Essays » Crow Pass
Alaska's Eagle Valley below Crow Pass is as pretty a place as you can image. The peaks of the Chugach mountains tumble down to the river in a series of high terraces and talus slopes grazed by mountain goats and Dall sheep. Lower down, the forest is white spruce and dense thickets of alders thrive where winter avalanches have disrupted the larger conifers. The trail wanders in and out of the dense forest and each time we emerged we were treated to a new vista. In 1995, Dan Boccia was similarly impressed by the place and, like us, was inclined to stop and take photographs from time to time. Dan saw something brown off the track and he took it for a moose. But then it morphed into a bear and he could see that it was feeding... and not on blueberries. The bear was tearing strips of flesh off a moose carcass and it hadn't seen Dan. Yet. He started his retreat, desperate not to alert the huge grizzly to his presence. All it took was the dull thud of his boot on an exposed tree root to turn his pleasant walk into a nightmare. By the time the bear had asserted it's ownership rights over it' kill, Dan had been bitten on both legs and shaken like a rag doll. He was raked the length of his body by the bear's massive claws and had a hole in his back, but somehow he managed to survive the attack and even made it back to the road end unassisted. Dan was lucky - a whole lot more so than the two mountain runners who were killed and eaten not far away just a couple of months later. 1995 was a bad year for bear attacks in the Chugach National Forest.
We knew none of this (Mark of the Grizzly - True Stories of Recent Bear Attacks and the Hard Lessons Learned is the sort of book you buy after forays into bear country) and were able to enjoy our tramp without the paranoia that might otherwise have detracted from the scenery. The other trampers we met on the trail were locals and when quizzed about bears, their cheerful nonchalance was reassuring. Moose, we were told, are just as dangerous. They can hold their own against wolves and bears and think nothing of disembowelling people if the mood takes them. Their razor-sharp size 12 hooves are ideally suited to the job.
The 42km route over Crow Pass, down Raven Creek and then the Eagle River is part of the National Historic Iditarod Trail. Being close to Anchorage, it is one of the more popular sections of the trail and is a convenient weekend tramp. The Iditarod trail is actually a 4000km series of trails stretching from Seward to Nome. It is best known for the Iditarod dog sled race that covers about 1600km from Anchorage to Nome every March. The race is a proving ground for Alaskans and is a cauldron of legends. In 1925, when a diptheria epidemic threatened the town of Nome and bad weather halted all flights, dog teams carried essential medicines in a relay that covered 1078km in just 127 hours. Most Alaskans can tell you that the lead dog of the team that charged into Nome was called Balto.
The Crow Pass route is infused with gold mining history and relics of the old workings are evident on the haul up to the pass from Girdwood. The route was used by dog teams until the railway from Anchorage to Fairbanks was completed in 1925. As we sweated up towards the pass in late summer, it was hard to imagine the place under snow and harder still to imagine negotiating the route with dog teams hauling heavily laden sleds. A foot race is held over the route each summer and the winning time is usually around three and a quarter hours. A couple of days walking, though gives plenty of time to savour the place. We were passed by several runners during our time on the trail and their presence added weight to our low-risk assessment of bears. Running into a bear is one of the worst things you can do, so the presence of runners suggested that there were few around.
So bear attacks, even moose attacks were not really on our minds as we wandered down the Eagle river, life slowly returning to our feet that had been numbed by the crossing of the frigid glacial meltwater that is the Eagle River. We were strung out, three of us with me in the rear, 20 metres or so behind the others, enjoying the perfect weather. The forest was quite open here and there seemed little chance of surprising any agressive megafauna. Something caught my eye on the trail, down by my feet. A dozen or so blowflies on some bear scat, perhaps... or so I thought in a distracted way... and then the pain hit me like a billy full of boiling water. "RUN!" I yelled as I took off, defying several laws of physics and middle age, frantically brushing wasps off my face, arms and legs as I sprinted down the track. Brent and Paul turned like startled deer to see what was wrong, but needed no further encouragement to join me in flight from my tormentors. A hundred metres or so down the trail, we were out of range and we conducted a review of the incident which two of us considered to be extremely funny. My sense of humour was buried in a sea of pain and my left arm was pretty much useless for the rest of the day.
That evening we shared wasp stories with the other trampers we camped with. Those of us who had been stung (and there were plenty who had) were able to forge friendships with mutual sympathy and we compared welts. The more stings you had, the higher your status. With a dozen to my credit, I was definitely in the upper echelon and the two on my face were especially de rigeur. It was, of course the people ahead of us who had stirred up the wasps, we agreed. As a collective, we were immune to the mirth of the unstung among us.
The camp sites on the Crow Pass Trail are basic, the only facilities being steel fire rings to contain ashes. Small bridges over streams were in disrepair and some had been replaced by logs with a single wire to hold onto. One group of four trampers we met were from a nearby airforce base and were air crew on AWACs. They would not be drawn on where they had seen action, and the occasional overflight by F-15s were a reminder to us on the trail that the United States Government had other things on its mind than fixing bridges over streams.
The trail condition improved as we came within day-trip proximity to the road end. Spruce forest was replaced by stands of aspens, their silver trunks sharply contrasting with a luxurious green ground cover. As we approached the information centre at Eagle Creek Road, it was sobering to find several of the short walks temporarily closed off due to "bear activity". Having now read "Bear Attacks", I can't help wonder what "activity" was being referred to.