...The following notes were transcribed almost verbatim from a handwritten journal I kept during a trip with my son Revi, age 10 at the time, to Denali National Park in Alaska.
August 13, 2007
The camper bus dropped us off on the park road just south of Cathedral Mountain. We tossed off our carefully laden backpacks, the bus roared off, and silence loomed up all around us as we contemplated the reality of our situation.
We were alone in a vast wilderness. The late sun was lighting the huge, craggy mountains and the green-red tundra, and passing clouds threw variegated shadows on the soft slopes of the valleys. Words like “beautiful” and “majestic” do not come close to the truth.
Rev and I looked down from the road into the valley and on down around the pass we had to cross to reach the Teklanika River, our assigned backcountry camping unit. We knew we had to cross the stream at the valley bottom, and I was already apprehensive, wondering how we could do this without going barefoot (a park rule no-no) or soaking our boots. The solution turned out to be crossing the stream wearing our spare pairs of wool socks, which we then tied on to my backpack to flop and dry in the air.
Rev was in high spirits, cheerful and clearly excited by the prospect of adventuring.
“Hey bear, ho bear!” we called regularly as we wove through the willows and alders around the stream. Before long, we were working hard, heading up a steep slope.
We had a general idea of where we had to go, but no clearly marked best way to get there. We ended up following a “social trail” that led along the stream and up into the pass. After an hour or so and several rest stops, we rose up into the saddle of the pass and came upon a small lake, its surface like mirrored glass in the still evening air.
I was surprised to see a young woman sitting on the lake shore. As we approached, we saw she had a camp stove and was finishing dinner. Revi thought she also might be sketching the lake. It wasn’t until we had passed by that we looked back and saw her tent nestled behind a hill, hidden from view of the road.
After two more hours of hard going, we at last made it over the pass, topped the last line of hills, and saw the Teklanika valley spread out on either side before us. The view was stunning. We could see away to the right up the valley the gray-white glacier at the river’s head, and the broad gravel bed of the river with its many-braided courses flowing hither and yon in snaking, intersecting lines across the gravel.
Alas, we could also see that we had hours yet to go to traverse the sloping, complex series of hills and tributary stream valleys and draws to get down to the river.
Rev was by now tuckered—we both were. When he suggested pitching the tent right there, I considered briefly this change of plan, then readily agreed.
Barely had we pitched the nice little tent Jim Summers had loaned us, when Rev piped up that a bear was crossing the hillside above us. Stricken, I looked and could easily see that his keen, observant eyes were right. I got out the binoculars and we tracked the bear’s progress. It was indeed a grizzly. It appeared to me to be a youngish male, possibly 300-400 pounds.
Occasionally, he would break into a loping run as he crossed the hill, about a quarter mile away from us. I was deeply concerned, feeling fear take hold. Rev, in contrast, seemed exhilarated, excited to see a bear in the wild. It seemed doubtful to me that the bear did not know we were there, but he paid us no mind. For some 15-20 minutes we tracked his progress away from us in the fading light of evening, til finally he disappeared near the top of a ridge about two miles away. Rev puckishly decided to name the bear, calling him “Suki.”
All that night, I slept fitfully, sure I heard a bear snorting and scratching several times—but I believe it was only the tent flaps in the breeze. Rev slept like a log.
The next morning dawned cool and overcast, though that seems far too simple to convey the grand swirl of clouds of varying shapes and colors, from the high white layer through which the rising sun shone in white, diffuse radiance, to the gray vapor that hung in foggy shrouds in the valley of the Teklanika glacier to the south. I dressed and climbed out of the tent, stretching my legs and stiff neck and back and strolling across the springy tundra, drinking in the glorious, secluded, quiet dawn.
Rev eventually rolled out of bed, and within a few minutes we had breakfast upslope from the tent. We then struck camp, reloaded our heavy packs, and began seeking a pathway down.
Several clear lakes, the largest about a half mile across, were pooled up at the base of the pass where its streams emptied into the Teklanika. On one of these, we watched a raft of brown ducks take off and fly to another, adjacent lake.
Rev’s sharp eyes spotted a group of five Dall sheep on the opposite side of the valley across the Teklanika, five white shapes grazing on the green slope.
We’d been told the park had two weeks of fairly steady rain just before we came, and everything was green and growing.
Coming down the last slopes of the pass, we saw several snowshoe hares in the willow and alder thickets. These seemed strangely unafraid of people, and one allowed us to approach within 10 feet of it.
Likewise, a flock of sparrows with streaked and laddered backs that we walked into on the gravel bar later allowed us to come within six feet, something I’d never seen in wild birds before.
When we’d passed the lakes and were beginning our final descent to the gravel bar, we looked left and were surprised to see a large set of bone-white caribou antlers, seemingly sitting atop a bush on the hillside about a quarter mile away. We never investigated these more closely, but I suspected it was an old wolf or bear kill.
We had barely reached the river gravel bar and had a spot of lunch, and were just looking for a new campsite for our tent, when gray clouds that had been building let loose with a windy rainstorm. We rushed to put up the tent in the mounting rain and did it badly, and the rising wind soon blew it sideways and threatened to blow it over. We got several windward tent poles staked, and hurriedly threw everything inside, using the backpacks to brace the windward wall.
We then spent a soggy day in and out of the tent, mostly in, drawing and writing and playing games. Rev was excited and wiggly, talking a blue streak and poking and tickling me when I tried to doze. We played hangman and 20 questions, and talked and told stories and cuddled in our damp sleeping bags.
Mid-morning the drizzle let up and I got dressed, went out and re-set the tent properly. I tried to dry our sleeping bags, but the rain started again and we retreated back inside our now much cozier, properly set tent.
Mid-afternoon the drizzle broke again and, a bit stir crazy by now, we donned our rain gear and stepped out into a world of mist. We walked down the gravel bar a short distance to the main course of the Teklanika, which gurgled and sluiced swiftly over the barely submerged rocks, carrying gray glacial silt on its way to the sea.
Rev became interested in bubbles coming up from the muddy bottom of the little stream that flowed in the gravel bar next to our tent—unlike the main course of the river, this was clear, rain runoff. Rev believed the bubbles were underground springs, based no doubt on his understanding and recollection of springs he’d seen in Texas.
I pointed out they looked more like air bubbles coming up from tiny creatures down in the mud. Rev decided this was correct and started trying to dig the critters out with a stick. He spent several minutes thus busily engaged, but we never saw any little animals.
We could see a wall of thick gray mist enshrouding the entire southern end of the Teklanika gorge up toward the glacier, and in a few minutes learned this was another wave of misty drizzle sending us back into the shelter of our tent, a tiny dot of light blue in the vast landscape.
By evening, the constant rain had dampened our spirits, and I suggested that we accelerate our schedule and plan to leave the park a day earlier, to which Rev readily agreed. This decided, we moved our campsite late that evening farther down the river, hiking about two hours, intending to get closer to Igloo Campground, where we could catch a camper bus out.
The plan was to have easier going walking on the flat river gravel bar and avoid the up and down journey back over the saddle pass. This turned out to be a disastrously flawed set of assumptions.
That night in the tent, everything was damp except for a plastic bag of dry clothes. A similar bag was now full of sopping wet jeans, socks and other clothing, and this became another 20-30 pounds for our packs.
Rev complained that he was ill, but I later concluded that he was probably just cold and exhausted. He said he could not warm up, complaining that his bag was wet. We traded sleeping bags and I had him put on his fleece jacket and a precious pair of dry socks from the plastic bag. Finally he dropped off in the crepuscular gloaming of August dusk in Alaska, with the dying day’s light finally fading around 11:30 p.m.
I must have been very tired, because I normally sleep fitfully and wake tossing and turning often in tents. But this night I slept straight through, because the next thing I remember was opening my eyes to see the gray light of morning in the tent.
This day proved to be an ordeal of physical endurance that would push us both to the limits of will and strength.
Continued in Part 2...
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