June 5, 2010

Life does come at you fast.  We are getting very close to our goal of being both homeless and unemployed.  We have a contract that puts July 15 as the date for this lofty achievement by selling our condo.  I don’t know if people understand what a great identity this can be, a sense of freedom that was described decades ago by Janice Joplin as “nothing left to lose”.  I can understand the negative side of that, perhaps the desire to have something worth losing, but when you have everything you need, everything you want, and virtually nothing to lose, you feel truly free.

Our State Department pursuit took another step.  We found out the results of the next hurdle.  Kris cleared it, I did not.  This puts me an additional year away from achieving such a goal, but we are still on plan with just Kris getting through to the next step.  It feels strange to know because we have been comfortable with the uncertainty.  I can’t say that I am disappointed.  I don’t personalize this.  I can see how my resume could look odd.  I can see how I could have had a problem articulating my suitability for this job.  I can see how a panel of reviewers could miss me in their search for excellent candidates.  We have always planned to move forward if only one of us made it through so nothing has really changed except that I need to start thinking about what I want to do with the additional year of time that might pass after Kris completes all the hurdles and before I might.

Our friends from Ohio arrived on Sunday.  It was an exhausting day.  We started with a bicycle ride to help get Kris ready for her upcoming triathlon.  We were then kicked out of our condo for a showing so we went to Little Campbell Lake to fish and hike around the lake.  Then we picked up our friends at the airport and shopped at REI.  Later that evening we took a walk along the greenbelt.  We were rewarded with a couple exceptional wildlife encounters.  A large beaver was grazing along the shores of the creek. And a momma moose had two newborns frolicking around as she kept a watchful eye and tried to regain her strength by constant eating.

Monday was the last day of the season for Alyeska.  It was another blue sky seventy degree day and we skied hard.  The conditions were almost the same as Saturday, but the bumps in some places were finally exceptional.  It was a great day of skiing.  The significance of the day, the end of our season pass life at this resort, kept occurring to me intellectually, but failed to achieve any emotional impact.  We just enjoyed that day like we had the hundreds before it with no sense of remorse or loss.  We also signed the final contract on our condo that evening, another potentially emotional moment that seemed like just another step in our plans.  Perhaps I expect sentimentality, but am unable to achieve it.  Perhaps these passings simply don’t scare me.

On Tuesday, we drove all of our gear to Denali National Park.  Our friends drove Kris’ car while we drove the rig.  We had reservations for two campsites at the Teklanika Campground, a nice campground that is about thirty miles into the park.  This puts it over 15 miles into the part of the park road that is not open to the public so we were given a special pass.  We took two campsites because it was cheaper than paying for a bus ticket to get our friends in and you are not allowed to have more than one vehicle per campsite.  So we parked the Saab at its own campsite while the four of us stayed in the trailer.  The trailer is proving to be adequate for four people.

We began our adventures with a pleasant hike along the Teklanika River.  We didn’t see any wildlife, although we saw plenty of bear, caribou, and moose prints in the mud.  It was a pleasant evening stroll.

On Wednesday, we got more adventurous.  We picked a ridgeline across the river from us and decided to climb it.  The first challenge was crossing the river.  The river bed is very wide, but much of the flow is broken down into small braids.  We kept navigating across the braids, recognizing that each bit of water that we crossed represented progress.  The water was icy cold and left us dancing in pain as we emerged from each small crossing.  We were able to find our way across without ever getting more than knee deep in the fast silty water.

We identified a likely route to the ridgeline, but used compass headings as we headed into the thick vegetation.  The low elevations were dense spruce forests.  The mid elevations were mostly head high brush, but it was relatively sparse so we were able to climb to the short vegetation that mostly lined the ridge.  We worked our way along the ridgeline toward a tall rocky peak that we thought was Igloo.  Since this is a popular climb, we had a sense of security that we could find a route down through the potential obstacles of steepness and dense vegetation.  We just figured we were approaching it from the backside.  We summitted several peaks along the ridge before arriving at the final climb.  We navigated through some steep chutes to a ridgeline that took us to a small rocky summit with a spectacular 360 degree view.  The elevation seemed wrong for Igloo, so we began our descent with less confidence, heading into the unknowns of steepness and vegetation with only the visual information we could gather from the top.  We found our way down through the vegetation and crossed a few marshes, checking GPS to maintain our direction to the road.  We emerged on the road and flagged down a bus to return to the campground, another successful backcountry navigational adventure.

After dinner and a brief thunderstorm, we headed out for a late evening bicycle ride, hoping to spot some wildlife from the road.  We biked gradually uphill for six miles.  We only saw some dall sheep, but the cars we passed reported seeing a lynx.  The return trip was a cool six miles of easy coasting with one moderate uphill to get back to the campground.  We arrived just before another storm.

On Thursday, we took the normal bus ride into the park.  We saw the normal array of animals.  We saw wolves and bears, sheep and moose, and few other miscellaneous critters like hares, ground squirrels, ptarmigan, and a fox.  One bear walked the road ahead of the bus for almost three miles, making our bus run way behind schedule.

At one point, the bus stopped because someone had spotted a wolf.  The wolf was working in some brush and briefly disappeared from view.  Then it sprinted out of the brush, looking downright frightened.  A wolf is a high level predator that doesn’t frighten easily.  The explanation quickly emerged.  A moose charged out of the brush, forcing the wolf to further retreat up a hillside.  Behind the moose was its newborn calf.  We watched as the wolf contemplated its options while the moose demonstrated the superiority of her size.  It was a treat to witness this encounter.  We have seen some interesting things in our visits to Denali.

We got off the bus near Polychrome Pass to explore a little.  We headed up a drainage that was full of hares and pieces of hares.  Apparently the feet are not the tastiest part since they littered the small valley.  Dark clouds motivated us to put on our rain gear.  We identified a higher route and began climbing.  About halfway up the slope, we heard thunder.  Soon heavy rain began to fall.  Soon the rain turned to hail.  We remained in place, taking some cover from the brush.  The hail stung when it hit my ears and my shoulders, both of which were only lightly protected by thin layers.  The ground began to turn white.  We all were feeling the chill as the ice and water piled up on us.  We remained in place as the rain slowly diminished.  We counted the time between each lighting flash and the boom.  The storm seemed to stall within a mile of us and the chill convinced us to return to the road to catch another bus.

That evening, we took another hike along the river, this time walking a couple of miles downstream.  Again we didn’t see any wildlife, but it was a gorgeous evening as the sun slowly disappeared behind a mountain around 10:00.  We did find an interesting area full of small holes that were clearly dug by animals.  Our best guess of bears was confirmed the next day by a ranger who explained that they were digging for ‘eskimo potatoes’ as a food source in the spring.

We awoke on Friday to rainy cold.  We hooked up the trailer almost an hour earlier than we had planned since there wasn’t much better to do.  We drove slowly on the way out and did see a small group of caribou not too far from the road.  We took our time as we continued down the road to Talkeetna where we got a campsite along the river and went out for a nice dinner at the lodge the four of us had visited in 1999.  The temperature didn’t make it out of the forties so we hung out in the trailer after dinner with lively conversation that kept us up beyond our normal bedtime.

Today we awoke to sunshine.  We took a nice relaxing walk around Talkeetna before heading back down the road for Anchorage.  We stopped in Chugiak to pick up Kris’ race stuff as tomorrow is the triathlon.  Kris and I stopped again to empty and refill the rig.  We dumped the holding tanks, filled the first empty propane bottle, filled the fuel tank, and added a little bit of power steering fluid which seems to have fixed the random chirp sound that baffled us for hundreds of miles.  We spent an inordinate amount of time at the service station that provided all of these fluid services.  The four night trip for four people provided a better understanding of the management of fresh water, waste water, and electricity in the trailer.  We seem to have a decent understanding of our systems and we seem to have the power management under control with the cheap battery.