Journal Entry – January 22nd, 2014
Absurdly, impossibly tired. Everything is sodden. The trees are whooshing above me like a river, and they’re completely free of snow. The wind is warm. Great flocks of chickadees everywhere all day, happy and singing. I can still hear them, over that unsettling quiet tapping. Oh, but this is not good…
………………………….
There are some noises that mean trouble in the wilderness. The sudden, frenzied barking of a dog late in the night. The sharp, emphatic crack of ice under your feet. The steam engine roaring of a chimney fire at -40.
And this.
Marlen and I are lying on our backs in a snow trench, about fifteen of the twenty-three miles towards my family’s first cabin. The night is peaceful, warm. We have heavy loads and no trail, but we’re sure we’ll make it to the cabin tomorrow.
Or we were, until five minutes ago.
Until this noise, which is something like a hyperactive clock tick-tocking its arrhythmic fingers against the shell of my sleeping bag.
“It’s raining,” Marlen says.
We pull the tarp over our bags, curse the weather and pray that the temperature drops before morning.
It doesn’t.
For the next three days we snowshoe through some of the wettest snow I have ever seen. It clings to my snowshoes in clumps the size of baseballs, then footballs, then basketballs, until each step is as heavy as heartache, as impossible as anything I have ever attempted.
My snowshoes, when I finally took them off. Some of the snow/ice/slush has dislodged, but you get the idea.
Journal Entry – January 23rd, 2014
Still raining. Camped in the spruce trees. I can’t believe how little snow is left. In some places the tundra is showing through, bright red cranberries frozen in the fall, old beige cloudberry leaves with their delicate dark veins, pungent labrador tea…it’s lucky the world is so beautiful, because it’s damned hard to travel through. Certain words have become meaningless; a ‘mile’ last week meant an hour of reasonable effort. Now it refers to three hours of the most ridiculously difficult work I’ve ever done. Marlen’s snowshoes are disintegrating and I had to take mine off – it was getting to the point where I simply couldn’t lift my feet with them on. So instead I waded/floundered through hours of slush on the trail behind Marlen. We had to stop every five minutes to rest our hands on our knees and pant. The snow was literally dripping from the bushes. Is this really January? How the hell are we going to wake up in the morning and do it again?
Soon Marlen is keeping track of his steps, counting how many he can take before falling. Never in my life have I taken eight hours to travel three miles, let alone been so exhausted doing it. Everything is wet. We wring out our sleeping bags every night, pour water from the sleds. The pussywillows are coming out along the trail. I worry desperately that the thaw will end before we drag our sorry carcasses to the cabin, and we’ll freeze in our drenched gear.
The thing is? I haven’t had this much fun in years.
The thaw holds.
We reach the cabin six days after we left the highway, drenched and done-in, our snowshoes nearly in pieces. It’s a disaster. A bear has been in, ripped apart the counter, trampled the plexiglas windows. To us, it’s a palace. I’m not sure we’ll ever leave.
Cleo (aka the Sulk Monkey) also suffered in the slush; here she is at one of our campsites, the the snow clumping in her leg fur.
Dodecatheon Austrofrigidum 