Falls Creek. Chugach State Park. Alaska.

With a shove you’re tripping above leafing birch. Cottonwood flailing, pods sticky and raining. Climbing for pleasure, as only humans can. Strangling in the nasty, skeletal alders. Catching breath. Glassing terrain. The creek bumps, grinds, and floods away. 30 minutes, the world so (too?) easily left behind. My rutted, uneven single track parallels the water, bouncing up or down. Snow, leftover and spilling down dark chutes. Fields traversed, water surging beneath careful boot steps. Behind, Turnagain Arm made soundless, something of a keyhole – a gap view afforded between jutting peaks, though in odd moments, expansive, the Kenai Mountains gripped and towering behind. It is wet. Water above and below. Clouds too, forming only to race away. Moments of visibility – the curtains part to reveal walled peaks, ringing your precious experience. Passaged allowed to a point. I choose rest. The simple act of keeping watch for others attempting to share my valley. What strikes me is the unfriendliness of that sentence coupled to the place I sit. Craving this selfish space, momentarily mine.

Turnagain Arm, Southcentral, Alaska:

We traverse the dense, varied hillside. Ferns, their heads the size of dimes with stalks tender as a child’s finger, materialize underfoot. Devils club pours forth as a fresh new enemy. Birch rocket toward heaven. Spruce as stacked, twisted, and uneasy. The hemlock is rooted, wandering silently in the wind. Climbing. Falling away. Legs carrying mind carrying body. The silted, untouchable coast revealing itself in small, un-forested windows. We gulp the view. The tide is racing away. The curtain drawn back to reveal.

West Point, NE. A late winter storm drove us indoors. Lost discoveries to be had. Much left to to time and otherwise.