Midnight Wilderness by Debbie Miller

Author:Debbie Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mountaineers Books
Published: 2011-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chandalar River valley

Nearing our destination, we approach giant-looking stands of willows. When compared to the knee-high willows on the north side of the divide, these ten-to fifteen-foot-high shrubby trees seem to tower over us. After looking down at plants for so many miles, it’s pleasant to look skyward through rustling leaves. Many of the willows have had some of their leaves stripped off by browsing moose. Some trees are hedged, their branches uniformly nipped off at the same height. It looks as though the moose circled around the tree with clipping shears.

In the main valley we see caribou and moose tracks all over the gravel bars and along the banks of the river. Looking south, we spot a huge sheet of aufeis, or overflow ice, that bridges most of the river. During the winter aufeis forms as water runs over a frozen section of the river and freezes. The overflow water is often generated by underground springs, and layer up on layer of overflow ice can build up on the river through the course of a winter.

Some aufeis grows to be numerous feet thick and stretches for miles in length and breadth. Depending on temperature and location, much, or all, of the aufeis can melt during the summer. Also, there are areas where thick sheets of ice can remain for many years. I like to think of perennial aufeis as river glaciers.

From camp we hear an occasional rumble as aufeis sections calve into the river. The booms sound like distant claps of thunder. Dennis and I decide to hike down to the ice for a closer look. Just as we reach the mile-wide section of river ice, we watch a huge chunk of overhanging ice calve into the river. The wedge of ice makes a terrific splash, and a wake of backwater flows upstream for several hundred feet. The ice chunk had broken off where the river’s main channel cuts through the blue-tinted sheet of ice. The surface of the aufeis is pocked with tiny faint blue pools surrounded by rivulets of meltwater that cascade off the ice sheet. The perimeter of ice is impressive, measuring twelve feet thick in some places.

During the next few days the weather dramatically changes. Instead of being baked out of our tents, we begin our mornings in the dampness of fall mist. Ominous gray clouds hang over the river valley, and a chilling wind makes me pull the wool out of my pack for the first time. Plants, like the prolific cotton grass, disperse their next generation of wind loving seeds across a tundra flooded with autumn color. The bearberry is turning a deep crimson, the blueberry bushes pale red and orange, the willow trees yellow and gold. It is New England’s autumn in miniature. But it is not October. Autumn arrives in the Far North in mid-August.

A few days later we continue our southern journey beneath gray and white billowy clouds, with the sun occasionally beaming heaven’s light through them. In the distance we can see the beginning of the dark spruce forest stretching across the valley’s floor.

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