It's been thirty years...Part III

Alaska is a beautiful place to live and explore, as I’m sure you’re becoming aware of. Reviewing my list of the best memories I have, many are from Alaska’s vast resources of land, wildlife, and raw untouched nature. I have to thank both my parents for living here, and giving me such a rich place to grow up in.

SOUL OF THE NORTH

In March of 2007 my husband convinced me to snowmachine from Tok, Alaska to Dawson, Canada over the Taylor highway. Called the Trek Over the Top, this event usually has three runs of around 200 people each making the trip. See my blog posting for the full story of this trip – here I’m writing about the sun setting along the top of the world.

As we left Boundary, Alaska and crossed the border into Canada, the sun began to set. The Taylor highway winds along the top of the ridges here, and as it’s covered by a thick layer of snow, and there are no structures, no people, no anything for as far as the eye can see – it feels like you really are on top of the world. The sun sets slowly in the winter, and as it sank below the ridgeline the snow lit up in brilliant hues of red, pink and orange. The alpenglow extended for miles on either side of the trail, dipping into deep purple shadows in the valleys, and glinting off the sharp ridges. Eventually the sun sank, and the trail was enveloped in night.

Snow reflects light very well, so even though it was dark, the light from the moon and stars reflected back a translucent and ethereal glow. After the brilliant sunset this rapid transformation was shocking to my eyes. Reds and oranges gave way to silky purples, silvers, and inky black. I maneuvered my sled along the trail and peered upward from within my helmet hoping the northern lights would appear. Our group had spaced out along the trail, and I was alone. It was probably -50 Fahrenheit…or colder. Shadows from the moon rippled as I rode by them, and the eerie clarity that the cold brings to the night sky made the stars appear closer than I had ever seen. My headlight was unnecessary given the brightness of the moon. I felt deep inside of me that this vision of cold, stark beauty was the soul of the North, and that I was privileged to be one of the few humans who experience this. Jack London knew this intimately, and now I do too.

PICKING GREENS

For many years I worked in rural Alaska, and I have many friends there. On one trip to Nome my friend Dawn invited me to go greens picking on Anvil Mountain with her. For those of you not familiar with Alaska and her Native peoples, women are in charge of harvesting the vegetables, and veges (or greens) on the tundra come from the young plants in the brief spring, and a few plants (mainly berries and wild onions) in the fall. The tender shoots of willow, wild rhubarb, and a dozen other plants I don’t know the names of are all sweet and edible if picked at the right time. My friend is Inupiaq, and learned from her grandmother which plants to pick, so I was pretty excited to go see what we’d find.

When one first looks at the vast tundra, it’s tempting to believe that it is a vast, lifeless plain. It’s mostly light green and tan, and the plants are all under one foot in height. The blandness of the color, combined with the gentle rolling of the hills and tussocks make for an even landscape. However, the tundra is teeming with life. Because of deep snow and harsh winds the plants have learned to survive by laying close to the earth, and developing tough outer leaves to avoid dehydration. Since the ground is frozen the roots spread out in the top few inches of the soil, with root balls resembling dinner plates. I have seen a tundra birch that spread almost six feet along the ground, never sending a branch up over six inches!

Anvil Mountain overlooks Nome, and is distinguished by a large radar site at its crest from the 1950’s called “The Crown of Nome.” These large black curved amplifiers strained to listen to Russian radio signals throughout the post World War and Cold War eras. As my friend and I walked up the mountain, I began to realize that the tundra was dotted with the most beautiful flowers – neon blue forget-me-nots, flowers I don’t know the name of colored in deep magentas, creamy butter yellow, and delicate ivory and pink. You have to get close up, but the flowers are spectacular, even if only one centimeter wide. We began to pick greens, young shoots of willow, the curly edges of edible lichen, young birch shoots, ruby red wild rhubarb stems, and several other small green shoots. I tasted a few, expecting them to be bitter…but instead they had a range of flavors; sweet, tangy, peppery, acrid and so on. All along the Bering Straits it’s normal to preserve greens in clarified seal oil. The greens I picked on this outing I did not eat with seal oil, but later in another village I did get the opportunity to taste this traditional dish, and I was amazed at how ‘gourmet’ the flavor of the greens became when combined with the delicate seal oil. It did have the essences of fish, as that’s what seals eat, but it was not overpowering, and the flavor of the greens shone through the oil. It was worthy of any restaurant – and eaten at a humble plank table along a wild river under the enormous Alaskan sky.

I remember this particular outing because while we were hunched over the tundra picking greens and taking pictures the ground began to rumble. Dawn and I both thought ‘earthquake!’ and turned around to head back to the car, when up the side of the hill, probably 200 feet from us, a giant musk-ox bull crested the hill. His black hooves were flashing in the sun, his massive bone horns swung back and forth, and his huge brown and white raggedy rug of fur was flying back over his churning, stocky legs. Behind him were twelve other musk-ox, and amazingly three small calves. Now small is subjective with musk-ox, as the calves were probably the size of your couch at home, and the bull was the size of a van. The ground was shaking from their weight as they ran up the hill.

The herd wheeled as one and swung wide around the rocky outcrop we were standing on, and then slowed down to a walk on the north side of Anvil. We walked along the crest of the hill to continue watching them as they grazed and played in the late evening sun. They made all sorts of snorts, and grunting sounds, and the calves wove in and out of the adults, playing a sort of tag game. They also have horns, but not as fierce and developed as the adults. They had cute pushed up white noses, and they squealed whenever they were ‘tagged’. I had never seen wild musk-ox before, and they are rare in Alaska. They were extinct in the wild on the mainland at one point, and have only recently (in the last twenty or thirty years) been reintroduced from stock on Nunivak Island and from Greenland. Nome and south of the Brooks Range are the only two places in the wild where wild herds have prospered to the point that people regularly see them. It’s much more common to see a young male on his own. To see such a large herd was amazing in itself, and to see three calves was even more special. There are only 2,300 musk-ox in Alaska today.