Not Thirty

   

   The trees were bending and whipping as I peered through the windshield of the truck.  It was spitting rain.  The wipers were on their highest setting.  I was on my way to Bartlett for the start of the Mayor’s Midnight Sun Marathon.  My mother-in-law would say: "It is nasty." She would be right, it was nasty. Shit.  I looked over at the passenger seat.  The Walmart bag nestled there contained a brand new hat and gloves.  I'd pulled over on a whim. I hate being cold.  The five dollar hat was cool and I thought that the same would be true of the five dollar neoprene gloves... until I pulled them on my hands at the beginning of the race.  One was a size large, the other one wasn’t, it was an artery constricting size small. Nice.

    Due to construction at Bartlett High, no parking was allowed, so I sat in the Takatnu mega-complex parking lot along with everyone else, rain pouring down.  I was there forty minutes early and I had to pee.  I decided to dart over to the McDonald’s.  There were six women standing in line outside the women’s bathroom.  For a moment, I thought I was at a Bon Jovi concert.  I wondered if there has ever been a McDonald’s overrun by such a fit running crowd before. There were over fifty marathoner’s milling around inside the Takatnu McDonald's.  Some were actually in line ordering food (Egg McMuffins?), but most of them, like myself were looking to off load.  

     Eventually I would make my way over to Bartlett where I would first be met by a barrage of twenty port-a-potties in a row that were backed up twenty women deep.  In the periphery, men could be found tucking in shirts and everything else as they returned from various sections of the Bartlett woods.  Everyone had been diligently hydrating and was trying to squeeze out every last drop before the race.  It’s no fun making a pit stop during a race.

    A gigantic sound system cranked thumping beats interspersed with witty DJ commentary.  “Five minutes left!” He announced.   Finally the Alaska Flag song sounded followed by the National Anthem. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to introduce you to Anchorage Mayor Dan Sullivan.” During the awkward pause four people clapped.  I’m pretty sure it was the four Japanese runners that cut-me-off at the expo the night before.  I’m sure everyone else would have clapped too but they were preoccupied with important last minute race details, like blowing snot from their noses, or picking their shorts out of their butt-cracks.  “Remember, our motto is Big Wild Life, so look out.”  OK Dan.

        “5,4,3,2,1...bam.”  The gun sounded like one you might find in the bottom of a cracker-jack box.  The guy next to me looked over at me and said “really?”  We took off out of the parking lot, into the wind and rain and towards the inevitability of our respective racing destinies.

        Despite the rain and wind, I was feeling good, ticking off 7:20’s and 7:30 minute miles.  At mile nine I saw Hazelee waving and smiling and cheering.  She had made a sign and she was waving it proudly as I ran by.  My dedicated support crew of my Mom, Dad, and daughter were with me all day long in and managed to make it to the majority of viewing areas to cheer me on and monitor my progress.   All was going great until I hit mile 12.

Nipples McGee

      I felt a dull pain in my left leg, it wasn’t my knee but it was just below that.  It hurt to put weight on it.  I wondered if I would have to quit.  I discovered that I could stop, stretch and alleviate some of the pain for about a mile.   So went the progress.  Stop, stretch, slowly run another mile.  My dreams of beating my first marathon time disintegrated with each passing mile.  Shit.

  About mile 16 I glanced down and noticed two strawberry sized red stains on my shirt.  Coincidentally they were located over each nipple. “Huh?” I thought.  Some of the powerade I’d slugged down on-the-run was a reddish color, maybe I spilled some.  “That’s funny.” I thought.  

     As it turns out it wasn’t funny at all. An hour later when the pain hit, I realized that I'd rubbed the skin off my nips.  Not only was I in pain but I realized that I’d run the whole second half of the marathon with two big red nipple-stains front and center for all to admire.  

Like some kind of sick Rudolph the red nosed reindeer I was Steve the red-nipped fruit loop. Luckily I was focused enough on all my various pain to not really care what anyone else thought.

Hazelee supporting her dad
as he pulls over to stretch his
weary bones. 

    Several days before the race I had considered downgrading to the half-marathon.  Although my overall training mileage seemed adequate I had, essentially taken the last three weeks off floating the Yentna, visiting my family in Ellomar and sport fishing for kings at the cabin.   

     “You’re not thirty anymore”.  The advice from a trusted coach was well received but I’ve always been stubborn.  For me thirty years old was 12 years ago.  My first marathon was only five years ago and I did pretty good posting a time of 3:31.  I surprised myself on my fast-ish time.  

    This year I was supposed to be ready.  I had logged in almost 600 miles of running since August and I had competed in several races including the inaugural running of the Kasugi ridge race, the Willow Winter half, and the Mission Gorge 15K in San Diego.  I had to be ready right?
I made my way past miles 18, 19, and 20. My pace had slowed considerably. I noticed several of my running compadres nursing similar pains. "What a wuss." I thought about myself. Somehow I'd pigeon-holed myself into the gimp-crowd. Finally, as I made my way up the final hill leading to the finish line. I could hear the cheering crowd and the bumping party music. I managed to pick up my pace to something that resembled a kick as I narrowly squeezed my way past several middle aged ladies that were running the 5K and blocking the whole chute. I darted past them to the finish.
Nips bleeding, legs in pain, and dogs-a-barking, I collected my ridiculously large medal and shirt and hobbled my way over to the beer tent. Let the healing begin.

The Third Cast

                                  The Third Cast

    

Corey, successfully harvesting a King Salmon.

It was the third cast. I flung the spinner high over me and winged it as far as the old line would allow.  Wait for it, wait for it, ....as the lure sunk towards the bottom I began my retrieve.  The action of the lure I was using was fickle today.   In the name of conservation, ADF&G announced that single hooks only could be used.  The standard treble-hook was more balanced, and made the whole thing spin better.  The rules had changed.  Oh well.

    In addition, retention of the coveted King Salmon would only be allowed on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. Okay.

     The Deshka River had gone the other way with it’s regs.  Reaching their escapement goal early-on, Fish and Game opened the Deshka King fishery to treble hooks and even bait.  My common anecdote for the Deshka River King Salmon fishery goes as follows:  10oo fishermen on 300 boats casting for 100 kings.  I chuckle to myself each time I drive by the mouth of the Deshka.  Boat after God-forsaken boat pack the mouth like a true riverboat version of combat fishing.  

      A familiar tug pulled down on my rod and I knew what was in store.  Before I could even announce my success or play-it-cool by not announcing it,  another fished jumped into the air.  Tamra had one on too.  Holy shit!  There we were fishing by ourselves, without another boat in sight, and we both had one on.  Hazelee was in attendance and can bare witness to said story because she was in charge of the landing net.  “Haze, grab the net!”  Tamra barked at her.

     “ I am, it’s stuck on my boot.”  

     Meanwhile, as Hazelee was untangling herself from the dipnet Tamra and I were playing nice Kings on either side of the boat.  One would peel drag in a panicked frenzy as the other one seemed to be losing ground.  Hazelee was fumbling with the net along with a canister of Planters salted peanuts.  Just then, a third King jumped nearby.

   “ Here Haze, take the pole.”  I saw the handwriting on the wall and quickly decided that action must be taken.  Haze took the fishing pole and immediately felt the strong pull from the King on the other end.  Feelings and words of self-doubt threatened to get the better of Haze as the fight continued.   I got the net over to Tamra who swiftly guided her fish into it. After another minute or two I was able to land Hazelee’s fish too.

    “Whoo-hooo!”  said Hazelee as she sat down on the boat’s bench to take a breather.  Two bright silvery Kings flopped around on the bottom of the boat. They were just as surprised as we were.

All said and done, the King Salmon Hazelee caught received only a fraction of the attention of Hoppy Hopperton, the frog I found for her out by the outhouse, much to the chagrin of Hoppy himself.

Cruisin the Yankner

  The super cub bounced down gently on the gravel bar.  The oversized tundra tires looked like they would fit on a Boeing 737.  They were under- inflated purposefully to absorb the uneven terrain and did a beautiful job of setting me down in God’s country.

    “Brent and Brian are right up around the corner.” Tom pointed upriver to their approximate whereabouts as I helped him pivot the plane around.

    The breezy afternoon had made for a bouncy flight and he couldn’t land in the same spot that he had when he dropped them off the day before.  I grabbed as much of my stuff as possible and headed up river to find my buddies as the black and yellow plane took to the sky and disappeared in the distance.

     The mile-wide river bottom was a myriad of braided channels. Only a few of them contained the silty waters of the Yentna.  It was easy to see that during times of high water the whole floodplain could be underwater  but for now it was easy hiking on beautiful gravel bars.  Twisted white driftwood of all sizes was littered on every bar like it was sprinkled from a big shaker high in the sky. The mountains of the Alaska range hemmed in both shores and overlooked the river valley from all sides.

      I had agreed to this trip with enthusiasm.  In the name of filling-in-the blanks of my geographical sense of place, this one was huge.  Approximately 100 river miles up the Yentna river via the West fork, we were tucked up into the Alaska range with rafts and time and beer.  Oh yeah, we had guns and fishing poles too.

     All three of us have cabins on the lower Yentna (some 80 river miles downstream) and seeing its source and all the new country appealed to all of us. The plan was to make our way down the river all the while looking for black bears and good clear tributaries to fish.

   Sure enough, around the corner sitting among the giant pile of gear was Brent Mason and Brian Gornick.  They were both lounging in their camp chairs and had situated themselves in the middle of a big pile of gear.  With the wind at their back and the sun in their face, it looked like they’d been there a while.  Each was clutching a beer.  “Hey guys, I couldn’t wait for the plane, I decided to walk-in.”  I was betting that they hadn’t heard the plane land around the corner in the 20 knot winds.  I knew that I looked ridiculous wearing my orange float-coat and my bright orange helmet. I had a giant green water-proof bag on my back and I was carrying two cases of beer.

    “Welcome.” said Brian as they both got up to help shuttle my gear.

     At least part of my interest in the upper Yentna region stems from its early exploration by those who were in search of high places.  

In 1906 Dr. Frederick Cook, Belmore Browne, and the good Professor Herschel Parker were among seven hardy souls to set out to be the first to the top of the continent.  Like me, they had a desire to tromp their way to North America’s highest point: Mt. Mckinley.  

      Unlike me, they weren’t fortunate enough to have K2 aviation buzz them out to the East fork of the Kahiltna glacier landing them at a comparatively comfortable striking distance from the mountain.  Their story was a little different.  They had to route find their way from tidewater. The West fork of the Yentna was their first guess as to how to penetrated the Alaska range.

       After sailing to Seldovia from Seattle and steaming over to Tyonek, they split their party in two.  One group had twenty burly pack horses, the other had a wooden skiff with a shoal-draft motor boat  The plan was to meet at the headwaters of the Yentna which was precisely where Brent, Brian, and I were staged.  

    “The conquest of Mount McKinley”, by Belmore Browne is an interesting and detailed account of their efforts. If ever I thought that my wilderness forays were remotely burly, tough, or impressive in the slightest, all I need to do is pick up this book and refresh my memory of what the true definition of hardship and adventure really is.  

     After a month of bushwhacking their way up stream, their West fork aspirations ended when it narrowed into a harrowing canyon with steep walls and crushing glacial rapids.  Their efforts at this point were riddled with near-drownings with horse and man.  Their food supply was dangerously low, so Belmore shot a giant Brown bear that he’d spotted on a hillside. When he discovered that the bear had a series of infected slash wounds from an obvious bear-fight and couldn’t stomach eating it, he left it for dead.  It was at this point that Belmore Browne declared something like, “This sucks.”

     Eventually after being slapped-down again and again they retreated back downstream, crossed all the braids of the West fork and endeavoured to try the East fork.  At this point one passage sticks out:  “The quicksands were our principal difficulty and some of the pack horses sank so deep that only their heads were visible above the water...”  When we floated by their possible crossing point near the confluence of the East and West fork we pulled over for a sandwich.

Belmore Browne's horses don't have shit on Brent

Puffing up the rafts

    “Michael rowed the boat ashore Halla-loooooo- yah!”  I pushed off down stream in lackluster form.  Someone had tied my left oar into the gear pile and after a brief panic I managed to pull it out and collected my self....It must have been Brian.  Off we went commencing downriver progress winding our way out of the Alaska range slowly joining with other braids of the river, splitting away from others.  “Michael rowed the boat ashore....” The age old childhood jingle repeated itself as I negotiated my way downriver.  Occasionally a bad decision was made and we would have to hop out and drag our inflatable canoes over the shallows.  These times were few and far between.   Mostly our travels were long stretches of easy going.
Both boats were equipped with mini stereos and I suggested that Brian should be in charge of the music selection for the trip. He phoned me before we left to inform me that his computer wasn't talking to his I-pod and that we would be relying on Brent for music. "I hope you like Willy and Johnny."

     Slowly we made our way downstream.  Lacking the ability to speed-up, we were resigned to taking it all in and catching up with each other.  It had been a long time since I’d been able to catch up with these two friends.

    I had dropped a few pins on my GPS on the flight in.  I hoped to mark some of the clear water tributaries that we could fish.  On the second night we set our sights on one of them and were rewarded when we found a nice back-eddie chock full of Dolly Varden and Grayling.  We set up our tent on a nearby gravel bar and quickly discovered that the fishing was pretty good right outside the tent door too.  For dinner that night we had pasta primavera with chunks of Dolly Varden- Dolly Primavera!

     That night around the campfire we watched a pair of beavers slide in and out of the water in front of us eating mouthfuls of green leafy twigs on the bank.  A pair of swans honked and as we turned to look also noticed a cow moose and her calf crossing the river on the upstream side of the sandbar.

    In the morning after coffee and a little more fishing, we pushed off back into the Yentna and continued our journey towards our cabins.

    Although we had enjoyed a wonderful float trip thus far, our adventure was far from over.  We made our way down past Youngstown bend where we encountered our first power boat.  From this point down, there were lots of interesting cabins.  We shared our opinions on what we thought each cabin owner did right and wrong in the creation of their own Yentna river palace.  Some of them looked like shacks that had been abandoned, while others were nicer than our homes.  

      I was excited to check out an old paddle-wheel steam boat that was anchored in a clearwater back-slough above Fish Lake Creek.  I had seen it when I flew over it on the way in.  I was hoping it was the S.S. Alice Susitna, an old sternwheel steamer that serviced Talkeetna in the early nineteen hundreds.  The Alice was reknown in Talkeetna history for ferrying loads upriver from Susitna Station.  Brian Okonek who spoke last winter at the Belmore Browne slide show said that it was rumored to be rotting in some slough around Lake Creek.  This little nugget of history had me pretty excited when I spotted a floating sternwheel steamer from the air.  “Hey, I think I found the Alice!” I told them one night after recalling my discovery.  My enthusiasm was met with blank stares as I went on to explain my limited knowledge of legendary sternwheeler the Alice Susitna.

      It turned out to be a different boat; the Susitna Belle.  I climbed around on it and took pictures. Preliminary research hasn’t turned up any information on it yet but it looks cool.  I am amazed with the idea of these big paddle wheel boat being able to push up through the swift waters of these glacial rivers.  Some stretches of both the Yentna and Susitna are extremely braided, shallow and swift moving.  I can’t imagine these giant boats making headway upstream but they did and they routinely pushed big loads of supplies.

    Finally we made our way down past cabins and lodges until we arrived at the mouth of Fish Lake Creek.  The kings were in as we cast shiny lures from our inflatable canoes.  Brian had two fish on.  One got off and the other broke his line.  Bummer.

    All was not lost because an hour later as we were back-trolling a sweet mixing line of the mouth of Lake Creek he hooked into another one.  Coincidentally I hooked one at the same time but as I was trying to hold the rod and maneuver the boat around an overhanging tree, it broke my line.  I was resigned to “support crew” and I quickly rowed over to the bank to help Brian land the dime-bright 20 pound king without a landing net.  Hell yeah!

   Once again we pushed off the bank and resumed our progress.  We would be back at Brent’s cabin soon grilling up a delicious King salmon dinner.   Little did I realize that, to cap off the trip I would get to shoot a nice six foot black bear the following morning which was not nursing infected wounds and was delicious.