"Toklat River" from Inside Passage
(c) Terry Kelly 2004
I love Alaska, even more so now that I don't live there anymore. While I was living in Alaska my friends Steve, Veronica and Mike came up to visit and go backpacking in Denali National Park. The trip was great adventure and misadventure. There are no trails in the park; it's all cross country hiking and orienteering. The only strip of civilization in many parts of the park is the road that roughly bisects it. To get to your starting point, you take an old school bus which drops you off-- well in the middle of nowhere. As the bus pulls away there is an incredible mixture of anxiety and anticipation. The silence, especially for big city people like us, was absolutely intimidating. We were staring at one another thinking, "what have we gotten ourselves into" when another school bus came by with tourists. They were looking at us thinking the same thing. Then an amazing thing happened. The bus slowed down, the door slid open and the driver tossed out a bunch of lollipops for us. We knew we would be OK. For me, that trip had some of my highest and lowest personal moments-- all made richer by the great friends I shared it with.
On the last full day out, we walked for hours and hours through dense brush and then suddenly burst through the trees to the wide open gravel bars of the Toklat River. The relief of being in open space was like a rebirth. We sat by the rushing waters and ate dinner while watching the sun, which had turned blood red from forest fire smoke, set over the hills.
"Been so long since we'd seen the sun
We were buried in the trees.
And sometimes when you just need to breath
Get off the bus and take a walk
Down by the gravel bars of the Toklat River bed.
We watched the blood red sun set across the watershed"
MUSIC