Hike leads back in time, forward to fall

Out & About, by Joel Davidson

Autumn in Palmer, Alaska. Crisp air invades my lungs, uncloaking my once invisible breath, which billows forth now with every word. The seasonal clock turns the green leaves and soon this valley will drip with gold, falling from the trees. The sun slumbers and rises later and lower with every passing day.

Migratory birds point their V-formations south and their long parade rapidly fades into the horizon. In the surrounding mountains the earth transforms faster still. Winter is already settling into the highland altitudes, whose uppermost peaks, like the heads of eagles, grow frosty white.

Year round, the mountains define and dominate the horizons of the Matanuska-Susitna Valley. In the summer I hike the ancient contours of the Hatcher Pass mountains, switching along ridgelines, exploring a world that moves at a different pace. The warm days and leisurely hikes are soon ending, so I stuff snacks and a water bottle into my sun-faded backpack and drive to the mountains, a final trip before winter descends.

My destination is Hatcher Pass, the southern gateway to the vast Talkeetna Mountain Range. I'm heading for the Reed Lakes Trail, which winds up a mountainside, past two deep-blue lakes.

On the way up, I notice again that the formerly gravel road is so much smoother now that its been widened and paved. Business-minded developers continue their "improvements" on this mountain to make it easily accessible and tour-bus friendly. The pavement ends, however, when I turn off the main road, just past the Motherlode Lodge and Restaurant and onto an old mining road with rocky boulders pushing up through the washboard dirt.

This primitive road winds up the base of a valley, paralleling the streams that flow down. Sections of the road are completely immersed in standing water where ambitious beavers attempt to dam the streams and flood the area to their liking. After a two-mile jostling, I reach the trailhead parking spot.

The early afternoon sun is at full strength and it's not hot anymore but still pleasant. Colors flash from red blueberry bushes and orange alpine shrubbery. Together with wine-red fireweed and golden willow leaves they drape the mountains in a blanket of color. Starting up the trail, I noticed how far along the season is compared to the valley below.

At lower altitudes leaves are far from the color saturation point and many firmly hang from their branches, green and healthy. On the mountain, however, I walk into fall -- into the future -- each step taking me higher and closer to winter.

It is almost a month since my last hike up Hatcher Pass and it feels like a different mountain now, so many changes. Four weeks ago everything was garden-green with varieties of lush, leafy plants and trees. I don't think the Amazon is any greener than Alaska at full bloom.

I'm always a little taken aback to finally see the summer plants burst into their colorful last hurrah, before the mountain consumes and transforms them back into earth. Halfway up the trail, it narrows into a single-file footpath. Dog tracks and hiking boots are pressed into the soft earth, traces of energy spent over a busy weekend. I, too, leave traces on the mountain with each drop of sweat that falls from my forehead and soaked into the trail.

A little plane flies overhead and I image that the pilot might easily overlook my presence, as I hike along in the underbrush. Instead of distinguishing me from the rest of the mountainside, it might appear as one continuous entity. A stream crosses the trail and I lean over for a drink. As the water flows from the stream into my belly, it isn't easy to tell where the mountain ends and I begin. After a good 30 minutes, I stop for a breather. The mountain spreads out below, eventually fading into the flat valley. I feel like an inchworm resting on a giant rock; all the small things seem even smaller up here. Overhead, two massive clouds form on each side of the valley and slowly move together like gray sliding doors, shutting out the sunshine.

I pull on extra layers, take a few bites of peanut butter granola bar and continue on. Just before reaching lower Reed Lake, the trail gives way to a boulder field where, generations ago, a powerful avalanche left thousands of elephant-sized boulders. They tumbled down the mountain to their exact locations long before I was born.

Moss and lichen slowly cover their gray surfaces as they relentlessly eat into the rock. Occasionally little chunks crumble off in miniature avalanches and fall into a hidden stream, which is seeping down from Lower Reed Lake. I jump across the boulders, leaping from rock to rock. When I touch down onto one rock, I have a split-second decision before pushing off and flying through the air toward the next and the next. It's been 20 years since the first time I took flight across these boulders.

On the other side of the boulder field, the trail resumes along the creak and on up to the first lake. Boulder-clumps lay along the trail, some poking out from the slow-moving stream. I lean out over one of them and stare into the crystal clear water. It's like looking through liquid glass. Along the surface, delicate stringy ripples spread across the stream without once breaking the smooth sheen.

Fish don't swim all the way up to the lake and the stream is growing progressively more empty the farther I climb. In one quiet pool I spot a single unidentifiable larva, only a half-inch long. It swims in spastic side-winding motions. It looks like a tiny lost explorer in an ocean soon to freeze.

I continue at a gradual incline with the advancing snowline only a few hundred yards away. At snowline, it is like walking from color into a world of virgin white. At 4,000 feet above sea level, one inch of fresh snow now squeaks beneath my feet.

I walk up over a little ridge and drop down into a winter courtyard. Lower Reed Lake pools at the base of a circle of jagged mountains. It is a small emerald-green mirror, reflecting the circle of whitened peaks. The air is mild; in fact it almost smells like spring with live, green plants poking out from the wet snow.

I walk to the edge of the lake and climb a boulder, which is resting at the shoreline, and unpack lunch. On three sides, the mountain walls rise above me, where winter quietly gathers strength before it swoops down the mountainside, into the city streets and sidewalks below. White mountain tops merge with clouds to blur the line between rock and sky as both fade into a swirl of dusty white.

Far in the distance and a little higher, a waterfall from Upper Reed Lake pours over a cliff, feeding into Lower Reed Lake. The water constantly flows from one namesake into another. Sitting in silence on the boulder, an ancient stillness permeates in the air. The mountain contains great distances and great intimacies.

Change is slow and often imperceptible but, like everywhere, its movement is unceasing. Five human generations come and go without noticeable differences upon the mountain. I am always struck by the vastness of time and space when I haul my little warm body to places like this.

Sitting before the mountain, I remember sitting in St. Paul's Cathedral, London. Both places are so much more than my experience, so much older, with histories I can enter but scarcely comprehend. Gradually, a misty rain begins sprinkling the lake and thousands of ripples emerge in the water.

A few snowflakes slip between the falling raindrops. Everything is perfectly silent as this secret liturgy unfolds. I close my eyes and breathe clean air through my nostrils, deep down into my lungs, carrying oxygen to every single blood cell, all needing the breath of life. I look out across the mountains to the distant waterfall. It promises yet another lake, another discovery just over the next hill. I want to continue, but the rain increases and the sun weakens.

There's no one else on the trail and I imagine that whatever occurs beyond the waterfall this evening will go unseen by human eyes. I must turn back while the mountain continues its ancient rituals. Seen or unseen it abides as it has for untold centuries.

On the way down, I stop to fill my mouth with handfuls of marble-sized blueberries. I drink again from the stream and pee into the dirt. I pick a bouquet from the litany of colors. Just before reaching the car, I stop to take a last look at the mountain in full color, before the earth rotates away from the sun and spins into another winter, always ending and beginning again.

My trips to this mountain are numbered and where the count stands I'll never know. I'm a young man yet but the moments, like the seasons, move deceptively fast. In my lifetime this mountain could move through close to a hundred seasons and barely change as one generation fades into the next. By the time I reach the car, my belly is tight with berries and my fingers stained blue. My hands clutch a few plants and branches, yellow, orange and red. These little sticks and berries help mark my time on the mountain, brief as it is.

Joel Davidson is from the Mat-Su Valley.