August 15, 2010

If you could eat ice cream every meal, it would start to get old.  It would no longer be a treat.  I think the core concept of a treat requires infrequence.  To make it a treat, you could feed yourself a steady diet of lima beans and just once a week, treat yourself to ice cream.  I am willing to bet the ice cream would seem to taste better that way.

Now if lima beans were bad for you and ice cream was actually a healthy diet, the choices would be a little more difficult.  Would you force feed yourself a steady diet of unhealthy food just to make your healthy food seem like a treat?  That wouldn’t make any sense at all.  We tend to think of treats as something that are bad for us, but the concept of a treat doesn’t require it.  For example, seasonal foods can seem like a treat at the beginning of the season, even something healthy like fresh salmon.

My contemplation for the day is this.  Getting out into the wilderness and seeing nature’s magnificence were things that I could once only do on vacations.  They were certainly a treat.  Then I moved to Alaska and I had evenings and weekends to further treat myself.  Now, it’s 24/7.  It is no longer a treat.  It raises some question about how to live my life.  I have never been healthier so my ‘ice cream’ is actually good for me.  I am now even more convinced that a desk job is horribly unhealthy.  I don’t want to go back to that unhealthy life just to make my current one seem more like a treat, but I am sure not enjoying my ‘ice cream’ like I did in the old days.  For now, there is no question, I will continue on and strive to savor.  It is, after all, a wonderful bowl of ice cream.

This thought crosses my mind as I observe other people on vacation, too.  I sense a child-like thrill in some people, people who are seeing a bear in the wild for the first time, perhaps.  In others, I sense a zombie-like execution of their umpteenth summer vacation to Alaska.  Travelling for months at a time might do that to a person, I suspect it does it to me a little, but I think we are all programmed to repeat enjoyable experiences.  We all want to eat ice cream for every meal.  And it isn’t that the experience is no longer enjoyable, it just doesn’t have that treat status.  You can see it in their faces.

Yesterday I kayaked around an unbelievable lake.  All around me were massive jagged peaks, dense spruce forests, and amazing wildlife.  I looked up at a high alpine bowl, still partially filled with snow, thousands of feet above the lake.  The bowl drained out over a sheer cliff.  The melt water tumbled hundreds of feet down into the valley.  A waterfall of this magnitude would be an attraction practically anywhere in the world, yet here, it didn’t even have a name.  Any peak I looked at could compete with images from my memory of mountain vacations, yet I am saturated.  I have to concentrate to savor this time.  My inclination is to just go through the motions of paddling around the lake.

I don’t expect sympathy for my dilemmas.  I am not suffering in any way.  It is just an observation from a point in life that perhaps few experience before retirement.  I think many retired people have experienced something similar when they realized that their free time was no longer a treat, just their daily life.  Perhaps some haven’t yet realized it because they haven’t just spent seven hours floating in a tiny boat contemplating the scenery.

The lake was Chilkoot Lake in Haines.  We are camped right at the lake, although our site is deep in the woods.  The perimeter of the lake is almost ten miles, a full day of paddling.  We stopped on a beach for lunch at the far end. 

I fished quite a bit.  We found one herd of salmon splashing in the shallows near a tiny creek that was flowing into the lake.  I cast along them, catching a couple of nice dollies as expected.  I didn’t keep them as I have my suspicions about eating anything that has had a recent diet of salmon eggs and dead salmon.  I managed to avoid snagging the spawned out salmon.  Most of my fishing, though, was simply trolling a spinner along as I paddled slowly around the lake.  My success with the northern pike had me convinced that it was a good technique.  It wasn’t, but I had nothing better to do while I contemplated the scenery.

I don’t mean to say that trolling was unsuccessful, just not a very effective technique for catching fish in this lake.  I had already covered over eight miles, most of it with a lure in tow, when the rod finally bent.  I dropped the paddle and picked up the rod, expecting the boat to turn quickly.  I could tell right away that it was a fish, but it wasn’t pulling that hard.  I had to use the paddle to aim myself at the fish, the most stable position for fighting.  The fish headed down, an uncomfortable direction in a kayak as the downward force is a tipping force.  I had thought through big game fishing a little better as a result of my experiences with the lake trout and northerns.  Number one is that the drag is not there to protect the line, it is there to protect the boat.  I had it set comfortably snug, although not as snug as my high quality 12 lb test can handle. 

The fish began a stronger battle, perhaps realizing that something wasn’t right.  We fought a good battle for awhile, although I was in no hurry to land the fish knowing that the only way to handle a big fish from a kayak is to handle one that is completely tired.  As I thought the battle was nearing its end, the fish surprised me with a line peeling run down into the depths.  It was the thrill I had always wondered if I could find a place to experience, catching a salmon from a kayak. 

This one was a big sockeye, a total surprise since sockeyes rarely hit spinners.  I was expecting a pink, but I knew early on that the size seemed a bit big for a pink.  My first glimpses challenged my salmon identification, but the clear indicator is that sockeye don’t have spots.  I finally tired the fish, bringing it alongside with a heavy bend in my rod keeping its head just barely out of the water.  The fish was a bit too discolored to keep so I grabbed the hook with the long nosed vice grips (intelligently tied to the boat to prevent me from throwing another pair of pliers overboard) and released the fish.

At lunch, I was walking around on my toes, trying to make fake bear prints on the beach when I stepped into a set of real ones that were much bigger.  The lake is surrounded with bears.  We found fresh prints on most of the beaches and we have seen probably the same mother with her two cubs every day so far.  She is sticking close to the road, a behavior seen in Denali that keeps the cubs safe from the big males that would kill them. 

I was treated to another wildlife sighting.  As we paddled, we heard the strangest cry coming from the shore a few hundred feet behind us.  I turned around to investigate.  I paddled in close and quiet.  Three river otters emerged from the brush and dropped into a narrow channel.  They didn’t notice me as they quickly swam across the channel.  Two of them were much smaller than the other, so I assume it was a mother with two babies.  The mother soon emerged back on the side of the channel she started from and then she noticed me.  She started making loud noises, I assume to call her babies back.  When they regrouped, they all dropped into the channel and hid in the water under some branches making their hilarious snorting noises in my direction.  I paddled off as I had already disturbed them more than I intended.

Tonight as we drove back to the campground, we noticed some odd critters in the river through the trees.  I passed the campground entrance to drive across the bridge to get a better look.  We saw some ducks on the river so we assumed that is what we had glimpsed.  After we turned around and were coming back across the river, we saw what we had originally seen, at least a half dozen seals swimming in the river near its outlet into the salt water bay.  It was high tide.

Haines is known for its eagles and we have certainly seen more than a few already, but our favorite birds from our last visit here are the scoters.  We see a few of them relatively often on lakes throughout Alaska, but we have only seen their odd group behavior here.  When they get together, sometimes hundreds of them, they line up and dive in sequence.  It looks like a drill team.  We were disappointed not to see them on the bay leading back to the campground on the first day, but we did see them on our beach hike two days ago.  We emerged from the woods onto the beach just as they started a dive.  I think we both yelled out in joy, “scoters!”  We have since seen a group on our bay as well.

The weather has been unbelievable.  Our drive into Haines was on a beautiful sunny day.  The mountains were spectacular.  We have driven through the Kluane Lake area a couple times and driven out of Haines once, but have never had such clear views of the massive mountains that make this such a difficult place to visit.  Our drive in was awesome and the roads were even pretty good with very little of the abusive frost heaves from further north.

Today was another adventure.  We climbed Mt. Riley.  It was a grueling climb through the spruce forest with massive roots tripping us the whole way.  It was only the last couple hundred feet of vertical that brought us into a more open environment, still subalpine, but more open.  A few rocky peaks allowed us to climb up for a view above the trees.

The view was amazing.  I think I need more words because everything here is amazing or spectacular, but this view really put the local landscape into perspective.  Lynn Canal is a massive fjord that lacks any scale no matter where you view it.  Two smaller fjords, the one fed by the Chilkat River and the one fed by the Chilkoot River branch off the same side of Lynn Canal.  Tucked in between, before the mountains rise thousands of feet, is Haines.  At the end of the relatively flat land that houses the town is this relatively tiny mountain, Mt. Riley.  Every direction has incredible mountains with water tucked in between.

Haines will remain one of our favorite Alaskan towns.  It might be because we have never experienced bad weather here, but I prefer to think it is because it is an interesting place.  It seems like a compact version of Alaska.  Almost every Alaskan experience is available within a short distance.  I would almost recommend it as the place to visit for a week or two, avoiding the hundreds, if not thousands of miles required for a more typical Alaskan vacation.