walks and talks...

Back in Denali National Park, I had a second day to play tourist before spending time with the park staff so I took the opportunity to do some hiking. Armed with my trusty bear spray I walked north from the headquarters along the Rock Creek Trail to climb the steep track up Mt Healy. The Rock Creek trail wound through pretty stands of birch and spruce with a bountiful understory of ripening berries, although disappointingly there were no bears lazing around enjoying a meal of them. The sunshine dappled on the path through the trees and squirrels angrily chirped as I passed, interrupting their late summer schedule of food caching. Amazingly, I didn’t meet another person on this part of the hike, the only company were little brown birds that sang melodiously, unperturbed by my presence.

Rock Creek Trail

In stark comparison, the Mt Healy Trail was hectic with hikers as I slogged up through the same pretty Taiga forest as on the Rock Creek Trail. I was greeted good-naturedly by numerous groups of people, young and old, mostly returning from the walk. I passed a young woman on her way up, carrying a grinning baby in a backpack with a whining toddler at heel. Impressive! The track was slowly eroding from the volume of foot traffic, and the higher it climbed, the narrower and rougher it became. I paused regularly on the relentless slope to regain my breath and to enjoy the sweeping views south along the valley and into the canyon below; hotels sprawling along the highway flanked by the milky white Nenana River, carrying its load of finely ground glacial flour.

Along the track, fireweed, a pinky-purplely, native wildflower found throughout Alaska, had finished flowering and the foliage was beginning to turn bright red, signaling the end of the summer along with small pockets of birch, leaves turning yellow, glowing golden in the bright sunlight. On the final stages of the hike, the trail narrowed even further, traversing the ubiquitous talus slope, decorated with lime and black spidery lichens, marking the transition to the treeless spongy herbs of the high alpine tundra.

Finally, after what seemed like many hours of pushing myself uphill, I reached the lookout spot and sat down to sip the last of my water, enjoy my cherry Lara bar and take a badly over exposed self portrait. The view was dramatic and expansive, stretching off in every direction with a stiff arctic breeze reminding me that I was at altitude. Over the left shoulder of Mt Healy, way off in the distance, Denali was partly visible, shrouded with a neck ruff of white puffy clouds. I thought of the 75 buses that would be making the daily pilgrimage out to the mountain, Denali partly obscured from view.

The walk down was tough! My feet cramped trying to grip the surface of the trail through soles of my thick boots with my knee and ankle muscles strained against the cruel slope. I passed many more groups of hikers on their way uphill, puffing and red faced, no doubt exactly what I looked like myself, not long before.

Back down the mountain I called into the visitor centre and read about the hike I’d just done. Rated strenuous – yeah that was about right. It was meant to take 4 hours return and I did it in just under 3 with the Rock Creek Trail thrown in as a bonus. I was happy with that, despite knowing that hiking times are always wildly overestimated to take account of the slowest walkers - whining toddlers perhaps?

It wasn’t a surprise that Denali’s main visitor centre display was excellent and engaging, after seeing the visitor centre at Eielson. The arts, culture, nature, and history of the expansive 2.5 million hectare (6 million acre) Denali National Park and Preserve were all creatively interpreted along with the recurring theme of bear chewed food containers. I sank down in the comfort of the huge theatre with a hundred or so mostly aged cruise line passengers to watch a film on the park. As the lights went down, the old man sitting next to me loudly kissed the back of his hand like a teenage boy at the movies, his wife chastising him for such a crude display. I smiled to myself in the darkness.

Over the next couple of days I spent time meeting and talking to the myriad of staff at the headquarters about a diverse range of topics including bear research, fire management, forest fuel measurement, aviation, and climate monitoring. I gave a brown bag talk on parks from home that lasted for over 2 hours because there were so many questions to answer at the end. At the brown bag talk I met Lucy, Denali’s research administrator, a woman who mushes sled dogs in her spare time. It’s Lucy’s job it is to regulate research carried on in the park, as well as collecting the data and published reports for the archive once it’s completed. Lucy invited me to a talk by one of the four artists in residence for 2010 in the park, the author and Alaska’s current writer laureate, Nancy Lord.

Denali’s artist in residence program invites the selected artists stay for ten days each at the historic East Fork cabin at mile 48 on the Park Road. Expansive views from the cabin of the braided East Fork River, the mulitcolour Polychrome Mountain and the snow capped peaks of the Alaska Range all provide inspiration for their unique interpretation of the park. This year the artists include a sculptor, a metal smith, an artist and an author. After their period of residence they donate an artwork to the park’s collection and give a public address about the experience. Nancy’s talk was fascinating. She told us how she explored the park with researchers and rangers. Nancy said she had kept notes in a catalogue of journals and she would write up her stay on a self-enforced writing sabbatical in an artists camp for a month when she expected to produce her next work. Inspiring!

patchwork quilt created by an artist in residence
(view from the East Fork Cabin: the braided East Fork River, the mulitcolour Polychrome Mountain and the snow capped peaks of the Alaska Range)