Be Good to Yourself

I'm back from America's last frontier and happy to report that the trip was fantastic. Since I was off the digital grid for the last 12 days, this blog is actually an old school, handwritten journal entry, penned while I was in Denali National Park:

Wednesday August 3

This misshapen little wooden pig outside the door to our Skyline Lodge tree house in Denali admonished us: "Be good to yourself." Well, that's exactly what a week in Alaska feels like. Being good to yourself by slowing down, enjoying your family, seeing amazing animals, endless rivers and mountains, big skies, glacial kettle ponds, clouds, fog, purple lupin wildflowers, and sunsets (if you can stay up that late!)

My three boys are off mountain biking and hiking to Wonder Lake in hope of seeing "the mountain" out today and maybe finding some wild blueberries on the tundra. The "mountain" is Denali (the high one) or Mt. McKinley, as it was known prior to 1980. Surprisingly the star of Denali National Park is seen by only about 40% of the visitors on average in August, since Denali, rising from a base of 2,000 feet to the summit of 20,000 is so big it generates its own weather system and is often completely enshrouded in clouds. That was the case when we stopped at the Eielson Visitor Center on the way in and gazed in the direction of the Alaska Range. There was nothing but clouds, although if you stared at them long enough you could swear you saw a cliff popping out here and there.

Is that a mountain or a cloud?

Skyline treehouse

I am relaxing this morning, starting with my breakfast of homemade strawberry-rhubarb jam on toast, cereal and fruit with rice milk and fresh ground coffee. Simple but delicious and the view from my deck looks out over the green Kantishna Valley, the westernmost point in Denali Park, a former gold rush site. 

There's only one road across the six million acre park, which is the size of New Hampshire, or as our bus driver wryly commented "bigger than Slovenia, Israel or Djibouti." We saw abundant wildlife on our six hour bus ride--yes, actual school bus seats you may remember from your childhood--- but the trip went by quickly with several scenic overlook/bathroom/wildlife spotting stops and the slow, deadpan narration of the driver as our comic soundtrack. "Here is Moose Creek. There are over 100 moose creeks in Alaska."  and a little later on: "Here is Fish Creek. There are over a 100 fish creeks in Alaska."

The sun sets around 11 pm but it never gets truly dark. From our cabin room, it's 25 steps up two staircases to the bathroom inside the lodge and no headlamp or flashlight was needed during the night. One star peaked over the horizon at 3 am and although there are no Northern Lights visible in the summer sky, in the eerie light I couldn't help but think of a poem that my brother Peter and my Uncle Dick would never fail to recite at Christmas: The Cremation of Sam McGee. Standing here in old mining country where there were all kinds of crazy fortune seekers and adventurers, like Little Johnny Busia who brewed his own Kantishna Champagne or tough Fannie Quigley, who lived alone until age 74 through the harsh winters in her cabin that still stands, the poem seems apt:

There are strange things done in the midnight sun

By the men who moil for gold;

The Arctic trails have their secret tales

That would make your blood run cold;

The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,

But the queerest they ever did see

Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge

I cremated Sam McGee...

Read the rest of the poem by clicking here.

Sure, I could moil for gold.

Cabin life is fine with me

Don't exaggerate. I only took 200 pictures today, not 300!

COMING Next: the BEARS