Posterity

I am not a die-hard conservationist or environmentalist.  Although I generally follow the principles of Leave No Trace in my outdoor adventures, I’m not obsessive about it, and while I respect nature, I also believe that I, too, am a part of the environment.  That being said, I have a few pet-peeves about behavior that I often observe in remote locations, and since I experienced all of them on my recent day hike in Pikes National Forest, it seemed topical to mention them.

First, tree carvings.  Almost any time that I follow a trail for any length of time, I come across trees, especially birches and aspens, with the lower trunks bedecked with initials from past travelers.  This tends to be more common near the beginning of  a trail, since in general the people who are inclined to do that don’t seem inclined to penetrate to the more remote and difficult to access regions, but the fact that it is present at all is disheartening.  It simply doesn’t make sense to me.  Are people so concerned with their own mortality that they feel the need to ensure that every future hiker is aware that so-and-so was here with so-and-so?

Next up is trash.  I’m not talking about the occasional forgotten tent stake or bit of paper that got away.  That’s understandable, and while not desirable, it does happen.  Finding empty cans, bottles, and other human detritus in the sorts places I was exploring last weekend, or anywhere else for that matter, is really unfortunate.  That’s not a matter of forgetting it was there, or not being able to find it when you go to leave; it’s a matter of making a deliberate decision to leave it in the wilderness instead of taking the time and effort to carry it back out with you.  Since I make it a policy to not complain about something if I’m not willing to do something to affect a solution, I will often carry an extra bag with me when I hike, and pick up trash if I come across it.  At least that way, the next hiker won’t have their experience marred by its presence.

Third, and probably least significant, is campsite evidence.  If I camp somewhere, I try to make some effort before I leave to return the environment to something approximating the state in which I found it.  Mostly, this means burying, scattering, or otherwise obscuring the evidence of my campfire, if I made one, including returning any seating arrangements I may have made to their original, or at least more random locations.  This is mostly just an aesthetic matter: I want the next person to be able to experience as pristine a wilderness as possible, and not find it scarred by wherever I decided to camp (this is obviously irrelevant if you’re hiking somewhere with established campsites).

All of this really comes down to the environment that will be experienced by succeeding hikers.  When I go hiking, there are times when I feel like even a trail is too much evidence of humanity – I want to feel like I’m somewhere that no one but me has ever walked before, even if I know that’s probably not the case.  At the very least, I don’t want to be confronting stark evidence of humanity’s less desirable characteristics in the form of tree carvings and trash around every switchback.  I try to obey the same philosophy in my adventures, so that the next person can experience it in much the way I did: unblemished.

As I said at the beginning of this post, I’m not an obsessive environmentalist or a die hard conservationist.  I believe that people have a role and a place within a natural environment as much as anything else does – that doesn’t change just because we’re able to exercise greater control over our environment.  However, I also believe that with that ability also comes a greater responsibility to respect that natural environment, and part of that is not leaving your obvious, human markings on it for posterity.  Please, find some other, more productive way to ensure your immortality.  Now, I promise I’m done proselytizing.

A Little Escapism

My original thought for this blog was to share my knowledge and experiences in the outdoors with a wider audience, which (I think) it continues to do effectively.  In addition to that intention, it has taken on an unexpected dimension; through many of my posts, I’ve noticed that there has been a theme of trying to explain why the outdoors holds such a draw, and how to convey that to others so that you can share that passion with them.

I am frequently asked why, when I get to the end of a long week of non-stop, twenty hour days, I would want to do something as physically demanding and apparently un-relaxing as hiking.  After all, even once you’ve reached your campsite, there’s still setting up, gathering firewood, tending the fire, preparing meals, cleaning up from meals, filtering water, and myriad other camp chores.  Then, at the end of the day, you get to lie down on a bed that probably has less than an inch of padding between yourself and the ground.  To a lot of people, this doesn’t sound like a fantastic way to spend a much-needed weekend.

To answer these questions, for one thing, I don’t consider any of these to be hardships.  I enjoy the work involved in camping, and hiking itself to me is not so much about a physical challenge as it is about simply going somewhere.  There’s also a definite element of escapism involved.  Like why I enjoy distance running, backpacking, hiking, camping, and otherwise immersing myself in the outdoors allows me to, at least temporarily, leave the cares of my normal life behind, and focus on something more primal, and much simpler.

Of course, the reasons for doing anything are almost always multitudinous, complex, and multi-faceted – to reduce them to a single motivation would lose a high degree of richness and dimensionality.  This idea of escapism is just one of many reasons why I seek out time to spend in the wilderness.  Speaking of, expect to see some pictures on Monday from a mountain hike I’ll be taking this weekend.

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Since this was a shorter post, I’ll also take the opportunity to remind you that you’re welcome to contact me using the contact form for specific advice, or with any questions you might have about hiking, camping, backpacking, and other outdoors topics.

The Long Haul

I’ve written before about some of the attractions that backpacking holds for me: the sense of freedom, the self-reliance, the challenge, the adventure…really, I’ve essentially dedicated an entire blog to sharing my enjoyment of the outdoors.  Now, I don’t know if it’s the same for other backpackers, but to me, perhaps the ultimate expression of the backpacker’s art is the through-hike.  Perhaps most famously represented by the Appalachian trail, which runs from north to south in the eastern US, major US through-hikes also include the Pacific Crest Trail (west coast, from the Canadian border to the Mexican border), the Continental Divide Trail (follows the spine of the Rockies from Canada to Mexico), and the American Discovery Trail (a coast-to-coast trail).  Those are merely a few notable, US through-hikes: there are dozens more in the US alone, and that’s not even mentioning the ones in other parts of the world.  A through-hike in New Zealand that follows the path taken in The Lord of the Rings movies, anyone?

Alas, I have not yet had the opportunity to attempt one of these trails (something about most of them requiring about three months to complete makes it somewhat difficult to find the time), but in my rare idle moments, I will often work on the general logistics that would be required for such an endeavor.  Truthfully, the logistics required to successfully complete one of these trails are at least as challenging as completing the the hike itself.  Being on the trail for months at a time requires a whole different kind of planning than anything we’ve discussed on this blog previously.

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Food

Food is one of the major logistical issues on extensive through-hikes.  Obviously, you can’t carry enough food with you for a three month journey, even if all you wanted to eat was granola bars and jerky for three months.  That means careful planning is required in advance to identify your resupply stops.  These trails aren’t exclusively untamed wilderness; they occasionally pass through towns, villages, and even follow roads (that was a misconception I had before starting my research, that these through-hikes were one, continuous trail.  In most cases, they’re actually a lot of smaller trails that have been linked together).  Sometimes, it will be appropriate to purchase food and supplies from outfitters in the towns through which you pass, and sometimes you’ll mail materials to locations before you start your journey, or have relatives do so for you.

Hygiene

While “a Scout is clean,” I’ve always considered this more of a moral, mental cleanliness, than a physical one, especially when camping.  On my most extensive backpacking trip to date, which lasted two weeks and covered almost one hundred miles, I had only one shower, and while it was nice to get back to civilization and have a real shower, the lack thereof on the trail didn’t phase me too much.  I also re-wore clothes frequently on the trip, and brought enough of what clothing I didn’t want to re-wear too many times.  Neither of these approaches will prove viable on a three month journey covering thousands of miles.  Having a plan to wash yourself, and your clothing, will be imperative to keeping healthy and comfortable over such an extended adventure.  Since the trails do pass through more civilized areas, many people choose to stay a night or two in motels, bed-and-breakfasts, or other local accommodations, where they can sleep a night in an actual bed, do real laundry, and take a real shower.  I have to admit, this is an idea that I would struggle with in planning my long-distance adventure.  Part of me thinks that it would take something away from the experience, and would prefer to do my laundry, and showering, in streams and lakes.

Navigation

I mentioned above that most of these through-hikes do not consist of a single, continuous trail.  Some, like the Appalachian Trail, are pretty well developed and marked, but others, like the Continental Divide Trail, remain truly backcountry, with few markers or other indications of which way to go, or even where the trail is.  These are considerations to keep in mind when planning a through-hike, so before setting off, it will be important to find all of the best maps of all sections of the trail, to know what sub-trails there are, to know which parts of the through-hike tend to be confusing, or offer multiple options, and to know where you expect to end up at various points along the hike.

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This is really just a very brief introduction to planning a through-hike (in other words, if you’re planning a through-hike of your own, please don’t try to rely on this blog post for all of your logistical needs).  If (and I certainly hope it happens one day) I decide to accomplish one of these grand adventures, I’ll definitely be chronicling both my planning, and the adventure itself, on the blog.  For now, I’ll have to settle for more sedate adventures.

Wilderness First-Aid

If you’re going to do extensive adventures in the backcountry, I highly recommend going through a Wilderness First-Aid course.  These are offered by various organizations, though I’ve found that the Red Cross’s courses are usually the best.  Standard first-aid knowledge is, of course, absolutely essential, and CPR/AED training is simply best practice, in my opinion, but a wilderness first-aid training truly offers something unique and valuable for those of us spending time in places where medical assistance may take hours to arrive, if you’re able to contact it at all.

Basic first-aid is certainly what most people know, and what most people will be likely to use.  In fact, I plan to eventually include posts that describe some basic first-aid techniques.  Wilderness first-aid, though, teaches not just a set of skills and knowledge, but also a mindset, a mindset that is radically different from any, more traditional first-aid course you may have taken in the past.  Traditional first-aid courses make one, pivotal assumption: professional, emergency medical care is no more than twenty minutes away.  With wilderness first-aid, that assumption is no longer valid.

Without that assumption, how we go about handling medical emergencies changes drastically.  It’s no longer enough merely to keep the patient alive long enough for the experts to arrive, which in many cases is all basic first-aid is intended to accomplish.  In the backcountry, it could be hours before help can reach you.  That’s assuming that you can contact help: in many cases, you may have to extricate yourself and the patient from the situation, and doing that requires an entirely different way of thinking.

Instead of seeking merely to stabilize, in these situations you have to start actually considering how to treat injuries.  It may no longer be enough to stabilize a broken bone: you might actually have to set it, or relocate a dislocated joint.  Rather than being able to put up your hands and say “I don’t know how to treat this, so I’m just going to leave it for a minute until the ambulance gets here,” now you might have to know how to make someone with a tension pneumothorax (sucking chest wound) stable enough to travel long distances over rugged terrain (by the way, in that case you would end up carrying them – you won’t be getting them walking).

That element of finding your own way out is a major component of the style of thinking fostered by wilderness first-aid.  You have to assume that you’re on your own, and that the only way you’ll get help, or get out, is by seeking it yourself.  Depending on the size of the group, that may be easier or harder.  If you only have two people, and one is seriously injured, you can’t exactly leave the injured person alone while you run the twenty miles back to whatever passes for nearby civilization.  A larger group can afford to send a couple people back for help, but not a small group.  With only two or three people, which is the typical size of a backpacking party, you might have to find a way to bring the injured person with you.

Beyond the alternate mindset, wilderness first-aid courses also dive into much greater depth in terms of technical knowledge and treatment.  Nothing extreme, and a two-day course obviously won’t make you a surgeon, but they do try to instill a significantly greater understanding of what you’re really doing as you treat something.  Frankly, I think that this is trying to enable you to improvise.  You won’t have first-class resources or an ideal situation, and no course can cover ever possible injury you could encounter.  If you do come across a situation like that, where medical help won’t possibly be there in time unless you do something, it is better to do something that might not be exactly, by-the-book correct, than to let the person die.*

If you’re only going to do one thing to prepare for your backcountry experience, I truly recommend that it be a wilderness first-aid course.  You can find the Red Cross’s course here.  The Red Cross also publishes a free, wilderness first-aid handbook, which can be found here.  Fortunately, all of you have already done more than just take that course, by reading this blog.  We all hope that we’ll never find ourselves in a situation in which we’d need to draw upon these sorts of skills, but if we do, it’s infinitely better to have the knowledge and ability.

*Just a reiteration of my usual, legal disclaimer: I am not a doctor, I’m not an EMT, and I’m not even a certified instructor for this course.  All this blog is intended as is a source of advice, information, and recommendations collected from my experiences.  Ultimately, you are responsible for your own adventure.

Being Lost

It can and does happen, even to experienced outdoorsmen.  You mistake a game trail for a poorly marked trail, or you miss a few blazes, and before you’ve even realized it, you’re no longer where you expected to be.  It’s because you don’t realize right away that you don’t know quite where you are or where you’re going that it becomes a problem: otherwise, you’d simply be able to turn around and step right back on the trail.  Fortunately, once you realize that you don’t know where you are, there are some simple steps that you can take to help yourself find a way out, or help others find you.

1. As The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy boldly proclaims upon its cover in big, reassuring letters, don’t panic.  Panic overrides your higher reasoning cortex in favor of your baser instincts, and in so doing, you end up sabotaging your own ability to survive in these sorts of situations.  When you realize that you’ve temporarily misplaced the rest of the world, you need to stop, take a deep breath, and start thinking.
2. At this point, you’ve stopped moving.  Hopefully, you’ve found a nice spot in the shade to sit down and take a moment to collect yourself.  Now, it’s time to take stock of your situation.
   1. Status: how are you doing?  When was the last time you had something to drink?  To eat?  How long have you been doing whatever it is you’ve been doing (hiking, canoeing, etc)?  Are you tired?  Cold?  Warm?  Hungry?  What is your environment like?  Is it too hot?  Too cold?  Is there inclement weather approaching?  Will it get very cold at night?  Are there other environmental hazards or benefits?
   2. Inventory: what resources do you have?  Everything you have with you is a potential resource, even if you can’t imagine how you’d use it.  Don’t forget to include your most valuable and powerful resource: yourself.
   3. Remember: remember what you know about the area, and whatever you can about the period leading up the realization that you temporarily mislaid the rest of the world.  What geographical features do you remember seeing?  If you have a map, try to get a rough idea of what your position might be based on the surrounding features.  Even if you don’t, you might be able to identify a major landmark in the area.  When was the last time you saw another person?  Have you seen signs of water, or animal life?
   4. Plan: Now that you’ve done all of this thinking, you can start to make a plan.  First of all, don’t worry about food and water.  Chances are you’ll be able to find your way back to some kind of civilization in a day or so, so you won’t die of starvation, and you won’t even die of dehydration (although you might become uncomfortably thirsty, depending on the climate).  We can start worrying about those things if we still haven’t found the rest of the world after a day.  Take into account all of the thinking you just did, and determine an optimal course of action.
3. Okay, now you get to start moving again.  Whenever you move, you’re going to want to leave some kind of sign indicating your direction of travel.  From wherever you are, I want you to move down from there, because down is the path of least resistance.  All animals, including humans, will naturally trend towards the lowest point, just like water.  Search and rescue efforts will start by looking in low lying areas, especially areas with water, because this is where people who are lost tend to gravitate, even if they don’t have any training on what to do.  Civilizations also tend to clump around waterways, so if you can find a stream or river of some sort, and follow it, chances are that you’ll eventually find your way out on your own.  At worst, you’ve saved yourself some energy, found a ready source of food and water, and made your continued progress easier.
4. If night comes and you haven’t found your way out of your situation yet, stop.  Moving at night will only confuse the matter further.  Build yourself some kind of basic shelter, light a fire if you can (this will attract humans and repel animals), and settle in for a good night’s sleep, if you can get it  When morning comes, you can resume your journey.
5. That’s pretty much how it will go until you find some evidence of civilization, or it finds you.  If you’re out for a long time, you might have to get water (purify if you can, but don’t refuse to drink if you can’t, unless the water is obviously contaminated).  It’s unlikely that you’ll be out long enough to need to worry about finding food, but if you do, passive methods are best (snares, traps, fishing, foraging: I’ll discuss how to gather food in a survival situation in a future post).
6. Once you find the rest of the world again, savor a big glass of cold water, have a big meal, and start embellishing your story to make it more exciting when you tell people about your grand adventures in the wilderness.

This is an exceedingly basic outline of what to do in the event that you’re ever lost.  If you’re an experienced outdoorsman, then you’ll know more subtleties, be better prepared, and will be able to tailor your approach accordingly.  However, this is an excellent place to start, and even someone with minimal training or experience can follow these steps to take care of themselves in the event that something like this occurs.  Even more importantly, if your family or friends back home know that you intend to follow a plan like this one, they can communicate that to search and rescue agents, who will be able to use it to inform their search efforts and find you that much faster.  We all hope that these situations will never happen, but if they do, have a basic understanding of what to do and how to think can make all the difference.

Out of Alaska

All told, we spent ten days exploring Alaska, and as I’ve alluded to before, were able to see only a small fraction of the enormous state.  We did other things while we were there that I have not chronicled in the blog, since they weren’t specifically outdoor related – after all, this is a blog about outdoor explorations, not a broader travel blog – though they were also exciting parts of the trip.

When we first began looking into planning our Alaska trip, which had been on our list of places to visit for many years, most of what we found discouraged forging your own way, as we did.  Recommended ways to see Alaska usually included cruise ships or other, similarly proscribed methods.  While those may be easier, I think that we were able to see more of substance during our Alaska vacation by going our own way.  Of course, we tend to be in favor of controlling our own courses and avoiding crowds, anyway, so that might have had something to do with it.

I have every intention of returning to Alaska at some point.  There is so much more to see; we never even began to venture into the more northern regions of the state, completed skipped the capitol, and didn’t venture to the islands.  Since we went in the summer, we had a great experience with the midnight sun, but I would like to see it in the winter, when the night is eternal, not least because of the fantastic opportunities to see the northern lights.  Of all the places that I’ve visited, Alaska would be one that I would consider making a permanent residence.

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed reading these Alaskan posts.  Now that there’s no further trip to chronicle, I’ll be returning to our previous mixture of instructional posts, techniques, and posts about smaller scale adventures.  I hope that you’ll continue to partake of the experiences I have to share.

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Along the Park Road

I maintain that the best way to experience Denali is to stop the bus, get off, and go hiking, preferably for several days at a time.  However, with the vast scale of the park, I am forced to admit that the best way to see Denali is to stay aboard one of the buses and take it as deep into the park as you can go.  It will probably mean spending eight hours on what is little more than a school bus, but doing so will allow you to pass through many of the varied terrains and environments that Denali has to offer, and you’ll probably see more wildlife than you would while hiking, simply by virtue of covering a greater distance.

With my family still weary from our long, challenging day hike the previous day, we did just that: parked ourselves on a bus and allowed the driver to take us through the expanse of wilderness that is Denali.  It was a long day of sitting, but well worth it.  We were able to see moose, bears, foxes, ptarmigans, mountain goats, caribou, and other creatures, not to mention the grand vistas and impressive facades of the less animate scenery.

There’s really not a lot that I can say about the bus ride that won’t be better conveyed through the pictures.  After all, it was simply sitting on a bus.  It is worth noting how much the climate changed as we ventured deeper into the park.  It was sixties and sunny when we started, and at the far end of the ride, it was thirties and snowing.  That’s unusual for June, but not unheard of. I highly encourage you to scroll through the pictures and see just what we were able to see on the Denali bus ride.

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A Day in Denali

Denali, which translates roughly to “Great One,” is the name of both the tallest mountain in North America, and one of the most well-known Alaskan national parks, although Denali National Park is not the largest national park.  Following our time in Sutton, we ventured north, deeper into the state, to Denali National Park, which would serve as the location for our next series of adventures in America’s last frontier.  To start off our time in Denali, we set out on what I consider to take the number three spot on our Alaska trip: a full day hike off trail in Denali.

Somewhat unique among national parks, there are very few trails at Denali, mostly concentrated around the few visitor centers, and none of them are extensive.  There is also only one road, and private vehicles aren’t allowed.  To really see Denali, you’ll need to purchase bus tickets to get out along the park road.  From there, you have two options: sit on the bus for up to eleven hours, following the park road and seeing what there is to see that way, or getting off to hike.  You can ask these buses to stop at any time so that you can get off and hike, and then you just have to pick up any bus when you get back to the park road.

We did the whole sit on the bus for hours thing, but that was our second day in Denali.  For our first day, we did what I had been looking forward to since I started planning our Denali hike: a full day of hiking, off trail, in Denali.  We boarded the earliest bus into the park, at 0500, and ventured forth.  Our bus driver had a dry sense of humor and a monotonous voice, leading my family to christen him “Batman.”  When we stopped the bus around 0645 to get off to hike, his announcement to the other passengers was “they are going to join the food chain.”  There were a lot of strange looks as we stepped off the bus and into the waiting forest.

I was aiming us for a low pass between two peaks: the idea was to go over the pass, and wind back around to the river, where we could re-join the park road after about ten miles of hiking.  As with most plans, this one didn’t quite work out, but we had quite the adventure, nonetheless.  To reach the pass, we first had to pass through a pine forest.  There was a layer of loam covering the forest floor nearly a foot thick in most places: I compare it to a sort of terrestrial coral, with a layer of living moss and plant material growing atop a thick base of skeletal plant material.  There was ample evidence of moose and caribou, and even some of bears, in the area, but we saw no such impressive wildlife on our hike.

After passing by a few mountain lakes, we began to make our way up the first part of the pass.  Reaching the top, with its prevailing winds, was a relief, as the breeze helped dispel the swarming mosquitoes.  Denali mosquitoes are large and numerous, but they seemed to not know quite what to do with us: for the number of mosquitoes we saw, we received very few bites.  Although it was only 1000, we decided to have the first of our two sandwiches at that point: after all, we had been up since 0400.

As we were eating our second breakfast, in the manner of good hobbits everywhere, the wind started to pick up, and we noticed rain blowing into our area.  It is commonly acknowledged that it’s always raining somewhere in Denali, and it seemed that it would soon be our turn.  We decided that rather than continue up the pass, we would descend along the other side of the hill on which we stood, and make our way through a valley we saw until we reached the river.  It was a fateful decision.

What the topographical map we purchased before setting out failed to convey was that the valley, which depicted a stream, was in reality an extensive marsh.  I have to say, my Zamberlan boots proved to be worth the money I spent on them, allowing me to traverse the marsh without getting my feet wet, but my companions were not so fortunate.  Between the rain that started to dampen us from above, and the marsh dampening us from below, there was a considerable dampening of spirits as we tromped our way through the valley.  It didn’t help that my family was admittedly not quite so enthusiastic about the whole off-trail hiking experience as I was.

With the weather seeming likely to remain less than ideal, and the marsh having bogged down what enthusiasm there had been, the decision was made to arrow through another pass that would take us more quickly back to the road.  Traversing the marsh had reduced out speed to a crawl, so although it had been two hours since we had our second breakfast, we had covered a distressingly minute distance.  At our pace, it would have taken into the dinner hour to reach the road, if we tried to attain our originally intended access point.

Leaving the marsh behind was a relief all around, although the pass we chose was steep and dense with brush in places.  After achieving the top of the pass, we caught a glimpse of the park road, given away by a bus winding along it in the distance, which helped to rejuvenate the flagging spirits of my family members.  We made much better time in our descent, following natural trails we found winding through the forest, and around 1415, we successfully returned to the park road.  Before long, we had caught a ride on a bus, and were on our way back to civilization.

The rest of my family would probably disagree about this hike taking the number three spot, and it probably doesn’t do wonders for my credibility on this blog that I can’t convince my own family of the magic inherent to off-trail hikes like this.  To me, there is something uniquely exciting about hiking like that, and I have every intention of one day returning to Denali to backpack into the more remote areas of the park.

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An Icy Reception

Between the Seward boat tour that started out our Alaska trip, and the bear viewing flight I discussed in the previous post, all other activities really were relegated to vying for third place. Certainly our glacier hike we took our first morning in Sutton was an interesting experience, but compared to what we’d already done, it was somewhat lackluster. Admittedly, the idea of walking on a glacier had been consistently hyped in the literature we reviewed before departure, and the experience itself proved to be a bit oversold. However, it did afford some excellent pictures, and an opportunity for us to delve further into glacial science.

I provided a brief introduction to glacial science in our post about Exit Glacier, which we visited early on in our Alaska trip, but entire volumes could be written about glaciers, and, indeed, have been written.  Far more than imposing piles of ice, glaciers are ecosystems in and of themselves.  They create their own microclimates, sculpt landscapes, alter sea levels, and at one point in time covered the entire surface of the planet, a time called “snowball earth.”  Scientists, it has been observed, have a penchant for creative naming conventions.

Drinking pure glacier water

Like icebergs, hippopotamuses, and crocodiles, there is a great deal more to a glacier than what is readily apparent.  In most cases, you’re able to see only a tiny fraction of the entire structure, which will stretch far up into the mountains, and even below the ground.  We were for some time walking on a glacier without even realizing it, because it was so covered in glacial till – also known as gravel and dirt.  The glacier we were on, if you reference the pictures, was actually more than three hundred feet thick.  Mulans led straight from the surface all the way to the bedrock.

Since this is an outdoors blog, not a science blog, I should probably spend some time expounding on topics other than glacial science.  Therefore, let’s talk a bit about crampons.  If you’re not already familiar, crampons are a mountain climbing tool that are strapped to your normal boots, and consist of a series of metal teeth oriented to dig into the ice and facilitate climbing on treacherous surfaces.  Our guides were very keen on formal “crampon technique,” but I found that such a rigid methodology was unnecessary.  For me, it was sufficient to be aware of the crampons as I walked.

Don’t allow me to discourage you; walking on a glacier really was an interesting and unique experience.  It simply wasn’t sufficient to fight it’s way into the top three for our fantastic Alaska trip.  And if you’re wondering what did achieve the number three position, you’ll have to keep watching the blog: it will be coming up soon.

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Bear Viewing

We had some amazing experiences on our Alaskan trip, especially when it came to wildlife.  The boat tour in Seward was a spectacular way to start the trip, and later on, when we got to Denali, we saw roaming moose and other wildlife, and of course there were so many amazing non-wildlife related activities.  Come the end of the trip, however, there was one that really stood out, and that we unanimously decided was the definite highlight of the trip.  In some ways, it was a lesson in you-get-what-you-pay-for, because this was by no means an inexpensive proposition, but our bear viewing flight tour was definitely worth the cost.

Our tour was courtesy of Alaska Air Service, and started out of Merrill Field, in Anchorage.  After a pre-flight briefing, we loaded up into a small prop plane, described to us as the “suburban of small aircraft,” and took off, headings towards Lake Clark National Park.  The flight itself offered gorgeous views of the mountains and other terrain; we flew between mountains and up through a pass where everything was entirely covered in snow, and around volcanoes, on the way to our first bear viewing stop.  It also presented new insight on life in Alaska, since we could see the various fishing shacks, local power plants, and other facilities, all of which could only be reached by boat or small plane.  We saw no roads or human trails as we flew: any trails we saw were animal highways.

Reaching Lake Clark National Park, we landed on a gravel beach, sans formal runway, and began making our way inland, towards a long field of grass, with a river running through it.  This, our guide and pilot explained, served as a natural gathering place for bears, who were attracted to the plentiful fresh water and food.  He had explained in advance that there was never any guarantee that we’d see bears, but that by knowing their habits and customs, he could usually make a good guess as to where they might be.  Good guess might be a bit of an understatement, because when we emerged from the shelter of the trees to the edge of this elongated meadow, we saw a bear digging for roots less than thirty feet away from us.

Bears have kind of a poor reputation, in that people seem to think that they will simply attack without provocation.  This is a sad mischaracterization: bears, like most animals, would prefer to avoid interaction with humans under most conditions.  They only become dangerous under a few conditions.  If something is wrong with the bear, then it can behave unpredictably.  If the bear has cubs, then it will behave aggressively in defense of them.  If the human acts like prey (runs away or gives off signals of fear or panic), then the bear will assume that the human is prey, and respond accordingly.  Finally, many bears seen near park visitor centers and other places where humans frequent might come to associate humans with easy food.  In the wild, though, where the bears have had no real exposure to or interaction with humans, the bears will usually ignore people.  To the bear, we were just part of the environment, unless we did something to make ourselves otherwise.

By reading the signals from the bear (how often did it look up at us, how content was it to continue eating, what direction was it moving, how was it standing, and so forth), you can tell what the bear is thinking of you and if it’s likely to become a threat.  As long as the bear didn’t seem to be too curious, we were able to stay right where we were.  When it started to look at us more frequently, we backed slowly a little distance away, and it returned to ignoring us completely.

For several hours, we perambulated up and down the beach at our first landing sight, finding various points to penetrate the barrier of trees that separated the beach from the meadow and river, and each time we saw more bears.  By the time we had walked back and forth along the length of the beach several times, we had seen probably close to two dozen bears, at varying distances.  We could probably have continued to see them if we’d stayed longer, but we eventually decided to return to the plane and try our luck at the next sight.

Luck turned out not to be with us for the next site.  It was very windy, and our guide explained that the bears tend to avoid windy areas, since it confuses their sense of smell.  Think of it like standing in one of those mirror mazes.  So our second sight visit wound up involving more of a leisurely stroll along another river and meadow, and a break for a late lunch (which was included as part of the tour).  After we’d made our way around in a wide loop, we returned to the airplane, and it was time to becoming acquainted once again with the spectacular views we experiences on the flight into Lake Clark.

The tour as a whole lasted from about 0900 to about 1630, making for a full day.  When we got back, it was time to find dinner and make our way to our next base of operations, in Sutton.  Even at that point in the trip, we knew that our experiences that day were going to be very, very hard to top.

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