The Hills are Alive

Alaska is all about the wilderness, great expanses of wild.  Hiking, boating, fishing, boreal forests, taiga and tundra, or staring wide eyed at the highest mountains on the continent and finding a moose nosing about the highway, it has it all.  On our first trip to the biggest state, Katie and I, and our friends Dwynne and Roman, have all fallen in love with it.  

Serious hiking is not done on trails here like in the lower forty-eight however, as most trails are short by comparison to the extensive networks we have in the Sierra, Cascades or Rockies.  When you look at a map of Denali National Park or Wrangle-St. Elias, the nations largest National Park, the interior of the huge parks are almost devoid of trails.  The rangers -- so diligent to keep you on trail in the Sierra and off the fragile timberline soils -- here encourage you to simply strike out in any direction.  Take a compass and walk on the tundra, find your way through virgin taiga, or simply follow the long openings created by miles and miles of “braided rivers” flowing out of the ever-present glaciers.

That kind of serious hiking will be for our next trip.  This is a scouting visit, just seeing what this vast, wild land has to offer, and we’ve done a number of wonderful day hikes.  Two I particularly liked are the Lost Lake Trail a few miles out of Seward on the Kenai Peninsula, and the Bird Ridge Trail on Turnagain Arm.  The first is the closest I’ve ever come to hiking through the opening shots of Julie Andrews singing and spinning around in the Austrian Alps in the Sound of Music.   Everyone I met on trail remarked on the resemblance.  

The Lost Lake Trail can be a 15 mile day hike from one roadside trailhead to another, and some folks had left bicycles at the end to ride back to their cars.  But for most it’s a four mile hike up from the Seward Highway to an Alpine, tundra covered bluff overlooking Lost Lake.  The trail begins in a dense boreal forest of spruce, alder, birch and aspen, the mossy understory thick in ferns and Devil’s club.  After two uphill miles of forest the landscape opens out onto the tall flower gardens that cover the land in Alaska just below the “dry tundra.”  Sedges and tall grasses fill the marshy areas, and valerian, lupin, wild geranium, violets and chocolate lily cover the surrounding hills.  

Once we were out of the forest, the trail rolled along a ridge, very gradually gaining elevation as we passed into true tundra, where moss, lichen and butter yellow heather, bloomed extravagantly underfoot.  

The lush fields only set the scene however as it was the drop dead views we couldn’t stop staring at.  The trail ahead fell away toward deep blue, Lost Lake, and the views to either side climbed to snowy summits, cascades pouring down from every patch of snow or glacier.  Behind us we could see the length of Resurrection Bay, the town of Seward sheltered beneath towering mountains.  So where’s a good musical number when you need one.  On cue, Julie Andrews should have stepped forth and just started belting it out.  

This trail was well peopled the day we hiked it, a trail race was going on, but their were mountain bikers, joggers and just plain hikers, and every one I talked to couldn’t help mentioning the Sound of Music connection.  Several groups were singing the song.  The scene was idyllic, the tundra springy underfoot and the sun was warm.  We lay on the soft ground and I fell asleep in the beauty.  

It’s an easy hike if you’re in shape, moderately difficult at most, and worth the push up the first two forest miles, for a taste of Austria in Alaska.  

As peaceful and welcoming as Lost Lake was, the next day I took a hike of quite a different nature.  I had heard from some of the locals that there was a great training hike up Bird Ridge on the way back to Anchorage.  It climbed 3,500 feet in 2.5 miles.  Now that’s a hike!  That beats my favorite burn up Mt. Diablo, the Burma Road Trail, which is 3,500 feet in 4 miles.  I couldn’t resist.

On a grey, drizzly day on the North side of Turnagain Arm, Katie and Dwynne went for the full spa treatment at the Aleyeska ski resort, a very swanky place, while Roman and I headed for the hills.  We would all be steaming away the day in our own particular fashion.

The trail began right off the Seward Highway, just west of Bird Creek, which was lined with fishermen on the banks or wading in the stream, which was bigger than most rivers in California.  We hiked for a civilized quarter mile or so before veering steeply uphill onto an almost immediately rocky, and decidedly uncivilized, ear popping grade, nearly  straight up.  But it was too beautiful to even consider not climbing this monster.  

The thick forest of spruce and birch, thinned to alders -- stunted by their proximity to timberline -- and eventually opened out on the flower gardens we had come to expect whenever we hiked above a thousand feet or so.  Corn lilies grew in profusion, surrounded by beds of lupin and valerian, the brilliant colors intensified by the shadowed, overcast day.  

The climb continued unabated to a rocky outcrop where the trail seemed to disappear and it became a matter of scrambling up as best one could.  As if on cue, the drizzle intensified.  The only saving grace for this trail in the rain was that the rocks had been cut so recently from the glacial landscape that they were sharp edged.  There was not a smooth surface in sight to slip on.  The traction was good even when at about two miles, the trail became a trail again and the grade leveled off somewhat through scrubby tundra.  

Toward the top a 360 degree view opened out that made all the sweat and strain worth every once of energy expended.  Standing on the summit, on the edge of the Chugach Mountains, I could see a great distance into this magnificent range.  Hundreds of miles long it still holds vast frozen plateaus linking distant peaks with huge frozen reservoirs that feed countless glaciers.  

On both sides, the vista encompasses U shaped hanging valleys of tundra and trees, seemingly cut with the smoothness of a carpenter’s gouge.  Glaciers do fine work.  Finally, facing south, your eye moves to the majesty of Turnagain Arm, a fjord off of Cook Inlet which was once a super massive glacier, the destination for all the tributary glaciers for many miles.  It has cut a trench over a thousand feet below the current sea level.  Instead of a clear channel however, this giant glacial valley has been filled with a thousand feet of rock flour, the finely powdered leavings of all the myriad glaciers, mountain eaters and stone crushers, that have lived in the region.  

Today Turnagain Arm is posted, warning fishermen and the curious not to venture out onto the extensive mud flats at low tide.  Here your feet can be sucked down with such force that drownings have occurred on the frigid incoming tide which moves with such speed and has such depth -- over twenty-nine feet -- that its tidal range is only second to the Bay of Fundy in North America.  

The tide was ebbing throughout our climb leaving beautiful mud slicks and swirls, channels that probably change daily with the force of water over the finest sediments in the world.  The clouds wound round the ridge top or curled just below it and the distant mud glistened in the subdued light.  I finally had control of my breathing, even though I was drenched in sweat and rain.  Heather underfoot on a rocky ridge, mist beneath and clouds above, I felt the exultation of a great climb on a glorious day in Alaska.

“I used to envy the father of our race, dwelling as he did in contact with the new-made fields and plants of Eden; but I do so no more, because I have discovered that I also live in ‘creation's dawn.’ The morning stars still sing together, and the world, not yet half made, becomes more beautiful every day.”  John Muir