Winter Wonderland

No internet most of the winter, oh well. I hope the Malachi government has luck in stablishing peace. Following is something about my final days at my former home...

So the stay at the rural, former place in Alaska, finally ended. It took an amazing 7 hours to walk just seven miles, but 2 of those were through the forest, and the rest were in a more tired condition with trudging progress.

The forest is interesting in winter. The forecast was for sub-freezing yet it didn’t happen enough to solidify the snow enough to walk on. Over a variety of logs, circle over my own tracks in the snow and mist and snow all day. The toughest choice while disoriented because of low visibility and difficult terrain association circumstances is which set of one's own tracks to follow while wondering how three sets of tracks showed up in one place and how could they since the slope going uphill is going downhill instead. Later, aft having followed the right set of footprints in the snow by luck perhaps I realized that I must have left these tracks under some of the trees on the return from a mission to town January 27th. In some heavily forested places the footprints weren't buried under new snow although it must have snowed and rained a lot since then. It was a good choice to leave since it snowed two feet today making travel worse.

Go up six hundred feet and turn right, walk along the slope side and use caution. Wonderful.
The eagles soaring out over the sky and waters were impressive, yek I'd been impressed by the ravens too all winter...how they survive so well in the cold-in the wild they average 30 year life spans. In the cold wind chill overcast sky with mists and snow enshrouding some of the mountains the eagles resolutely soar without freezing their eyes or other vital parts...who does the de-icing for them? I ran across some substantial moose nuggets on he side of a hill...seemed sort of a surprising place however they are members of the deer family. A bear showed up a couple of weeks before I ran out of food and the chain saw broke (for cutting dead trees). I had a feeling it would when I tossed a frying pan full of burnt bannock bread out into the snow one night-sure enough the bear tracks were all over in the morning. If they smell that well it still makes me wonder how close it usually was. I fired six rounds of 12 gauge shot to provide a deterrent element, and I didn't run into it later. I wondered if it was my 12 gauge shots into the side of a nearby hill that brought a year and a half old deer onto the property. It seemed rather chagrinned and was initially somewhat frightened, yet reluctant to move away, and when I said to the deer that it was o.k. it moved toward me briefly before I walked away. The strange thing about the particular deer was that its head seemed somewhat calf-like and legs somewhat stouter than a usual emancipated fawn on its own through the winter. Deer haven't any nerve endings in their legs and don't feel pain. If usually spindly deer legs were much like those of people they would certainly have frostbite limb-loss. Nature again is rather amazing.

I never encountered any wolves this winter, and that was rather disappointing...until 1996 I had regularly found wolf tracks and listened to their winter night howling (they will answer if you can imitate a wolf howl reasonably well) during aurora borealis tendril'd clear cold nights when it was good running over a deep snowpack.

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