Biting At The Waves

At Mile 27 Out the Road is a trail that I had not explored before called Windfall Trail. 

After digging them out, the two Juneau trail books that I have told me that it was a relatively flat trail.

This past Monday, on a beautiful and sunny and warm day after work my Mountain Boy and I decided to check it out and see what we could see.

Above is an up close picture of Devil's Club in the summer.

This new-to-me northeast plant is ugly and nasty when it is dormant through the winter - nothing but ugly and leafless thorny brown stumps. 

I first found it by accident just a week after I arrived in Alaska.  Walking in the woods I made a grab (as a balance check) without looking, at what I thought was a branch hanging down.  My hand hurt instantly when I wrapped my hand around the stalk and was impaled with sharp thorns.  Ouch. 

In the summer this plant looks like this.........large and lush green leaves, thorns on both the stalks and on the bottom of the leaves, and lovely berry-like flowers.

I am not certain that I "like" this plant, but in summer it is an exotic and beautiful plant in its own right.

The picture below was taken from the river bank by the circular gravel parking lot.......

Me and Jamie getting ready to head into the trail......

For the first couple of miles the open and gravel trail was very flat and open.

It was surrounded on both sides by very lush greenery - lots of devils' club and ferns.

Although the walk was nice, it was flat and (to me) boring.  No roots or rocks or overlooks or open places to see the river or the mountains. 

No real challenges and not really anything to see.

Beautiful and green, and full of open gravel and plank trail.........

After a couple of miles the trail did eventually open up enough that I could climb down to the riverbank and take a couple of very beautiful pictures of the mountains and very blue water.

Even though the air temperature was very warm, there was a low-lying layer of fog just above the water......

And some more plank trail........

We crossed a sturdy wooden bridge that provided unobscured views of the river on both sides.........

By the time we got to this place I was beginning to really enjoy the walk.

The river was really beautiful and so were the mountains.....

Once we crossed over the bridge the trail changed to a combination of wooden plank, and some knotty and gnarly trail that was more interesting to me, but which began to wreak havoc on LC's injured knee.....

After walking just a short way we came to this.......

After walking on this trail for a couple of miles I had begun to resign myself to the fact that this would be a boring, quiet and closed-in walk.

It was completely unexpected that we would come across a view of this glacier, these snow capped mountains, and what was, by this point, a raging Class 2 and 3 river.  So cool.  So very very cool. 

Another gift.

We stayed at this place for a long time.....

Even though my Mountain Boys' knee was bothering him a good deal, he wanted to go further - to see what else was up ahead.

We both knew from the trail books that the trail ended at a lake and cabin, and we wanted to see them.

So we continued further.......

Beyond the river access, the trail progressively became more challenging.  More roots.  Some incline. 

A small pond we found along the trail....

We ended up not travelling a whole lot further beyond the river.

We were beginning to run out of daylight.

And the trail, for someone with an injured knee, was becoming too challenging.

We sat for a while, ate a power bar, drank some water, and then began to head back.

We made a decision while sitting on a log, that unless we knew exactly where we were headed on a trail, that we would hold off on long excursions until the weekends, when we could take our time and start out early....

Interesting scenes from the trails.

A gnarly trail.  A wooden bridge.  And a series of wooden steps that were part of an extensive wooden plank trail...

When we got back to the parking area we walked down to the banks of the river again and took some beautiful pictures of beautiful mountains....

Jamie beside the riverbed along the trail.

When she first arrived in Juneau we took our previously land-locked pup to the Boy Scout Beach.  The waves were lapping up against the shore, and our dog had never seen waves before.  She was terrified of them and we literally had to drag her into the water.

A few weeks later we took her to Eagle Beach and she spent a good deal of our visit barking at the waves and trying to bite them.

We laughed a lot at our Jamie-dog running from one wave to the next trying to nip and bite at them each time they came into shore.

And on Monday I had to hold her back beside this river.  She made a jump for a wave a few feet from shore, wanting to reach it and bite it.

If she hadn't been on the leash I have no doubt she would have jumped right into the water and gotten swept down river.........