The hike out from the hot springs camp to our rendezvous on Circle Lake was a soggy one. …and yes that is a trash bag on my pack (Big Bertha). Photo by Dave Jones
“A cold morn with watery sun. The ring around the sun is ominous…[I got up] and picked my usual pan of berries – spilled them and picked more. I had to range far and wide. We packed up and took off up the hill. We did our best to refurbish the site to its pristine state. We watered and raked.”
Years later talking with Tony I know he didn’t feel like we did enough to tread lightly. Tony told me he felt it would have been better to camp on a sand bar that would bear the weight of our visit better. At the time I thought we took great pains to peel up the ground cover where our tents were set up and “re-sod” the patches back in when we left. Tony may well have had a point. As Neil Young says in Natural Beauty “What a lucky man/To see the Earth before it touched his hand”
“Dave and I plodded (his ankle hurt). By the time we reached the lake rain had set in. We ate our last lunch and Tony gave us Cadbury chunks. The rain made us more cold so we pushed on. It was a long haul over slippery rocks to the pass. From the pass down it was a wet mess of alders…”
A word here about the generosity of the Alaskans sharing their food with Dave, Craig and I. They had shared their food the the entire trip and, as it turned out, this ended up being a big sacrifice. Once back at the spot where we had landed on “Circle Lake” and where we were to be picked up, Tony, Brett, Sharon and Mark took off up the Alatna River valley to our first day’s camp to retrieve the food they had cached there in a tree.
The bears had raided the Alaskan’s food cache and gotten it all.
“We saw a moose standing in a meadow off the Alatna in the rain. We wondered what it would be like to be a moose [in the rain] and not care. There were, at least, few mosquitoes. We were soaked. My boots were squishing… there were some peppermints in the bottom of the food bag. Dave and I had two beers.”
Photo by Dave Jones.
