Hiking Alone

I hiked alone in Chugach State Park two days ago, up and along a coastal mountainous rib known as Bird Ridge, on an early Spring day that followed a few weeks of warm weather.  The winter had been mild and dryish and was over, and I went to shake off the infestations of my primary environment, a city dense with people, and its unceasing demands of me.  I also went to see if I could find some interesting birds.

I wore a new lightweight shell, and as the wind whipped and roared along the cliffs and lower hills near the coast, and as light, ephemeral rains fell, I climbed gently, warm and dry.  This trail was an old acquaintance, I having hiked it some dozen times over seven years, and I knew it well enough to not feel lonely, despite the morose weather.  Small, thin clouds, wispy collections of fog, moved hurriedly down the coast, bunching together and coalescing as they rolled up a slope, and then splayed over a peak would encounter a wide space and dissipate.  Underneath my feet, the snow and ice had melted and there was wet earth and rock.  My route took me east and up the southern face of a large hill, and the spruce and poplar forest, where I had once found a moose and her calf, and another time a young goshawk, then began to thin.


How peculiar and familiar is the happiness one feels, alone in the woods, on the mountain's side, indeed! How free one knows himself to be, in that moment at least, when the straight lines and right edges of the manufactured environment are not around him, not walling him, corralling him, leading him, penning and pinning him! How awake one does become when he drinks air agitated and fortified so by its rough course over coast and cliff and woods! When his purpose is only to breathe deeply and follow a meandering foot path, how content one is! 

In the upland of these mountains, thick grasses and thickets of alder and willow carpet the earth, and it is here that I see the willow ptarmigan in my mind.  There, in a small clearing in the thicket, recessed in a shadow, sits silent and motionless the sentinel cock, betrayed to me only by his red eye comb and his heavy grouse form, painted white and auburn, perched above snow and amidst bark.


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