Cibecue Creek, part 3 of 4, possibly 5: We happen upon a frog, experience a bit of adventure, then hike into a place of magic

I will begin with the frog, which we happened upon shortly after we started to hike. As you can see, it was a tiny frog, but it brought to mind a bigger frog that I encountered very near to this place over 30 years ago. On March 10, I wrote a bit about my friend Vincent Craig, who was fighting the cancer that on May 15 took him.*

One of the experiences that I recounted was a nighttime rescue that he led that took place in a canyon cut out by one of the creeks that flows out of the White Mountain Apache reservation into the Salt River.

Perhaps it was this very creek, Cibecue. I cannot remember for certain, as we did the hike in and out and scaled the cliffs from which two waterfalls fell in the darkness of night. I have no visual memories of the terrain through which we hiked.

This creek does lead to a couple of falls, however, and it is a creek that is sometimes visited by non-tribal members, such as the blond woman who fell on the cliff and broke her leg.

There is another creek further upstream that also does. So it could have been either one. Somewhere, I have it written down and stored away, but that document would be hard to find and I haven't the time to look for it.

Near the beginning of that rescue hike on that night three decades ago, I was stumbling about on the rocks as we worked our way upstream when suddenly I felt something cool and clammy plop down upon my left wrist. "Snake!" was my immediate thought - "rattler" in particular. I let out a little shriek, but kept enough composure not to jerk my hand away until I knew what was on it and what it was doing.

I transferred the beam of my flashlight from the rocks below my feet to my wrist and there saw the startled eyes of a big frog, looking back at me.

Lisa holds the frog out for Kalib to see. Kalib cautiously touches it.

From the moment we came upon the creek and I looked at the walls rising into mountains on all sides of us, this line from Vincent's song, Someone Drew a Line, came into my head: "Between The Four Sacred Mountains we lived in harmony..."

These were not The Four Sacred Mountains that Vincent wrote about, yet, in their way, I believe all the mountains to be sacred and so it seemed appropriate. This song would stay in my head throughout the hike - for every minute of it, every second. Not for a moment would it leave me.

Sometimes Kalib hiked on his own power. Sometimes, he would be carried - either by his dad or his uncles, Caleb, Rex and Charlie.

Due to my shoulder, I could not carry him.

Mostly, we hiked through water. Before we started to hike, the heat had felt oppressive and I had wondered how we were going to do it. The water mitigated that heat. It turned out to be no problem at all.

Jacob trips and goes down while carrying Kalib.

Jacob gives Kalib an assist up a boulder, to his waiting mother.

There, atop the boulder, she changes his diaper, then helps him into a new one. Let no one doubt - she will pack the dirty diaper all the way up and all the way out. Other than temporary footprints, we would leave no sign of ourselves behind.

Kalib splashes water.

Jacob and Lisa hiking up Cibecue Creek.

Lisa comes to a big rock. She debates whether to go over it or around it.

She chooses to go over it. I walk around and get this picture of her as she tops it.

Although everyone had spread apart, we somehow all came together at this point. Something in the sky then caught everyone's attention.

It is a magnificent bird - a turkey vulture. At this moment, I kind of wished that I drug along my big cameras and my 100 to 400 zoom, but it was really nice to hike with a just a little tiny camera that I could slip in and out of my t-shirt pocket.

As everyone was gathered in one spot, we decided this would be a good moment to make a good group portrait - sans me. Kalib had grown hungry and so dug into his nose to see if might find something good to eat there.

He did. And he ate it.

Rex carries Kalib as we continue on.

Jacob and Lavina, hiking through the water.

Lavina and Jacob, stepping out of the water.

Melanie pauses by a big rock.

Kalib rests upon a rock.

Jacob and Rex survery the terrain ahead.

Jacob climbs over a rock and comes upon this drift log, wedged into a crevasse. "It looks just like a big b..." he exclaimed. I will leave the "b..." to your imaginations.

I will probably get in trouble with some of the female members of the family for even having said just this much.

Jacob climbs out onto the log and waves at Kalib, who is still working his way in this direction.

Uncle Caleb assists nephew Kalib as he works his way over a series of big rocks alongside water that was too deep to walk through.

Kalib tops the rock. Caleb offers him a "high-five."

Melanie finds a very pretty rock, which she shows to everybody. 

She by-passes a deep pool via a well-scuplted boulder. By now, we can hear the distant roar of a water fall. It sounds kind of like a jet.

As we move upstream, past cutouts in the rock, the roar of the falls grows louder.

And here it is, the lower of the two Cibecue Falls. It feels as though we have hiked into a place of magic.

Tomorrow: We frolic in the place of magic.

*Today, June 6, would have been Vincent Craig's 60th birthday. Today, his mother Nancy Mariano passed away, also from cancer. 

Back in Wasilla, where a moose ran into the trees and Branson caught a fish, I glimpse back at Cibecue Creek

It is a beautiful Saturday here in Wasilla, Alaska. The sun shines brightly upon foilage, lucious and green. The air is pleasantly warm, leaning towards hot but not quite there yet. A light breeze rustles the leaves and the aroma given off by all this new greenery and blossoming flowers is sweet.

So I don't really want to spend the day inside, yet I have spent the past two-and-a-half hours doing just that - editing my take of May 27, when several of us took a hike up Cibecue Creek from the place where it empties into the Salt River. This, of course, took place in the homeland of Arizona's White Mountain Apache Tribe, of which my wife and children are all enrolled members.

It was a hike that began in desert heat intense enough to cause me to wonder if it was such a good idea for all of us to take off into it with a two-and-a-half year old boy walking along, but our destination would be one of magic, if we could but reach it.

Do you think this little boy, Kalib, could handle the six-hour hike that lay ahead of him?

I can't spend anymore time on it right now, but please come back tomorrow and I will show you.

I have a great deal of catching up to do - from my trips to Arizona and to Anaktuvuk Pass. I hope to get all caught up within a week, possibly two, certainly no more than three, because three weeks from right now the plan is for me to be on my way to Greenland - I MUST be caught up by then.

Kalib, by the way, is enrolled not in the White Mountain Apache Tribe but in the Navajo Nation. Both the Apache and Navajo are matrilineal societies, hence Kalib and Jobe belong to their mother's tribe and clan.

Just to make it clear that I truly am back in Wasilla, where I am attempting to slip back into my "normal home routine" for the three weeks that it might be possible to do so, here is a moose that I caught with my pocket camera as I drove down Shrock Road.

Even as I catch up on Arizona and Anaktuvuk Pass, I will drop in images from Wasilla, just to keep up to date.

Just before I came upon the moose, I had made the usual afternoon stop at Metro Cafe, where Carmen showed me this picture that she took of her son, Branson, her husband Scott and the fish Branson had just caught. As you can see, it is a special moment, but it is even more special than you likely realize, for there is a bigger story here.

I will tell it when time and circumstance permit. Carmen is going to throw a big five-year birthday party for Branson on the 27th. She thought that this would be a good time for me to come, take pictures and tell the story, but I will be Greenland then.

I am excited to be making my second trip to Greenland, but I hate to miss this party.

That's how this life is, though. To experience one thing, you must miss out on another - no: a trillion-plus others. An infinite number of others.

I find this very frustrating.

In keeping with tradition, I now title this image: Through the Window Metro Study, #6699.

Anaktuvuk Pass: remembering loved ones who have passed on

This is the post that I had planned to put up Tuesday morning, but I could not get online. 

I arrived in Anaktuvuk Pass on Memorial Day afternoon with several friends and relatives of Ben (B-III) Hopson the Third and Nasuġraq Rainey Higbee, who would wed the next day.

There was much good food in the house - caribou stew, caribou meat, fresh rolls and such and I had already fed myself a good sampling of it when I learned that the community was going to gather at the cemetery at 5:00 PM, to remember loved ones buried there and to feast in their honor.

When the time came, I joined several members of the wedding party and we walked over together.

When we arrived, I saw a group of people gathered just off the southern edge of the cemetery, the mountains of the Brooks Range rising behind, in front of and all around them. They were praying.

The man leading the prayer was Dr. James Nageak, an Iñupiaq hunter, scholar, retired university professor and Presbyterian preacher. That's James to the left, wearing the green coat.

He thanked the Lord for the lives lived by all those buried here, and for the beautiful land and the animals that had sustained them and that continue to sustain the people of Anaktuvuk Pass today.

After he finished, the Reverend Keith Johnston, right, who now serves as pastor for Anaktuvuk's Presbyterian "Chapel in the Mountains," read scripture.

Then the feasting began. Although I had already eaten, I ate again. I had more caribou soup, I had fish, wild berries, Eskimo donuts; I made certain to get some of the bowhead maktak that had been boiled into uunaalik, seen here just to the right of the spaghetti.

The spaghetti, by the way, is caribou spaghetti. It was superb.

Rachel Riley asked me how my shoulder was healing up. Rachel was in the Barrow High cafeteria on June 12, 2008, when I took my fall, shattered my shoulder, got loaded into a Lear Jet ambulance and was flown on a $37,000 + ambulance ride to Providence Hospital in Anchorage, where I went through two surgeries and had my natural bone replaced by an artificial, titantium, shoulder.

I told her that it had healed well and I was doing good, but that it would never be what it was before. For all it's technical medical wonder, this titanium just cannot match my natural bone. Yet, I am greatly thankful to have it.

Rachel then explained to Ada Lincoln exactly what she had saw that day when I fell off the rolling chair while taking a picture (and Rachel, by the way, is in the last frame that I shot just before the chair rolled out from under me).

A boy walks through the cemetery, looking at the graves of relatives and friends.

Raymond Paneak took me to the grave of his brother, George, who died on September 19, 2009, at the age of 60. George had been Mayor of the village and was an active leader in the Healthy Communities movement, a grass-roots effort to stem the harm and damage that the abuse of alcohol and drugs has caused in the Far North.

Freida Rulland, left, showed me the grave of her father and my friend, Paul Hugo. A good twenty-years ago plus, Paul took me to many places in these mountains, by snowmachine, eight-wheeled Argo, depending on the season, and on foot in search of caribou. 

We found a few, too.

He had also kept me as a house-guest in his home. We had eaten pancakes in the morning, caribou in the evening.

Although I of course knew that he had died, it none-the-less shocked me to see his name stenciled into the cross that marks his grave.

He passed away on October 9, 2009, at the age of 49.

I told Frieda and her sister that I would stop by and say "hi" to their mother, but my trip was short and I was busy every waking minute of it and I never got a chance.

I expect to be back in Anaktuvuk before too long, though, and I will then.

Freida's sister, Amanilla Hugo, stands to the far right.

Two little ones, growing up in Anaktuvuk Pass.

The delay was long, but finally I flew to Anchorage and drove home to Wasilla, where a fish had jumped out of a tank

Given the non-stop intensity and full range of emotion that I have experienced these past few weeks, coupled with a chronic lack of sleep, I am a tired and lazy boy. I have no desire to blog or to do anything but to lay around, vegetate and indulge in the pleasures that lie on the soft and easy side of life, all of which seem to be out of reach.

So I will just post another traveling blog, with little comment. Tomorrow, I hope to get back to some serious blogging.

This is from yesterday afternoon in Fairbanks International Airport, where delay compounded delay. At one point as I was web-surfing, my adopted Wainwright Sister, Mary Ellen Ahmaogak (left, holding cards), appeared suddenly at my side and so I stood up and we gave each other a hug.

A bit later, she joined some other Arctic Slope ladies in a game of Snert.

Maybe if I had asked, I could have joined in, too, but they would have slaughtered me.

When it comes to Snert, they are all very cunning and ruthlessly ruthless.

So I sat in Fairbanks International Airport from 11:35 AM until about 5:30 PM. Finally, I was on the plane, sitting in Window Seat 7F. I observed other people debarking from another flight.

As you can see, the smoke from the wildfires remained heavy, although not so bad as when I passed through on the way to AKP.

Then came the preflight briefing. As usual, the passengers paid rapt attention to every word and demonstration, as all of our lives could depend upon it.

I wonder what it feels like, to have two batons in your hands and to order the pilot of a big jet around? Even if for just a few moments?

Of course, if that pilot were to accidently run over a duck because you waved a baton wrong, it wouldn't feel very good at all.

Then we were rising from the runway, passing over moth-balled airplanes as we climbed. Someone should give me one of those airplanes. I would put it in my back yard and move my office into it.

I think the cats and I would be very happy in such an office and it would give the fish a new place to swim.

Then I noticed that the sun had come through the window and had lit my hand up.

Lots of cumulous clouds in the air. 

Can you see Denali, right under the wing tip?

That's the highest mountain in North America, you know - and the tallest mountain in the world, measured from base to peak rather than feet above sea level.

We here in Alaska all love this mountain and most of us hate to hear it called McKinley. It is just not right to call it McKinley.

Here we are, descending over the Cook Inlet mudflats on final approach into Ted Stevens International Airport in Anchorage.

I wonder how Ted Stevens feels, when he sits on a plane descending on final into this airport?

And then we were at the gate, ready to deboard.

Back in Wasilla, a dog looked at me.

After I returned to my house, I discovered that the small green terror that had disappeared and so I had thought might have been eaten had not been eaten after all.

It had jumped out of the tank, had flopped its way several feet until it was under my work table and there it had died and dried. It didn't smell too good.

I try to keep my tanks covered, but awhile before I left, Pistol-Yero climbed upon the 95 gallon tank and broke one-half of the cover.

I wasn't worried, though, because I did not think there were any jumpers in there.

Just a little bit ago, Pistol-Yero climbed atop the 55 gallon tank and collapsed one half of the cover. I don't think he broke it, though. I don't think there are any jumpers in there, but I had better fish that cover out and put it back.

I was wrong before, I could be wrong again.

It just wouldn't be right to lose another good fish because it jumped out of the tank.

Back online at Fairbanks International Airport, enroute AKP - to ANC

This is Anaktuvuk Pass, this morning about 8:00 AM. I will make a couple of good reports from Anaktuvuk -maybe three or four, perhaps even more, but this post is not one of them. This post has but one purpose - to let you know that I am back online and to get something up at a reasonable hour of this day.

I am online because I am at Gate 1 at the Alaska Airlines Terminal of the Fairbanks International Airport, where my plane is scheduled to board, shortly. The airport has free wireless - as, indeed, all good, full-service, airports should.

This is Nasuġraq Rainey, formerly Higbee, but as of yesterday afternoon, Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson, her cat, Harley and her sister, Angela. Eventually, I will prepare a good report on the wedding of Rainey and B-III, and I will also give Harley a post all of her own, because she certainly deserves, but I will not do so now.

Right now, I just have to get something up, so I can catch my plane.

And here is Payuk, with one of Rainey's puppies. The puppy's dad just might be a wolf, who Rainey spotted one day eyeing a penned dog in heat. Maybe the wolf figured out how to get to the dog.

And here I am, in the plane, wishing that it was my plane, as the pilot prepares to lift off the runway.

And here we all are, the pilot, me, Byron and Alvira, airborne, leaving AKP, headed to Fairbanks.

And here we are, flying through the Brooks Range.

There are wildfires burning and so the air is filled with smoke. Two days ago, enroute from FAI to AKP, the smoke was so thick that we could not even see the Yukon River when we flew over it.

Today, although hazy, we could at least see the Yukon.

And here we are, landing in Fairbanks.

This is all I am going to post for now. My plane is scheduled to begin boarding in 11 minutes. I want to get a treat before it boards.

Update, 2:45 PM:

Well, my flight has been delayed. By an hour-and-a-half.

Damnit.

Guess I will sit here and web surf.