Let the Sunshine In

First nice day in two weeks, and I mean nice. Blue sky, sun, no clouds anywhere, not even a wisp. I woke up at about 4:30 and saw the sun shining in, full blast, as if it were nine in the morning. I kept dozing and waking up, each time looking out of the half-opened window at the head of my bed, gleeful at the sunshine, finally, after two long weeks of overcast, bleached out skies.
We hiked up the Nugget Creek Trail on the east side of Mendenhall Glacier. One member of our group who is a local said he does the trail in two and a half hours. We got back to Banfield about six hours after we started. It wasn’t a particularly strenuous hike, but I didn’t feel like running and there were some mucky, sloggy patches (and I had little desire to relive my experience in the bog). We had some phenomenal views of the glacier, and the glacial lake, which is greyish green, full of suspended silt. The bottom is a soft, slimy clay, and the water felt refreshing on my feet after four hours in wool socks, but soon enough my ankles began to numb. Chunks of bluish ice were floating in the lake at a distance, still coated with the grey detritus of the glacier. Our hike led us parallel to the lake and then up a ridge, at the bottom of which gushed Nugget "Creek," a torrent of white water at least thirty feet wide.
The trail—despite how my legs feel now and the time it took us to do it—was not particularly strenuous, and it felt even less like "wilderness" every time six or seven Bread Loafers took out their digital cameras to snap pictures of the same vista. We did see a porcupine, waddling in a hurried panic down the trail, surprised, no doubt, by our conversation. He was smallish and trotted up a hill, wiggling his quilly bottom in an attempt to clamber away from whatever danger he thought we posed. We also saw a mouse in three pieces on a stump, missing some innards and looking very much like a moldy earthworm. So things do eat here.
And when we got back down to the Glacier Visitor Center, at about 2:00 pm, the area was flooded with tourists and the parking lot crowded with luxury coach buses. At 2:00 pm! What a waste of a gorgeous day. Having just gotten off the trail, I was sweaty and tired, and my boots were caked with muck. I felt good compared to those retirees and foreigners in designer casual wear and sun visors, with their expensive cameras and their jokes about taking the elevator, good about tromping around in sunshine and clean air, all glacier ice and spruce and chalky wet silt.
Of course, I still don’t know what kind of forest I was in, or what event triggered the stages of succession, and I think that’s fine.