Travelers' Tales Alaska

by Bill Sherwonit

  I’m pondering the question when in bursts a young Swiss couple. Ursula and Markus spotted a black bear and are still wide-eyed and trembling after their encounter with what to Europeans is a nearly mythical creature. According to the hut log, Bigfoot, Elvis, and Liberace sightings are also common on foggy days near the pass. Ursula holds up her bear bell proudly.

  I trudge on. Sheep Camp and treeline fall quickly behind. Snowfields must be crossed, willow thickets negotiated, and boulders scrambled. The Taiya bubbles beneath dangerously thin snow bridges. I don snowshoes and begin to climb up Long Hill into a massive glacial amphitheater. These broadening alpine vistas afforded the gold seekers a sudden overview of the phenomena that engulfed them: “We passed hundreds of prospectors moving forward singly and in small parties,” wrote stampeder Edward Morgan, “some men staggering under packs loaded on their backs, others drawing or pushing small sleds laden with their outfits, still others driving sleds, moving sometimes, under dog power. The procession of toiling humanity thinned out as we climbed and many of them had ceased all attempts…seated themselves on their belongings, and hung up signs advertising: Outfit for Sale Cheap.”

  Women were also present in the long struggling line. Diarist William Haskell wrote that he “…could not fail to notice many instances… in which the women showed a fortitude superior to the men. It was a revelation, almost a mystery. But after a while, I began to account for it as the natural result of an escape from the multitude of social customs and restraints, which in civilized society hedge about a woman’s life.… Her nature suddenly becomes aware of a freedom, which is in a way exhilarating.” About a dozen women became professional packers.

  During the gold rush, scores of women—miners’ wives, entrepreneurs, and prostitutes—climbed the Chilkoot’s Golden Stairs alongside the men. Their hike was even harder. Socialite Martha Black conquered the Pass wearing a tight corset, long skirt, and bloomers. On top of that, she was pregnant.

  Gold Rush Women by Claire Rudolph Murphy and Jane G. Haigh describes the travails of numerous other female stampeders, including Lucille Hunter, who gave birth on the trail, and Anna DeGraf who reached the summit on a crutch, with her clothes in tatters and her feet wrapped in rags. DeGraf, 55, had headed north to search for her missing son, who had disappeared into Alaska two years earlier. She never found him, but her pioneering spirit prevailed. DeGraf wrote, “My mother used to say, ‘You must howl with the wolves when you are with the wolves,’ and so I made the best of things up there.”

  —Andromeda Romano-Lax

  Intersecting mountain goat tracks flow down one side of the valley and up the other toward steep glacial seracs. In September 1897, these same ice fields developed into a temporary lake, and when the ice dam finally failed, a twenty-foot wall of water rushed down the granite aprons. Stampeders climbing Long Hill scattered as the flood crashed into a rest area beneath a giant boulder called the Stone House. Forty tents and outfits were wiped out.

  I investigate the remains of old tram towers, then cross the valley and begin climbing a gully that looks like it has seen its share of snow slides. With the nonstop winter traffic pouring through this narrow valley, it was inevitable that an avalanche would occur. On April 3, 1898, the first good travel day after two months of heavy storms, stampeders were passing up and down this snowfield when it gave way. Within minutes 1,000 rescuers had arrived from Sheep Camp. For days, they dug trenches through the debris, locating many victims alive, some of them thirty-feet down. One ox was found chewing its cud. Victims and rescuers could hear each other. Last goodbyes were hollered through the snowpack. More than sixty people died. [Avalanche debris quickly hardens into a cement-like firmness and people buried by avalanches seldom survive more than a half-hour of burial.] The corpses were mushed down the valley to a makeshift morgue where Frank “Soapy” Smith declared himself coroner and stripped the bodies of valuables. When avalanche debris melted the following spring, undiscovered corpses floated on the surface of a pool alongside the trail.

  Eventually I find myself at “the Scales,” a hummock of polished rock where professional packers reweighed all loads, charging up to one dollar per pound to haul supplies over the summit. Old beams are scattered about, the wood as limp as soggy cardboard. Rusted iron straps and long rods drilled into the rock recall the elaborate cable ways that once clattered through here.

  This is also the site of the Golden Stairs. Here an entrepreneur actually had a handrail installed and steps chopped into the ice nightly, which stampeders could use for a five-cent toll. One sourdough named Frank Berkeley counted 1,378 individual steps, and they constituted the biggest bottleneck between Seattle and Dawson. Everyone went the pace of the slowest.

  I turn away from the soggy gales and kick my way through the snow toward the ridgeline as an approaching storm rises in intensity, squeezed to a frenzy by its passage over the Coast Mountains. Visibility becomes hopeless, and since the open bowls on the Canadian side have no landmarks and seasonal trail markers aren’t yet in place, I decide to bivouac in the pass and hope for clearing weather. Klondike National Historic Park is a heavily regulated corridor and this isn’t an approved campsite, but the conditions are worsening. This seems the best among undesirable options. Soon I’m inside my flapping tent while the storm rages.

  I awaken to the chucking of rock ptarmigan. The storm has spent itself, leaving a leaden overcast. Red-breasted mergansers and red-throated loons flap past the tent, oodling with each beat of their wings. All through the dawn, waterfowl skim northward through the notch, their necks outstretched in labored flight.

  As I finish packing, I’m hailed by a couple from Berkeley, California, who’ve climbed up Peterson Notch. Their jeans are soaked to the knees, but otherwise, they’re game. Six rangers from Parks Canada appear, marking the trail over the open snowfields on the year’s first patrol. Ho for the Klondike! The rush is on! We head into Canada in a loose group and pass a day-use shelter. During the busy season, hot chocolate and lemonade are sometimes dispensed here to passing backpackers. Nice, but not quite the same as the tent that once stood nearby advertising, “Hops beer, five cents.”

  We descend over mushy snowfields, traversing a steep, avalanche-prone hillside en route to the turquoise waters of Crater and Morrow lakes. Most Indian packers descended these same slopes by simply hopping atop a sled full of cargo and launching. Since a six-foot cliff of snow usually surrounded frozen Crater Lake on the final run out of these sled rides, their sport required substantial abandon.

  Below Morrow Lake, we pass Happy Camp, still deeply blanketed in snow. A narrow basalt gorge funnels the trail to Deep Lake, with its rock terraces, contorted shoreline spruce, and mountain goats wandering the cliffs above. The rangers and I pause to watch the snow-white scramblers. Christine, a nineteen-year Parks Canada veteran, shares her binoculars as we talk appreciatively about the local flora and fauna, but she also sees the trail in a sociological light.

  “Midsummer here is not a wilderness experience, but the sense of community that builds between hikers is fascinating,” she says. “People meet on the lower sections of the trail and maybe see each other again on or near the pass. After trading stories the whole way, by the time they reach Lake Bennett they’re fast friends.”

  My new friends move on while I brew hot soup. In these high latitudes, the sun won’t set until nearly midnight, so there’s little need to hurry. Eventually, I amble down out of the snowbelt and along the rim of Deep Lake Gorge, a chasm of twisting, dropping waterfalls.

  I turn a corner to find Lake Lindeman, best described by stampeder Julius Price: “Here lay stretched at our feet, though some distance below, a large, placid sheet of water, like a huge piece of rose-coloured silk spread between the mountains.” Prospectors had used Lake Lindeman since 1880 as a place to build boats for their Yukon journeys. By spring of 1898, Lindeman City had swelled to 4,000 citizens as they waited for the river ice to break and the surging meltwater to carry their crafts down through t
reacherous Lindeman Creek, across the expansive lakes Bennett, Tagish, and Lebarge (the latter the scene of Robert Service’s famous “Ballad of Sam McGee”), and another 550 miles of the Yukon River through Whitehorse Rapids to Dawson and its nearby gold creeks. It will be another 200 years before these forests fully recover from the boat building.

  I’m coaxed into a layover day by the Parks Canada tent museum, a pocket-size treasure trove of old photographs and books on nature, Native tribes, and Klondike history. Again, the hut logbooks entertain. There’s a satire on Robert Service called “Smell of the Yukon” based on drying socks. The entries list sightings of moose, bears, cougars, wolverines, and Bigfoot. Again, profundity is left to the young. “When I die,” writes a ten-year-old girl from Whitehorse, “I want to be on a mountain with gold on the other side.”

  Steve Howe is a writer for Backpacker magazine and co-author of Making Camp: The Complete Guide for Hikers, Mountain Bikers, Paddlers and Skiers.

  NANCY DESCHU

  Downtown Duel

  Even in the big city, wild things reign.

  I STRADDLE MY BIKE IN THE MIDDLE OF McKENZIE Street and study the black dog lying unattended in the city playground, only a block away. I’ve been bitten by too many dogs in my life, so I’m extra cautious. But as the dog stands up and ambles into the street, I don’t see the svelte body of a friendly black lab or the blocky head of a gentle Newfoundland. Instead, the animal takes on the distinct shape and gait of a black bear. Not what I was expecting to see this early Sunday morning in urban Anchorage.

  At that moment, a woman walks out of a nearby house to pick up her Sunday newspaper and the bear charges toward her. Although she is overweight and wearing clogs, she sprints toward her neighbor’s chain-link fence and vaults over it like an Olympian. But the bear’s real target is not the vaulter; it is the dullard bicyclist who has been staring at him for the past minute. Before I know it, he abruptly shifts course away from the vaulter, straight at me.

  In a split second, I process my entire brain-load of bear information and I decide the bear does not want to eat me, he just wants me to disappear from his kingdom. I choose the risky option to run, so I can hide and get out of his sight. I race my bicycle across the pavement like panicked prey, the bear snapping its jaws closer and closer to my rear tire. My intended cover is a slot between the garage door and an SUV parked in the driveway of a neighboring house. I dive under the front bumper and yank my bike towards me, though it’s a poor excuse for a bear barrier.

  After twenty years as a field biologist in Alaska, my first serious bear encounter is taking place two blocks from my home, as I’m riding to the coffee shop. I lie still and listen to the bear tap his claws on the driveway, like manicured fingernails thrumming on a kitchen counter. He tap-taps his way towards the garage door and I wedge closer to the SUV’s left front tire.

  Now I hear the bear’s winded breathing and catch a glimpse of his furred feet. The slot is tight for him, so he turns and circles the SUV counterclockwise. The nature of the tapping changes and I guess that he has moved off the asphalt driveway, back to the rough-surfaced street. The clicking tempo quickens and finally fades as he gallops north towards the thread of forest that hugs the city’s Coastal Trail. As I slither out from under the SUV, the last I see of the bear is his round, black butt loping up and down, disappearing into the coastal woods.

  I walk over to check on the woman who leaped her neighbor’s fence. She is still lying on the lawn, one blue clog inside the fence with her, the other lying at the edge of the street, and I worry she has had a heart attack. But she lifts her head and tells me she is O.K. After we introduce ourselves, she suggests that the bear had strayed from the comfort of Kincaid Park, a large stand of woods a few miles down the coast. We agree that he was not a bear-gone-bad from eating human garbage, just a lost teenager standing his turf. Even so, we think it is terrible how he bullied us.

  Still flushed with adrenaline, I make the rash decision to continue my trip to the coffee shop. I peddle down Captain Cook Drive and cycle onto Anchorage’s Coastal Trail at a spot where the forest thins out and there’s a sweeping view of Cook Inlet’s murky waters, an openness I think the riled bear might avoid.

  I breathe deeply, taking in the August sea air. As I bike along I notice my tires are crossing giant brown paw prints on the black paved trail. I am pleased that the city has spent a few tax dollars to stencil grizzly bear prints on the Coastal Trail. How amused the summer tourists will be, to come upon the distinctive painted prints when they stroll this scenic route after dining at downtown restaurants. Long after they leave Anchorage, they will recall that this northern city has a love for its wildlife and a quirky sense of humor.

  As I scan the inlet, I have a sudden sinking feeling. The bear prints are exactly the same color as the inlet’s mudflats. I hop off my bike and quickly look around. No bears in sight. Leaning over, I lick my finger and run it across one of the prints. It smears like fresh, damp mud, not paint, and I realize that a grizzly bear has recently passed through. A grizzly so close to downtown is exceedingly rare. Feeling bear-hexed, I prepare for another encounter.

  With my back against the seaward fence and my bike against my landward vital organs, I move stealthily over the next quarter mile, until reaching a busy street that leads into town. At the Downtown City Market’s outdoor café I review my day so far: two bears, one black and one grizzly, in the same section of trail, within a short distance of downtown—and I had crossed both their paths? I do not share this tale with anyone at the café, because I do not fully believe my own story. I bike the two miles home along major thoroughfares full of traffic and free of bears.

  Three days later, I read in the Anchorage Daily News that, on Sunday morning, a wayward grizzly thrashed repeatedly into its own reflection in the living-room window of a downtown house. The bear left a mess of slobber marks and muddy paw prints on the glass—and a terrified man inside.

  I begin to believe my story’s plot. A grizzly bear and black bear, both astray in the city, cross paths that morning. The grizzly bullies the black bear out of the coastal woods and then irritably pads his giant paws through the mudflats and up the bank to the paved trail. Meanwhile the black bear finds refuge in a playground, where he lies recuperating on the cool dirt beneath the red sliding board.

  As the grizzly marches down the Coastal Trail, on his way to a duel with his own reflection, the resting black bear is disturbed once again, this time by a bicyclist taking an aggressive stance on McKenzie Street. Helmeted, hands on hips, she eyes him steadily, unknowingly challenging him to his second battle of the morning in the wilds of downtown Anchorage.

  Nancy Deschu makes her living as an aquatic biologist, studying rivers and lakes. Besides technical writing for her science profession, she pursues an interest in creative nonfiction and poetry. Her scientific perspective and field experiences in Alaska and the tropics, where she spends winter vacations, are reflected in her prose and poetry. Although she has seen many, many bears in her twenty years in Alaska, she has had only one frightening encounter, just a few blocks from her house in urban Anchorage.

  ERNESTINE HAYES

  Point Retreat

  The routine of guided tours yields its own mysteries.

  AS A DECKHAND ON A JET BOAT TAKING VISITORS ON two-hour whale-watching tours, my summer is filled with rushing, always at the beck and call of captains, owners, staff, and tourists. I meet each load of passengers delivered to the dock by the company bus, walk them down the ramp, and help them aboard the red jet boat. “Watch your step please. Make yourself comfortable. Watch your head stepping down. Watch your step please. Make yourself comfortable.” One after the other. Time after time.

  When everyone is seated, I untie the boat and cast off at the captain’s pleasure. Usually he is in a hurry: impatient, concerned about every minute, mindful that we are scheduled to return in exactly two hours for another load of tourists. Sometimes, though, he gabs on the radio or visits the head or c
ompares notes with other captains on other boats while I stand smiling, waiting for his signal to cast off.

  As we leave the harbor, motoring slowly through the no-wake zone, I stow the bumpers, close the hatches, and grab an orange Mae West life vest for the requisite safety talks. I point out the fire extinguishers and flare kit, demonstrate the floating device, and caution everyone to remain seated when the boat is in motion. Children fuss and people who don’t speak English chatter loudly.

  “Humpback whales from the greater Juneau vicinity are known to winter in Hawaii, where they breed and give birth but do not feed,” I repeat to a new group every two hours. “They return to our rich waters here in Alaska where they feed on krill, herring, and other small schooling fish. They eat a ton or more a day, every chance they get. Sometimes it seems like they’re eating all the time.” I pause here to glance at the ship’s progress, timing my speech with the buoy marker past which we can try our luck at accelerating, not always a sure thing. “Captain says that’s what it’s like to be on a tour ship.” Pausing here, I get a sense of the group; the more they laugh at my first joke, the better the crowd.

  “The mountains around Juneau are only three thousand to five thousand feet in elevation, but they appear much higher because they’re so steep,” I brag. “Picture that many of these islands are just as steep as the mountains, so the water is quite deep even close to land.” I gesture toward the coastline. “Remember we’re looking for a column of vapor. Be sure to look right up against the islands, because there might be a whale where we would normally consider the shore.” I look around again. “It’s a beautiful day in the rain forest!” I exclaim, no matter what the weather. “Let’s go whale watching!”