments at the top resemble smoke, thus the name. Spruce, aspen, and paper birch green the landscape below timberline, and only sparsely at first, like "little sticks" (as one bus driver translated "taiga," from Russian). Some kind of tree is turning yellow before the others and looks to me like bursts of flame in the distance, or an exotic kind of snow where its leaves strew my path.
That day we accomplished three easy hikes, between bus rides down from our turning point in the tundra. The next day, we broke up our drive back to Anchorage with two more strolls--actually the latter required a considerable detour, for the pleasure of walking up to and on top of a glacier, which we reached just as the sun was setting at its generous, high-latitude pace. This gave us enough time to poke at the glacier, photograph it, and puzzle at its properties. I saw glaciers again the next day, but this time from an airplane's height. Still, they were a marvel, and I fantasized skiing their pristine powder, which I knew was really hard ice. Later, Vancouver emerged, its boats, bridges, logpiles along the shores, and sunlit grid of homes and skyscrapers sparkling with civilization. After a while, the only lights I saw were electric. Descending the purple fog, I watched the patch of orange pinpoints expand and resolve into the familiar as our plane touched down in San Francisco.
(September 2003)
- - - - -
Later Aziz commented: just like you, in the presence of the tallest mountain in North America and obsessing over the 3-inch high plants...
posted by fragments of angry candy at 11:10 PM
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