Once located, Lake Clark Air was bustling with activity and bursting with stuff…boxes of food, stacks of dressed timber, boxed white goods, more boxes of food, pilots and passengers all waiting to get on light aircraft. As I checked in, the pretty dark-haired young girl weighed my bag and wrote its weight and my name, with her own spelling, on a blue luggage tag and attached it using a twist of wire. She then asked me to step on the scale and noted the total weight on the flight manifest. I must have looked coy when faced with the scale and she whispered a little too loudly she wouldn’t tell anyone my weight! Everyone waiting turned to watch as my face flushed crimson. Later I heard her ask a very large man if he’d lost any weight over the summer. He slowly shook his head as he stepped on the scale.
Back at Lake Clark Air, passengers sat on the deep lounge chairs or milled around as they waited to be called for their flight by the pilot who helped to load the plane including grabbing boxes of frozen food to be transported from the freezer at the last moment.
This was my second trip to Lake Clark National Park. My first was two weeks prior when I went for a day trip in a parks’ Cessna with oversized fat rubbery tyres, leaving from the same airfield to a spot on the coast called Silver Salmon Creek. That day I tagged along as the national parks staff flagged an alternate route for a swampy eroded access track to an in-holding. As we took off from the airfield, Leon the pilot/ranger, Lee the chief ranger and Page the chief of natural resources all chatted knowledgably about the changed tower procedures, and I realised I was the odd person out - as the only non-pilot. It is not unusual to be a pilot in Alaska where many individuals own aircraft especially floatplanes (seaplanes) and some don’t even have cars. Many locales cannot be accessed except by plane or boat, and naturally aircraft is the preferred mode of transportation as it is fast and efficient.
Out at Silver Salmon we cruised overhead as 10 or more brown or grizzly bears were feeding in the meadow just behind the shore and on the beach digging for razor clams. The bears we saw that day were all blondes – local lingo for light brown bears - and some sows had young cubs in tow. I learnt male bears are known as boars, but the babies are not bearlets! From the plane I could see tourists standing in groups at a respectable distance from the bears, with a guide watching over them, no doubt snapping thousands of photos as we floated by unnoticed. On our approach I could see the beach had a considerable slope and was strewn with small pebbles. As we touched down I automatically but unnecessarily braced since Leon landed the plane as gently as a mother lays her sleeping babe in a cradle.
At Silver Salmon the land holders, Dan and Nancy were awaiting our arrival along with Kevyn, a young backcountry ranger. Kevyn, I learnt spends much of her time cruising the beach on her ATV (quad-bike) supervising and educating the bear watching tourists. Her arsenal includes an air-horn and the ubiquitous bear spray so I was in good company as we all headed off into the forest to try and find a survey mark on a tree from the 50’s and flag a new route.
The vegetation was thick with spruce trees, alder, devil’s club, ferns, lichens and mosses. Fallen spruce trees and the multi-stemmed alder bushes made it tough going but the devil’s club was vicious with sharp spines hiding on the stems and underside of the leaves that went straight through my jeans like a red hot needle through butter. Page pointed out the evidence of bears as we scrambled through the undergrowth - little turfs of bear hair caught in bark, a bear scratching tree and well-used bear trails through the forest. Later we saw bear tracks on the beach.
The job finished and I enjoyed chatting with Nancy as we made our way back to the plane. She told me she was a grade school teacher in Anchorage before she and Dan finally retired and spent the last couple of years full time on their block that they have owned for 30 or so years. We lingered taking photos before taking off along the slopey rocky beach and heading back past breathtaking mountain scenery to Anchorage.
Once down the coast we turned to the west and threaded the narrow gap between twin towering mountain ranges and followed the twists and turns of an astoundingly steep green gorge. The mountain tops on either side were regularly punctuated with the terminal ends of glaciers; some prettily gleaming with opalescent blue ice like backlit gemstones, others filthy and brown, the ice covered in dirt like a white dog’s wet back after rolling in the dust. For the last part of the journey we flew over the luminously aquamarine Lake Clark, fringed with dark green vegetation and backed by mountains that stretched endlessly off in every direction.
As the plane landed on the smaller of two parallel gravel runways and shut down, vehicles converged and pulled up close to the plane to collect either cargo or a person. A parks vehicle pulled up for me and I was collected by Angela, the parks administrative technician who drove me back to the park headquarters and showed me to my accommodation. I was delighted to find I had been accommodated in a park duplex with another woman, rather than the bunkhouse as I had expected.
The next morning Ria, with whom I was sharing left for work early and keen to get to the headquarters bright and early, I jumped in the shower. Minutes later when I tried to open the bathroom door I was somewhat dismayed to find that it was locked tight. I methodically pressed the two buttons variously trying every combination of pressing; to no avail. I closely examined the lock but could not discern any markings indicating directions such as ‘open’ or ‘lock’ or anything else. I shook the door – it was firmly locked and I was nude, save for a towel, with dripping hair. I cast around to see what tools were at my disposal, after all I am a ranger – I can do stuff, I can fight a bushfire, I can sharpen and tune a chainsaw, I can drive a truck, and I can find my way in the bush! But I can’t get out of domestic bathroom! I thought to myself – ‘what hope did I have here in the wilderness?’ I was convinced I would be the laughing stock of the place and I would be a dismal ambassador for Australian rangers. I tried using the flat end of my tube of conditioner to get between the door jam and the lock – no dice. I grabbed the plunger and tried to lever the door open, no luck. With no other tools at my disposal except my toothbrush I considered kicking the door down, but decided it was not a great way to make an impression, particularly as the building looked relatively new.
I had met the neighbour in the other half of the duplex, John a helicopter pilot the night before so I put pride aside and started banging on the wall and yelling “John??? Are you there?” more banging… no response. I considered the options – I had very few and was on the verge of tears at the prospect of spending my first day at Port Alsworth locked nude in a bathroom. Twenty minutes into my ordeal and I sat on the toilet to calm myself and think. It just can’t be that difficult! I tried again and the door sprang open with the greatest of ease. Thank goodness! Minutes later a Jerry the ranger was at my door asking me if I wanted to come on a trip up the lake to do a job at a cabin they were restoring. I quickly threw my stuff together…
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