[Note: I did not write a journal entry at the time, so the notes that follow are based on the photos, any data I collected, and what faded memories I retain from years after the fact.]
Yesterday’s evening clearing was short-lived. We woke to steady rain which continued throughout the day. We had managed to consume some of the weight we packed up from Rust Lake, so today’s carry wasn’t quite as heavy as yesterday’s, but the trip was going to be much longer.
We planned to hike from the lake in the pass where we had camped down into the western drainage of Patterson Bay, with a planned pickup tomorrow morning in Patterson Bay. Overall the route was fairly straightforward. It was unlikely that we would get lost, but there are plenty of ways to run into difficulty when trying to get from point A to B without trails. We did have some aerial imagery and maps, but without much resolution.
By the time we packed up and were loaded for the hike out, it was past mid-morning. Route finding and travel was relatively easy at first. We traversed a broad open ridge from the lake towards the Patterson Bay drainage we would spend more of the day in. The scenery was nice, even with the falling rain. I suspect parts of it would have seemed spectacular on a clear day.
Had we had better aerial imagery, I might have chosen an alternative approach that kept us on the ridge longer, but we followed a steep deer trail from the uplands down into the steeper v-shaped part of the drainage headwaters. As we continued, it broadened out into a wider valley.
I was carrying a heavy-enough backpack plus a duffle bag. Andis had been skeptical of this approach, but as I was able to set the duffle bag down to clamber over and under logs, while he had his very large and heavy pack on his back the whole time, he decided maybe it wasn’t such a bad approach.
With the continuous rain, conditions weren’t so great for documenting the plants Kitty or I noticed along the way. I did get photos of a lousewort (Pedicularis sp) I saw where we started to drop down off the rounded back of the ridge. From there, I mostly focused on picking the most reasonable seeming ways to travel down the valley, hoping not to get caught up in any difficult blown down or brushy sections. My memories are faint as I write this, but for the most part we made steady progress through the upper part of the valley. Things got more interesting in the broader lower section.
I stopped for an unusual-for-Sitka-area orchid. It seemed worth getting my camera out, and I took a few minutes to get set up with my tripod and get the photos. By this time we had been going for 7 hours and most of my travelling companions were not so interested in standing around. I was at least somewhat aware the impatience, and Kitty told me later she ran a little interference for me, reminding folks this was part of why we were here in the first place. A bit later, I didn’t stop for photos of marsh marigold (Caltha palustris), in order to avoid drama. However, it was a species I had never seen before, and I remained a bit annoyed that I hadn’t felt I could get photos of it there. [With the cameras I started using later, it would have been easy to get at least a quick shot of it, but cell phones with decent cameras and compact tough cameras weren’t in my arsenal at the time. As it turned out, I didn’t see marsh marigolds again until a visit to Yakutat in 2014, my first photos weren’t until a 2016 visit to Taylor Bay north of Elfin Cove, and it was 2019 before I finally got an observation of them in the Sitka area, on a trip to Lake Eva.]
By the evening, my cell phone battery was dying, and I could no longer check in on what limited imagery we had. By this time we were in the lowest section of the valley perhaps only a mile and a bit from the shoreline. Seeing some swampy looking beaver-flooded area, I chose to go down towards the middle of the valley. We started running into more beaver works. I was quite went, and would have been okay just wading the waist-deep beaver created channels for what seemed to be a more direct route to where we wanted to go. Others were not up for it. So we backtracked a bit towards the southern edge of the valley and found our way around the beaver swamp.
We ultimately made camp in some old-growth forest not all that far from the beach. I’m not sure we actually knew how close it was at the time, but we were ready to be done, as by now it was getting late in the evening. A warm fire and some food helped brighten the mood of the group after our soggy trek.
My iNaturalist Observations for Today
