Sitka Nature

My brother and I hiked from Harbor Mountain to Gavan Hill today.

Weather: It was partly to mostly cloudy. This morning when we left, it was partly cloudy, but throughout the hike, there were only small patches of sun that we could see out over the water. The clouds were mostly above the mountains where we hiked, although on occasion they dropped down and we were hiking in them. There was not any rain.

Birds: We saw quite a few ptarmigan tracks in the mud on the trail between the shelter and Gavan Hill, though we did not see any ptarmigan. Near the summit of Gavan Hill there were several patches of bare dirt. In these, there were a number of places where ptarmigan had scraped out a little dish (presumably to rest in).

Flora: If anything, the flowers were even more abundant than last month when Melissa and I did this hike. There were certainly more species with abundant blooms. Of particular note were, False Hellebore, Arrow-leaf Groundsel, Subalpine Daisy, Monkshood, Wooly Hawkweed, Broad-petalled Gentian, and Copperbush.

On the slopes of Gavan Hill near the summit, I noticed some Mountain Marestail (Hippuris montana). This was the first time I remember seeing it. I’m not sure how common it is, but it certainly is inconspicuous. Hall has it listed as Rare, while Pojar and Mackinnon indicate it is fairly common, though perhaps infrequently reported.

We saw a few slime molds on our way down.

Other Notes: Jonathan followed a bear trail from one of the saddles between Harbor Mountain and the shelter down into the Cascade Creek drainage. He thought it appeared to be a sow with at least one cub, and probably two.

While trailing the bear, he also found some weasel family scats.

Jonathan noticed a set of very small tracks in the mud on the trail. Initially we thought they were either a Long-tailed Vole or a shrew, but after further research at home, he decided they were probably from a shrew.

The weather was not what most people consider fabulous, but I took advantage of an opportunity get out hiking and made my first trek above the alpine in several months.

I biked out to the trailhead and arrived around 10:30am. I was originally planning to do a relatively quick hike, so I didn’t bring much. Along with a bottle of water, I did carry my camera with lenses, though I was not really expecting to use them that much. I wore the five-finger shoes that I have used on several earlier hikes, but this was the first time I used them with a significant elevation change.

Given my relative lack of exercise over the last couple of months, I made decent, but not great, time to the first viewpoint. Along the way, I noticed the Goblin Gold has recolonized some of the ground in its little alcove. The area it covered seemed much reduced the last time I was up this way last winter.

Not too far after the first viewpoint, my motivation shifted from moving at a good pace to practicing a different manner of walking. The folks at the Wilderness Awareness School (where my brother spent a year in their Residential Program) call it fox walking. It’s something that takes a fair amount of focus for me to maintain, as it is easy to slip back into my more typical manner of walking (called ‘cow walking’ by some). One advantage of fox walking when minimally shod is there’s much less tendency for me to take the kind of steps that result in stubbed toes and bruised feet from hard impacts on pointy objects. It could have just been my feet are getting tougher, but I think the work on walking helped as well, because my feet didn’t feel all bruised and sore after this hike like they have on previous hikes in the five-finger shoes. It almost makes me think it might be possible for me to work my way to going totally barefoot before too long. The one problem I have had is a blister that forms on the back of one of my ankles. I’m not sure why only one, but today it seemed only happen after the shoes got damp.

Another advantage to the slower pace I maintained while practicing my walking was that I saw a few things I might not have noticed otherwise.
Right before the second viewpoint, I saw several rein orchids that I had never noticed before. I imagine they’ve been there, but I’ve just moved right on by them. There were also Twayblade (Listera sp.) orchids in bloom beside the trail not far above the second view point. I also saw some up, but not yet blooming, on the ridge. I seemed to be getting closer to birds before they flew off in a panic, as well.

The change in seasons with increasing elevation was pretty dramatic along the trail. Along the ridge, I saw Purple Sweet-cicely, blooming. It was blooming in town early in May. Just below Picnic Rock, there were Fern-leaf Goldthread and Crowberries in bloom, these were blooming in late April around town. Blueberries are getting ripe in town, but they were just flowering and putting out leaves above the treeline. Even the birds seemed to be getting in on the act, as there was a lot of bird activity where trail leaves the trees. I heard several calls from familiar birds that I don’t remember hearing before. Varied Thrushes, Robins, Warblers, Winter Wrens, and Dark-eyed Juncos were species I heard/saw. I think I also heard a Fox Sparrow, but I’m not sure (it’s a call I’ve heard a couple of times lately, but I’m not positive about the identification).

There was no snow in the trees on the ridge, but between the trees and Picnic Rock, there were still several extensive snowbanks. Elsewhere along the tree-free slopes below Peak 2550 it was clear the snow had only very recently melted, as the plants were still matted down and this year’s new plant growth was still pretty minimal. Picnic Rock and the surrounding relatively flat area near it appeared to have been snow free for quite some time, as there were many plants that were very well developed.

The snow on the slopes made for interesting walking. I did all right on the way up, as the snow was fairly soft, but on the way down, I chose to avoid the snow as much as possible. I think some sort of make-shift traction accessory will be necessary if I want to do more extensive snow walking in these shoes.

I ended up reaching picnic rock a little after noon. I needed to be back home before 3pm, so I did not spend too much time up there. The bugs and weather weren’t all that inviting either. As usual when there’s not a breeze, Picnic Rock attracts a lot of flying insects. They find it easier to locate each other by moving up to peaks, so it’s a good strategy for them. Not so great for me, when they were landing all over me.

I had entered the clouds between the first and second viewpoint, but except for a few drops, it hadn’t really rained much on me. While I was near the top, it started raining a little more and continued until I got below the clouds again. At the first viewpoint there was a break in the clouds and it looked like the sun might try to peak out.

I wasn’t sure how the way down would go, but I made pretty good time and only stubbed my toes a couple of times, as I did better to remember to lift my feet instead of shuffle along.

One of the things I thought I might start doing is maintaining a species list for each trail. To that end, I guess I’ll do a separate post or two with species and notes. To keep things managable, perhaps I’ll just start with vascular plants and vertebrates (birds and mammals, primarily).

Fellow natural history enthusiast Kitty LaBounty wanted to make a trip up the West Fork of Indian River to look for mosses over spring break. I thought that sounded like a reasonable way to spend a day, so I agreed to go along. Despite the spring in spring break, it’s been anything but spring-like around Sitka this March. The snow started around the middle of Febraury, and with only a few exceptions, there has been additional snow each day since then. We were uncertain what exactly conditions would be like, but after my slog through deep snow last week, it seemed the smart thing to do was take snowshoes, so that is what we did.

We got started around 9am under overcast skies threatening snow. The trail was well-packed from the feet of other hikers, so we carried our snowshoes at the start.

The walk along the trail was largely uneventful. The woods were quiet with the sound of the river muffled by deep snow. We made good time to the second bridge. At the second bridge, we stopped to put on our snowshoes in prepartion for leaving the trail.

It quickly became clear that someone else had been snowshoeing along the route we had chosen, so the snow was already partially compacted and supported our weight just fine, especially with the snowshoes. On a couple of occasions, I purposely went off the trail just to see what it was like. With the snowshoes on, the softer snow still held me, but I sank in noticably more than I was doing on the trail.

The trail followed the main fork of Indian River for a short distance before turning up a short, but steep, hill slope that took us to the edge of the large muskeg below the Middle Sister. The way up the hill was a bit of a challenge, as it was steep and the snow was deep, so it was difficult to step up high enough to move up. I ended up crawling and grabbing whatever I could hold on to to help pull myself up.

While we were walking through the muskeg it started to snow lightly. It was very different than other times I have experienced this place, mostly in the summer. I remember one warm summer day in this muskeg, perhaps the first time I ever visited it, actually. It was bright and I came out of the woods at the lower end of this long sloped clearing. There was the faintest of breezes, just enough to feel the warm air on my face as I left the coolness of the forest for the open sunlight. The sun glinted off the grasses and sedges that were growing. I noticed what almost looked like a path of light through the grasses and sedges. Along this path, the blades were twisted differently from the prevailing orientation and so reflected the sunlight with a different intensity. This was my first experience with one of the most ephemeral kinds of tracks you can find. Today, all of this was buried under 4 feet of snow, waiting patiently for the coming of spring and summer.

The trail followed the muskeg up toward the base of the Middle Sister before veering off toward the West Valley. We followed it to the edge of the woods and decided that it was time to part company, as it was our intention to go further up the valley. I let Kitty lead and we found the going a little tougher without the guiding trail. The snowshoes worked well, but sometimes fallen logs lead to treacherous sink holes where the snow was not as deep as it looked. Each of us probably got our snowshoes stuck at least once when they were partially pinned by a log or branch.

As we made our way along up the West Valley, picking our route by what seemed easiest, I looked up and noticed the trees seemed to imply there was a clearing up ahead. I couldn’t actually see the clearing, but the trees got shorter and scrubbier looking, as often occurs at the edge of muskegs around here. I commented that this would be a new clearing for me, as I did not remember finding one in the middle of the West Valley before. We made our way towards it, and as we left the woods, a mountain ridge became visible. The problem was the mountain ridge looked totally wrong for the one that goes from Harbor-Gavan Ridge back to connect with Starrigavan Ridge and the North Sister. It took me a minute for my brain to remap what I was seeing and realize that I was in fact looking at Verstovia. The problem with this was it meant we had become completely turned around, and this “previously unvisited” clearing was actually the edge of the muskeg we had just finished walking through a short time before.

This is the first time I can ever remember being completely turned around like this. I took some solace in the fact that I wasn’t the one leading at the time, but it was still a little disconcerting to have gone along so easily. In actual fact, it was probably a good experience to have, as it gave me a little bit of a sense for what happens when people get lost. I’ve read that sometimes when people get lost, they will ignore obvious cues that should tell them they are not where they think they are. For the briefest of moments, despite having a pretty good idea that there are not any clearings in the middle of the West Valley and despite knowing what the ridge should have looked like, I was about ready to decide that my memory must just be faulty and/or the lighting and snow might have made things look different. Expectations can be quite powerful and have strange effects, I guess.

After figuring out where we were, we turned back and follow our trail to see where we had gone wrong. It turned out to be a matter of consistently choosing a left tending path when picking our way through the forest. It was not a sudden turn around, and if it weren’t for the fact that we kept focussing on the best route (in the short term) through the snow, we probably would not have been turned around at all.

Having corrected the error of our ways, we worked our way up and towards the center of the valley. At one point along the way, Kitty told me to stop and look because there was a marten… or maybe a deer. I asked her if she didn’t think it might actually be an elephant, but that seemed a little unlikely given the amount of snow and the northerly location. I never did see the animal, but when we walked over to where she had seen something, there were fresh deer tracks, so that is presumably what she had seen.

After not seeing any deer tracks up from Herring Cove last week, it was interesting to see several sets of tracks in the West Valley. Although the snow was quite deep in many places, under the full canopy it was a little less so. Some of the blueberry bushes which, from past experience I knew to be fairly short, were sticking up above the snow. At one point we dug down and found the snow only 12-18 inches deep. The large trees in this valley seemed to do a good job keeping the snow from accumulating too deeply.

Without any real particular reason for doing so, we decided to make the big hemlock a destination for this hike. I had never visited the big hemlock by way of the muskeg before, so I thought it would be interesting to try finding it from this direction. In the end, we didn’t really have any trouble finding the big tree, and we stopped there for a bit of a break. While we were there, the clouds parted to reveal some blue sky and sunshine for a few minutes. Before we left, the clouds returned and with them snow and a little wind.

The wind made travelling in the woods interesting for awhile. It would shake the branches enough to release massive clumps of snow that would hit the ground with a large “WHUMPH”. I think some of the clumps, had they been a direct hit, would have knocked me down. They certainly would have made a for a rather chilly experience with snow down my front and back. Fortunately we both managed to avoid any direct hits. There were only a couple of occasions where snow fell close enough for us to experience the miniature blizzard that expanded from the impact zone.

On our way back, as we were following the West Fork not too far up from the first bridge, we spotted a Pine Grosbeak. After walking slowly up to it, we discovered there were in fact several of these birds.

Also on the way back, we finally found some overturned trees with rootwads that were not totally covered in snow. We took a look at some of the bryophytes growing on these, including some Goblin’s Gold (though we did not see any of the reflecting cells that give this moss its name). Kitty collected a few to look at more closely with a microscope, and we continued on our way. We ended up making it back to the trailhead by a little bit after 4pm.

Photos taken while snowshoeing up Indian River Valley.