Last American Frontier

After lingering as little buds for quite a while, the leaves around town have exploded!!! Not quite so much in the mountains yet, but it's getting very green around here. Hooray!!!

Today I saw the first wildflowers of the season on the Turnagain Arm trail - with many more to come!

But a lot of the trails are just barely starting to green up, like here:

I'm sure the moose in the background (with a nice set of velvety handlebar antlers coming in) is happy about that!!! Spring is great, but this is also tough time for local wildlife. Cow moose are literally chasing off their yearlings, three of which I saw wandering lost and confused today as they set forth on a tough road for survival. The cow moose have to run them off by force to make way for new little baby moose, which will follow in the footsteps of their older siblings next May. (Feel free to break into that Lion King song if you please). The bears are awake, but with the salmon not yet running and said baby moose not quite yet being born in mass, the bears are desperately hungry. Unfortunately for the baby moose, their arrival is met with joy not only by their mothers but also by hungry predators. In fact, three bears had to be killed (by citizens, not the gov't) in the area this past weekend for getting too bold with humans in the desperate search for food (one broke inside a home, much to the chagrin of the returning homeowners). The bear-moose thing (or wolf-moose thing for that matter) fits right into what I always refer to as the old Lion-Gazelle Dichotomy. If you watch a show about gazelles, you root-root-root for the speedy gazelle to make a thrilling getaway from the lions. But if the show is told from the point of view of the hungry lion, in an Anne Rice inspired twist to National Geographic, you stand up and cheer in relief when the mama lion lowers the boom and finally feeds her cubs on the brink of starvation. Nature is wondrous, beautiful, and unforgivingly harsh.

The great part about this time of year is it has become summer-warm, it's just going to get greener and greener, and it's just going to get lighter and lighter for the near future (at a rate of about 5 mins per day with a current sunrise at 4:54 a.m. and sunset at 11:00 p.m). In other words, we are on the cusp of months of awesome times!

On Saturday I hiked up a section of trail I had not previously done on Turnagain Arm and ended up at the spot pictured here, which was a happy place to wind up! If you enlarge you can see a little turnoff from the highway, which is where I parked, and a brown stripe representing a different section of trail I have done many times. But this new section was up-up-up-up-up-up compared to that, as you can see! Unfortunately, I choose poorly when I grabbed a pair of socks that morning, and combined with my brand new hiking boots, the left sock completely disintegrated at the heel, leaving a nice nickle-wide, dime-deep divot in flesh. Shoddy effort by me.

But a nice view, nonetheless! No pain, no gain! So while I was at this exact spot, taking a few pics and texting a couple of buddies to rub in the fact that I live in the best place on earth, I heard a crack-crack below and to the right, and turned expecting to see a moose. Blackie!!! (AKA a black bear). I saw him, he did not see me, and wind conditions meant he did not smell me. What to do? Keep it that way! The only bummer was I think after much climbing up I had just reached the spot where the trail leveled out, and it was about to be easy sledding. But, I can continue on another time - and the whole sock thing didn't need to be aggravated further anyway (I had my first aid kit with me as always, and did some repairs, but it was a little too late). If I hadn't been alone it might have been different, but you always think "OK, if something goes wrong, could I explain it or would I feel like a jacka$$"? All things considered this felt like the latter.

On another note - I've posted many times before with a "full" Turnagain Arm with the tide in (a near 30 foot tide), like it is here at the end of my day today:

But, when I set out today the tide was out, exposing what I consider the most captivating mud flats in America (I'm not actually sure I've seen other mud flats, but it's hard to imagine there are better ones than these):

Like these pictures from Saturday, this one at the far (southern) end of the Turnagain Arm:

OK - nice enough, but how 'bout this one as the tide comes in, filling one of the many little contoured channels the water follows before the whole thing fills up. Note the boat (first one I've ever seen in the Arm) to the right of the pic to show "scale":