Camp Denali & North Face Lodge

This past week has been busier than usual but is emblematic of the activities this Camp Denali year-round staff member partakes in during the dark, cold winter months.

My name is Martha McPheeters. I am a Naturalist Guide in the summer and the Personnel Coordinator in the fall, winter and spring. Right now it is hiring season. My work life is full of interviewing potential staff, setting up in-person interviews, checking references, revising last years hiring documents and deciding who will work at Camp Denali/North Face Lodge during the upcoming summer.  The rest of this blog is about my non-work hours.

First to set the scene, it is NOT dark or cold by interior Alaska standards as this February week unfolds.  The most recent snowfall and sub-zero temperatures were in January and it is now late February. The minutes of sunlight each day have been increasing steadily since the winter solstice so that now we have nearly 11 hours of sun-above-the-horizon time each day.  At Solstice we had 4 hours of sun-above-the hypothetical-sea-level-horizon time. The light comes rushing back at 4-7 minutes per day. From the beginning of this week to the end, the amount sun-above-the-horizon time has increased by nearly 49 minutes.

Friday: On certain Fridays after work I join the Women’s Ice Hockey Team in Healy, AK to scrimmage. Today is the tenth day of above 32-degree temperatures and the outdoor rink is a big puddle. Hockey practice is cancelled so I head home.

Saturday: The DERT bags (the newly organized Denali Emergency Response Team) execute a practice search and rescue. Sixteen of us show up at 10 AM and pretend to find four skiers buried in an avalanche at some distance from our meeting point. With the rescue complete, the DERT retreats to 229 Parks Restaurant and Tavern to debrief the experience.  Many participants suggest improvements for next time.... the real rescue we hope will never happen.

Sunday: Sunday begins with brunch at my cabin. We eat artichokes that a California friend mailed to me after listening to me complain about the scarcity of the vegetables in the interior of Alaska in the winter. Brunch is followed by a ski trip up Riley Creek in Denali National Park on no-wax skis. My preference is waxable skis but today the snow underfoot has been thawed and refrozen maybe 10 times making proper wax selection impossible.

In the evening, I put my books and homework into a pack and walk over to a neighbor’s house for Physics Class.  This small group of older women who had Math or Physics majors in college have been getting together weekly to take an online Physics course from MIT. Actually that was last winter, this winter we have become less formal and choose topics of mutual interest to research. Tonight we are making telescopes from cardboard toilet paper tubes and lenses we acquired from broken cameras, broken magnifying glasses and toys. We find ourselves flummoxed by the need for a parabolic mirror. In the process we discover that collectively we do remember the equation for a parabola and how to calculate the focal length of the mirror we do not have.

Monday: It is still above freezing so I go for a bike ride to Carlo Creek on completely bare roads. Then I move firewood from a tarp-covered heap to my now half-empty woodshed.  I wonder if wood-burning season is half-over.

Tuesday: Today is cooler, a high of 20 degrees and we’ve had a whiff of snow greatly improving the ski conditions. I go for a six-mile ski on my waxable skis.

Wednesday: Now there is an inch of new snow and the temperature is 10 degrees. I hook up a neighbor’s dog and skijor for nearly three hours covering more miles than I could ski in the same period of time. (Skijor means to use a dog to assist a cross-country skier. The dog and the skier wear harnesses and are connected by a length of rope.  The skier provides propulsion with skis and poles while the dog pulls.)

Trudging home in the evening, the snow has the unmistakable and satisfying squeak that accompanies sub-zero temperatures. I get home and sure enough, it is 4 below zero.

Thursday: I attend my weekly Tai Chi group in Healy. This group learned a Yang style short form in 1999 and has been meeting weekly ever since to read from the Tao Te Ching, do Shibashi and practice the form.

Friday: Three more inches of snow have fallen. Yippee! A friend asked if I would be willing to exercise her sled dogs while she is gone. This friend, Nan Eagleson, former Camp Denali guide, is going to “town” to guide Exporitas (formally Elderhostel) trips to the Fur Rondy and the Iditarod dog sled races. I love mushing dogs and this afternoon I hook up Nan’s six mellow, aging sled dogs and go for a run. There is nothing quite so thrilling or quite so Alaskan as riding the runners behind eagerly pulling dogs.

In the evening there is a dessert potluck to kick-off Winterfest. (I did find time to make cookies.) Winterfest is a three-day celebration of winter for those of us living just outside the eastern boundary of Denali National Park.  The keynote address this year is given by our very own Jerryne and Wally Cole, the owners of Camp Denali. They give a wonderful presentation that starts with baby pictures of Celia Hunter and Ginny Hill, the founders of Camp Denali, and end with baby pictures of their grandchildren, the potential inheritors of Camp Denali.

Closing: Perhaps these few paragraphs will give the summer guest to Camp Denali pause to re-consider the inevitable question that year-round staff answer repeatedly, “What do you do all winter in Alaska?”
 

What’s your preference? Spruce or birch? When it comes to heating our homes and cabins this winter, this question is one of many about the methods we use. Many people heat their homes with oil, as natural gas is not available north of the Matanuska Valley in Alaska. To supplement that, both financially and environmentally, most of us utilize the local abundance of trees we have right here.

The process of rendering a standing tree to logs burning in our wood stoves takes several steps, as well as a substantial amount of time. Dead trees are ideal, as you don’t have to ‘cure’ them in your yard for a few years prior to burning. The tree has to be sawed down, the branches taken off, and the trunk chopped into sections (aka ‘bucked up’). Then you haul those sections home, and split the logs. Colder days are ideal, as the grains of the wood split more easily then. A sharp big ax and maul are very useful here, as well as having a healthy chunk of confidence. I never seem to split my logs perfectly on the first swing, and end up grabbing the maul a lot. I get particularly befuddled by knots in the wood, which are basically scars from when old branches fell off. One of these days I’ll be a regular Paul Bunyan, I swear.

My naturalist’s sense of wonder is still active while splitting the logs. Inside, I find several grubs, which have bored extensive networks through the logs. How is it that I can hardly get a heavy ax through the logs, with all the help of physics and a young back on my side, while a grub the size of my fingernail can? Seeing these little guys doesn’t exactly make me jump for joy, however. They are reminiscent of the recent explosion of spruce bark beetles in south central Alaska, which has left vast swaths of boreal forest dead or dying. The incidences of wildfires have escalated due to the abundance of dry timber. Similar problems are occurring in the lodge pole pine forests of states such as Montana. Although the direct reason for their explosion is speculative, it probably correlates with global climate change and warming winter temperatures.

But for now I’ll do my part to reduce carbon emissions, and keep my cabin cool. 50 degrees is the baseline temperature while I’m out for the day, but I throw some wood in the fireplace while I’m home and heat it up to a comfy 70 or so. Norwegians have a word for a quaint, rustic but cozy atmosphere like the one generated by a wood stove. The word is “koselig,” and though it has no direct English translation, embodies the essence of a warm winter retreat. We hope you are all having a koselig winter, as we think about the summer to come and the seasons which lie ahead of us.

At the humid edge of a mangrove swamp, on one of dozens of palm-fringed coral islands that fringe the Celebes Sea, a small greenish bird feels it.

On the sun-seared savannah of Tanzania, darting after insects stirred up in the dust by the hooves of zebras and wildebeest, a pale cinnamon bird with a black and white tail feels it.

In the teeth of a roaring Antarctic gale on the Weddell Sea, the gray ocean churned as white as the eroding summer pack ice against which it crashes, a lithe seabird borne effortlessly on the wind feels it.

As dusk falls along the Essequibo River in northern South America, and the first bats begin skimming the water's surface while a tinamou gives its last, plaintive whistle somewhere in the darkening forest, a slender, streaky olive bird settles into a sheltering clump of leaves for the night, and feels it.

Whether they spend the winter in the company of crocodiles and hornbills, lions and gazelles, leopard seals and penguins, jaguars and anacondas, the Arctic warbler, northern wheatear, Arctic tern and blackpoll warbler all sense the same growing tug. Scattered as they are across almost the entire globe, they all feel the pull back to Denali, back to the Alaskan landscape of their birth.

Right now, the spruces along Moose Creek where the blackpolls nest lay silent under snow; the winds howl unchecked through Thorofare Pass, where the wheatears sing in June. The tundra ponds are locked in ice, the willow thickets empty. Only the hardiest ones, the rock ptarmigans and the gyrfalcons, the ravens and gray jays, hunker down and tough it out.

But for the migrants, living their distant lives in distant places, the draw of the breeding season will soon make itself known; one day soon a little itch will awaken in them, which will become a compulsion, which eventually becomes the overwhelming, incontestable command: Fly.

And back they will come, as the snows melt and life returns to the tundra. And I'll be there, too, migrant that I am, because even here in the gentle mountains of Pennsylvania, where what we call winter has finally settled in, I can feel that same tidal force, that same growing itch that tells me it will soon be time to head back to Denali.

When the first Arctic warbler of the summer, freshly arrived from the hazy mangroves of the Philippines, begins to chatter its song from the willows - I will be there too, to welcome both of us home.

Author Scott Weidensaul will be at Camp Denali June 4-10 to share more on bird migration and conservation of Alaska's avifauna.