Day 2 of 4: Polychrome Mountain Exploring and Toklat River Camp

After a chilly and rather restless night, I rolled out of the sleeping bag around 7:00am and cooked myself some oatmeal. During breakfast, a golden eagle soared overhead. He must have smelled my oatmeal! While Zach and Mark slept I broke camp and got to work on getting my pack arranged better. Unfortunately there is just really no good spot for the damn bear canister. Try #2 had me putting it on the bottom of the pack (Spoiler Alert: This didn't work very good either!).

Setting out today we headed east towards Polychrome Mountain. This mountain stands on the north side of the Polychrome Glaciers that I hiked towards earlier, on my day hike in the Polychrome area. Summitting from the south side of the mountain is undesirable due to the high relief and excessive amount of scree (like all mountains and hills here). So we thought we might give it a try.

We started with our packs, which became undesirable quickly (scree+heavy packs+steepness=tiredness). We moved to a nice flat tundra clearing where we ditched our packs and took small loads (snacks and water) before continuing on. We continued another 1000 feet or so before the wind became really strong. We also found that the ridgeline we hoped would take us to the summit didn't connect like we hoped and going this way would likely lead to a late return to the packs. Oops!

Returning to the packs we headed east. This entailed fighting through a lot of willow bushes, which made the going slow and scratchy. We had viewed a couple of distant plateaus that looked hospitable and like possible camping locations, however upon reaching them we found they too had a lot of brush. This led us to a cool little creek.

Upon entering this creek bed we found mudslides on each side of the creek that had hardened. This area was probably really unstable this past spring. In the hardened mud were the tracks of many different creatures. The two notable sets of tracks were from wolf and bear. This coincided with the wolf cries we heard the night before and many bits of animals found along the creek. Many snow shoe hare were made a meal of along this creek, as evidenced by rabbit's feet deposited regularly.

After hiking a mile or two along this creek it flowed into the main branch of the Toklat River. We camped near the confluence of the creek and the Toklat. In fact, our cooking site was located on a 6 foot high bank of the Toklat, providing an amazing view of the Toklat riverbed and nearby Mt. Sheldon (we referred to this site as "Dinner Time Theater").

As I sat cooking, I was really struck by our day's travels and this park. The wide bed of the braided Toklat River was astrewn with stumps and bits from dead trees. The stumps attracted our gaze due to their resemblance to a passing bear. It was these stumps and thinking about traveling along the creek that I realized just how accelerated the life cycle is out here.

Old growth anything simply does not exist. Animals kill other animals and the drunken forests of black spruce show that even the vegetation isn't immune. In the bushy areas of the tundra, where willow trees clog any path you might find, snow shoes eat the bark and chew off their tips. Often leaving huge swaths scarred and dead (the snow shoe hare population in the park is the highest it has ever been and a crash in the population has been expected every summer for the last five years or so).

Tomorrow at Eielson Visitor Center we will find that not even the strong and vicious are above this life cycle. The angel of death works overtime in Denali National Park!