Alaskan Autumn 2023
Now that the snow is weeping itself into the sod and spring is haltingly underway, it’s time to post some pictures of my first Autumn in Alaska. Seasons are generally either astronomical and exact, or subjective and circumstantial, and I prefer the latter. So in my reckoning, fall began in the last week of August, when the air first felt crisp on a grey day, and the grass began to attain a reddish tint. On that day I went to Reflection Lake, a modest pond ensconced in the naith formed by the confluence of the Knik and Matanuska Rivers. I must admit to a degree of nostalgia – the light and the weather so reminded me of North Bend.
The following week was Labor Day, and pressed by the lateness of the season, I forced myself to cross two things off my list, without which I would have felt anxious I was too cowardly to properly enjoy Alaska, but which were nonetheless occasions for some anxiety. The first was to camp by myself. Now, I have a great deal of experience camping, and am very comfortable in a tent; I am even quite comfortable in a tent by myself, including in places with large fauna like Yellowstone. But it's still difficult to sleep when you’re worried, and the middle of nowhere in Alaska is very much outside my experience.
Driving up the Glenn highway revealed a wilderness of sepia, exhaling vapors even on a sunny day. After turning North on the Richardson, the ruddy tundra grass leapt to meet the declining sun such that every field became a glory of color. The Gulkana River cut through the red like azure floss, and its Glacier attained an almost Tibetan cast in the saffron robes of fall. Yes I know – the grass is red, the rivers are blue, my prose is purple.
Rainbow Mountain is a whole palette, of course, and I arrived at exactly the right time of day to see it fully illuminated. I dipped over the pass just to see the Alaska Range up close, and it was wonderful how different the scenery looked from just two months before. A simple change in color, lighting, atmosphere, and a small lowering of the snow line, transformed the mountains into a country entirely strange.
I turned back south, and then west onto the Denali Highway. The tundra this road cuts through is BLM land, and can be camped on essentially at will. The first time I had driven it, in July, the road was enfolded in clouds down to the hilltops; but this first evening the gilded fields unrolled all the way to mountains whose only limit was haze and my decrepit eyesight.
I found a spot to camp just east of Tangle Lakes, on the north side of the road. Below, you can see the view from where I set up my tent. It was chilly on the tundra at night, but by carefully wrapping myself in a burrito of fleece and down I quickly became quite cozy and comfortable. The night was bright with moonshine, and I was mostly untroubled by fear of the bears (or drunk moose). I will say, however, that just before I rose, shortly after waking in the early morning, I heard a sound near the head of my tent, perhaps a few yards away in the bushes, that sounded like nothing so much as a large animal sneezing. I never did see what it was; I struck camp shortly after, and didn’t go poking around to find out.
The second thing I crossed off my list which challenged my comfort zone was going paddling. I love canoeing on tranquil sloughs and lakes, but I have always gone with other people. In the absence of anyone else, however, I had to content myself with a solo kayak rented from the friendly owner of Tangle Lakes Lodge, where I was also able to procure a plate of pancakes. I don’t have any pictures from the boat, but you can see from what follows that the day was grey and wet, and it was with trepidation that I allowed myself to be thrust onto the water. The worst part was the beginning, because to enter the main body of the lake I had to paddle through a gentle, but still noticeable current where the lake flows through a narrows. As you can surmise, I’m not used to being on water that moves at all. From there, though, I spent about an hour wending my way around the lake, enjoying myself more and more as I went. After returning to the lodge, I set off down the foggy highway toward Cantwell, chariot covered in grime from the road which snaked its way up and down fir-covered rises and above the braided Nenana River.
I had meant to camp some more, but between the tent and myself we were a bit soggier than anticipated, so I went back home from Cantwell that same day. On the next decent day, however, I drove up to Hatcher Pass, and scrambling to get some purchase on the crumbling scree, I witnessed the rapid passage of light and dark over the summit of the pass, as the clouds breathed their way around the peaks. Descending, I found that in Palmer there are pastures greener than I expected to find above 60 degrees of latitude.
Then, mid-way into September, my oil leak became much more pronounced. Because the places I wanted to take it were full up, and because I am sluggish about such things, for about a month I did not drive anywhere to speak of, but simply walked back and forth to work – which in my case is a pleasantly short and flat commute. I took the time to walk around my neighborhood in North Spenard, to see that my neighbor’s poppies were still in bloom even as the trees at Chester Creek were already browning.
Thankfully the only thing wrong with my car was a loose gasket, and once it had been resettled in place I headed back to Hatcher Pass to see what a month of Autumn had done to the place. The change, even in early October, was quite profound; the hills were already indistinguishable from the white fleece of clouds which hung above (and in cases, below) them. South from the pass, the sea was undergoing the same change, as the watery grey of the Knik Arm bled into the watery grey of the sky.
Over the next few weeks I stopped in Bicentennial Park several times, often after church, to observe the progress of the fall. Each day the sun rapidly declined, which only augmented the beauty of its angle while it remained up, and the birch trees and dead grasses glowed with the last of its yellow light.
Then came the frost. First, one morning my windshield was stenciled with crystals. That same day I drove to Girdwood, and saw that the snowline above Turnagain Arm was a sharp divide of ice. The valley above the town felt like something from a different continent, one higher and less green, now that the leaves were bare.
Exploring from Girdwood to Portage, I was astonished at the intensity of the frost. The veins of a leaf were replicated and exaggerated in ice; and the grass, even in the sun, extruded a forest of flat crystals, some an inch long, yet thinner than a sheet of paper. The ponds were not simply frozen: they were locked up in a way that preserved their layers of ripples as well as the brush strokes of their icy coat. Portage Lake was still unfrozen, but the waterfalls had changed from noisy white cascades to silent pillars.
On another day, leaving behind the forlorn, south-staring satellite dishes near my home, I probed round the corner of the Knik Arm, into a neighborhood fully shadowed by a steep mountain to its south. Here the frost had already accumulated so much that everything was desaturated, as if bleached. The air hung bitter, and the world seemed as dead as the abandoned cars which littered the woods. Only the patchy ice on the river moved, though it too would soon cease.
Finally, I returned to Bicentennial Park, and found that I could now walk on what had been marsh. Out on the surface of the pond, a child was skating with their parents. The sky above, even in mid-afternoon, already had the quality of watercolor that is too much water and too little color, so diminished was the sun. I did not know it yet, but this, at the end of October, was the terminus of Autumn. The next time I came to this park, it would be unrecognizable.
