Day 5: Upper Fog Creek to Terrace Lake
On this morning we afforded ourselves two cups of coffee! I broke down the tent and Artie tended to his feet. “Art, look there’s some hikers!” Suddenly the mood in camp changed. One at a time we watched six hikers crest a nearby ridge. They were about a half of a mile away. We quickly packed up and took-off down into the valley.
“When we get below the rise, I’ll drape my raincoat over my pack so they don’t see us.” The competitor in Art was rising to the surface and it was funny because up until then we had both forgotten about the race part of this thing. We had no way of knowing whether any of them saw us or not.
After about 20 minutes of hiking I looked back and could see that they were setting up a tent. This blew our minds. “What are they doing?” I said.
“Maybe they are going on a night schedule too.” said Art. All of the possibilities swirled in our heads as we hiked towards a far distant pass. The idea that we were ahead of at least 6 competitors was invigorating. We congratulated ourselves on our smart route finding decisions and wondered why they didn’t just do what we did. It was quite funny all of the thoughts that surfaced.
After crossing Fog Creek we had a 100 foot snowfield to climb. “Hey, let’s make giant steps in the snow to throw them off.” said Art. “They’ll think we’re really tall.”
“Or they’ll think we’re really fast.” I said. We must have looked pretty goofy leaping up this snowfield. I stepped in Arties footprints to further throw off our competition into thinking that there was just one of us.
From the pass above the head waters of Fog Creek we descended into the Tsisi Creek valley. The hiking was almost entirely above treeline. From up high we plotted our course down to the creek. “Let’s make it down to those serpentine benches.” Art pointed across to a series of benches that linked in a curvy pattern all the way to the creek.
We cut across a brushy valley to access the first bench. The benches were huge (much bigger than they appeared from across the valley) and we wound our way around and down to the last bench that overlooked Tsisi Creek itself. After crossing the creek we made our way up onto a gentle rolling plateau. We were into the magical 4000 foot elevation where the brush gives way to low lying tundra, lichens, and fields of talus. This great hiking would take us all the way to Terrace Creek.
A gentle afternoon breeze had begun and grey clouds gathered in pockets around us. Lightening flashed in the far distance. We began counting between the flash and the thunder. “Every 5 seconds between lightning and thunder is one mile” said Art. There were several distinct thunderheads around us and it was hard to see all of the flashes. The rain began and we stopped to put on our raincoats. From the corner of my eye, I saw a flash to our West and began counting.
“One…” BOOOOM! The Thunder shook us to the core. We decided to sit down and chill out for a while. Soon we could see that the wind was blowing the thunderheads across Tsisi valley and we continued along the rolling plateau no worse-for-wear.
In the far distance to our Northeast, on the other side of the Susitna River we could see what looked like a small fire started from the lightening. A small narrow smoke stack rose into the air. We hoped that the accompanying rain would mitigate the situation.
It was late in the day now and we were in what I call marching-mode. Our feet and legs would start to ache, we were getting tired and so we did what Dick Griffith told us to do; “Just put one foot in front of the other.” he said. We must have been zoning-out because we neglected to check our bearings with map and compass or my GPS. By the time we came upon the steep canyon leading down to Terrace Creek we were three miles off of our route. It was at the end of the day and we decided to camp overlooking Terrace lake. It was an amazing view. There were several high alpine lakes at the end of the valley that spilled into lower ones finally gathering at Terrace Lake at the bottome of the valley. From there Terrace Creek drained out of the North side of the lake and made its way towards the Susitna.
We took out the map, figured out our mistake and plotted our correction route for the next morning. “Oh well, at least we get to check out Terrace Lake,” said Art. It was an amazing view right in front of us, something from a postcard; This would be our Terrace Lake camp.
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| Terrace Lake camp. The plateau in the upper right of the photo contains several high alpine lakes. They all spill down into Terrace Lake |
