September 2, 2005

Just another walk in the park. Whoever came up with that phrase wasn’t talking about the Chugach State Park. Today we climbed Wolverine Peak. We drove up to the Prospect Heights trailhead which is only a few miles from home and about 1000 feet up the mountains. From there, we descended a little way to the South Fork of Campbell Creek. After that, it was all up hill. The total elevation gain on the hike was about 3400 feet over the five miles to the peak.

It was a beautiful day. It was in the 30’s when I got up this morning. It was in the 40’s when we started our hike. It warmed up to just break 60 today. The skies were mostly clear with a few puffy clouds running around. The air was unusually clear. The view of the big mountain, Denali, was the best we have seen from the Anchorage area. We had views of Denali most of the way up Wolverine Peak. We could also see Anchorage down below us. The further we climbed, the more the view opened up.

As we climbed into the scrubby stuff, we noticed a large moose up ahead. The steepness of the trail made it look like she was hovering above us. It turned out that she was standing right on the trail. We detoured off trail and she just stood there. As we got close, a male moose came down the trail toward us, well more toward her than us. He was not as comfortable with us there and he quickly disappeared into the brush. We saw that the velvet was peeling from his one antler. It is not that it wasn’t peeling from the other antler, it was just that he only had one small antler. I don’t think he was going to be winning any fights for female moose. I think it was just wishful thinking on his part to be hanging out near this girl moose. She was cool. She just browsed as I took pictures, occasionally looking up to make sure we weren’t doing anything too weird.

We stopped and ate lunch about 2/3 of the way up. The food tasted unusually good. The cool air and the beautiful scenery must have combined with the hard climb to make cheese and crackers taste really good. We supplemented our lunch with crow berries that we found along the trail. We also found a couple of small straggler raspberries, but it was the crow berries that provided plenty of snacking along the way. Some of the berries were very large (for crow berries) and juicy.

After lunch, we climbed past parts of an airplane that had crashed on Wolverine Peak. It was simply a pile of unidentifiable twisted metal.

We arrived at the top and it was amazing. We have climbed several peaks in that area, but this was by far the tallest. It was also the first that truly had a 360 degree view. Most of the other peaks were part of ridgelines that went higher. Wolverine Peak is the highest point in its ridgeline.

The expanse of the view is mind boggling. To the north, Denali is about 150 miles away and the Matanuska and Susitna Valley flatlands extend most of the way from Anchorage to the Alaska Range. To the west, downtown Anchorage sat below us, yet was still 10 miles away. Mount Susitna sits across Knik Arm from Anchorage and was about 40 miles away. In the background, the southern end of the Alaska Range was about 80 miles away. The waters of Knik and Turnagain Arms and Cook Inlet stretched for dozens of miles. I even felt like I could sense the curvature of the earth across the water. To the south, several peaks of the Chugach Mountains were in the foreground with dozens of peaks of the Kenai Mountains in the background. The flat part of the Kenai Peninsula extended 50 miles to the west of the mountains out to Cook Inlet. Finally, to the east, the larger peaks and ridgelines of the Chugach Mountains limited views to as little as 2 miles with some distant peaks poking up here and there that were tens of miles away. Beneath us were Long Lake which feeds the North Fork of Campbell Creek and in the other valley was Williwaw Lakes feeding the Middle Fork. The lakes were about 1500 feet of elevation beneath us and a couple miles away. The limited air pollution allows such distances to be viewed with remarkable clarity.

So we found a rare clear day and took an aggressive hike. It is good to know that after 3 months in Alaska, I can still say wow.