Denali – Page 2 – Travels with Billie

What was that about silence?

In the last week I’ve been listening-really listening-to the sounds of the wilderness. Well, this isn’t exactly wilderness right where I’m living-not when you have 90,000 of your best friends coming to visit during the season. So at times there is a need to filter out the cars and buses and airplanes, not to mention the guests and several hundred employees who are in the canyon where we live and work. But most of the time, there is an opportunity to stop, to listen, and to hear the sounds that are not man-made.

There are the raucus ravens who hang out around here. Earlier in the season it seemed as though the seagulls had taken over the territory, but apparently the ravens have recaptured their traditional place in the heirarchy. This afternoon I watched as three ravens chided me for infringing on their territory. Unfortunately, I’m not as easy to get rid of as the seagulls were.

We also have a healthy population of Columbian ground squirrels in residence. They run and chase each other from tree to tree, and when they realize I’m watching they move around to the other side of the tree and squeak at me. How brave.

There are plenty of other, smaller birds besides the ravens, and of course the river nearby and the wind in the trees cooperate to bring the counterpoint to the animals and birds. I love it in the early morning, before the tourist trade gets into full swing. It makes for a wonderful walk to work.

Silence Is Golden

Mountain Rainbow — This was my reward for hiking on the top of a mountain in Alaska.

One thing I’ve always enjoyed about the wilderness is the silence. Well, the wilderness isn’t really silent. But it’s quiet.

There are few places you can go in this country today where you can hear nothing but the sounds of the wild. Even most of our national parks ring with the cacophony of cars, trucks, people, airplanes, and all the other sounds of civilization. But there are rare times when I’ve been able to find that corner of quiet, where the only sound is the wind, the water, the birds.

Last weekend I had the privilege of going on a heli-hike. One of those noisemakers, a helicopter, took a group of eight of us to the top of a mountain and dropped us off for a three-hour hike through the high tundra. For a number of reasons, it was an experience I’ll cherish all my life. One of those reasons was the silence.

Yes, there were eight of us. But all were lovers of the outdoors, and the conversation focused on the experience we were sharing. There were also some opportunities to walk up over a ridge and find a few quiet minutes. The wind carried away the other voices, and the only sounds were those made by Nature herself. Definition of magical: one of those moments when the world seems to expand, when you can look around you and feel a part of something greater than yourself.

I stood at the top of a mountain and looked across the valley, two mountains tied together by a rainbow. I could hear a bird calling, and the wind murmured back. The ground was soft under my boots, a cushion of tundra decorated with tiny alpine flowers. Yes, magical.

Trains

Living in Denali has brought me back to a memory of my childhood. I grew up in both Alaska and Montana. Please don’t ask me how much time I spent in each-I’m getting old and having trouble remembering what I did yesterday, let alone what happened fifty to sixty years ago. The bare bones are that I was born in Montana and first went to Alaska when I was six. From then until my Junior year of high school, where I lived depended on what stage of marriage my mother was in. I did spend my last two years of high school in Anchorage, and graduated from there. But I attend the Cut Bank, Montana high school reunions. Go figure. But I digress.

Growing up in Montana, I grew itchy feet early on. Inherited from my much-married mother, I suspect. We lived in a house on the edge of town overlooking the railroad trestle off in the distance. I spent many hours sitting in front of the big picture window watching the trains go by. I’d count the cars in the long trains pulling the oil tankers from the refinery outside of town. And I’d watch the Empire Builder, wondering where the people on board were going. Were they headed to Chicago? To Seattle? Somewhere even farther and more exotic? Like Minneapolis? (I was a kid. My geography wasn’t always accurate.)

So that’s a long intro to the trains of Denali. I’m again living in a place where I can see the trains go by-now they are Alaska Railroad trains and the river is the Nenana River. And my bedroom is situated so I can hear them rumble by. Those trains are the lifeblood of this area. They bring the guests for the hotels and the National Park, and they carry the coal from the coal mine in Healy. The trains during the day are the people movers, and at night the coal train starts its trek to the coast for shipment. I can lie in bed at night and hear the train rumble by, sometimes for a long time-lots of coal going somewhere. At first it was a little disconcerting, but then I started remembering the trains of Montana. Now I can listen to the rumble and know how lucky I am. Now I’m in one of those exotic places I wanted to go.

Heading for Denali

Off to Denali National Park! I was amazed to see a traffic jam in Wasilla, which used to be nothing more than a couple of bars and a gas station on a gravel road. Once we got a few miles out of Wasilla, however, it started looking more like the Alaska I know. Funky little roadside businesses, and trees. And mountains. The best part of the drive was the first glimpse of Mount McKinley. I’ll not call it that again…in Alaska we just call it Denali-The Great One. As you drive along the Parks Highway, suddenly you round a curve and there is that amazing mountain towering above everything.

We also had a caribou cross the road in front of us, so we had our first official wildlife setting. I’m not counting the moose in Anchorage. They are ubiquitous there.

Because our housing isn’t quite ready, we’ve been put in temporary housing. It’s a building that used to house pipeline workers on the North Slope. It’s nothing more than a bunch of modular housing that was moved here and stacked up again. The funniest part was the bathroom. It’s down the hall, and there are two doors-one at each end. both ends have sinks and toilets, and there are showers in the middle. On one door the sign says “Men” and on the other it says “Women”!