The View from the Boat Landing

Posted on May 1, 2024 by Jack & Barbra Donachy

Behind me from where I stood as I composed this photograph, a dirt and gravel road travels a winding path along steep hillsides for about three miles to the Chignik Lake airfield, a bouncy dirt airstrip capable of handling the nine-seat bush planes and smaller aircraft that regularly travel the Alaska Peninsula. For the first two-and-a-half miles from the boat landing the road hugs steep hills, often within view of the river. Traveling the road from June through November, it’s common – at times almost a given – that you’ll see one of more of the Chignik’s massive brown bears. Sandhill Cranes, Tundra Swans, eagles and any number of passerines are frequently encountered in summer, and at any time of year a glimpse of foxes, moose, wolves and even wolverines is possible. Take note of the local hares you might catch sight of – Tundra Hares, the largest hares in the world.

The road is the road… the road to The Pad… the Top Road. Three miles. On one end, unless you are on a Honda (an ATV), you would need to board a plane to travel further by vehicle. On the other end, you need a skiff. There is no overland connection with any other community. Mountains, rough terrain and jungle-thick alders make travel by foot even to the village of Chignik Lagoon – just six miles down the peninsula from Chignik Lake – impractical. Whether one travels by air or by sea, it is 353 miles to Homer, Alaska – the closest place a road connecting with the North American mainland can be joined.

Is “wilderness village” an oxymoron?

One Fine Morning

Posted on April 27, 2024 by Jack & Barbra Donachy

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. Henry Thoreau, Walden

Those Crickety Chirps Mean It’s Fall on the Chignik

Posted on March 30, 2024 by Jack & Barbra Donachy

**Male Golden-crowned Kinglet** – Chignik Lake, Sitka Spruce Grove, January 23, 2018
*Making our way along a bear trail I hacked open as it descend*s through a dense alder thicket toward creek bottom, we hear them – cricket-like whisper-chirps. They’re in there somewhere, hidden in a jungle leaves the alders are stubbornly holding onto even as nighttime temperatures dip and we awake to frosted mornings. Kinglets. The Silvers are in, all but the Monkey Flower, Goldenrod and maybe the last of the Yarrow is gone… Fireweed gone to seed, *big brown bears fat with Sockeyes, terminal dust on the mountains. Fall on the Chignik.*

Golden-crowned Kinglets are another species that is either absent or listed only as “rare” on Alaska Peninsula avian checklists. This might be because they are only a fall through early spring visitor to that part of the world, as is the case at The Lake. Or it could be that even in those non-breeding seasons these hardy little being rely on the shelter provided by mature spruce trees which, for now, only occur near the peninsula’s tiny, scattered villages. JD

Wilderness Camp – but What Is Wilderness?

Posted on February 27, 2024 by Jack & Barbra Donachy

**Wilderness Camp**
*Denali National Park, 6/7/17*

We procured a backcountry permit at the park office, took a shuttle bus a ways into the park, debarked and backpacked into the landscape in this photo to spend a couple of nights. The only sign of people we came across was a plastic lens cap from a camera – something accidentally lost, not littered. Caribou and Dall Sheep, Wolf prints and Wolverine tracks… A Grizzly Bear caused us to change our course… Short-eared Owls cruising low, nesting Willow Ptarmigan hens – the males waking us at first light with their call of Potato! Potato! Potato. Tree Sparrows flushing from tiny ground nests where clutches of blue-green & brown eggs were crowded together. We came across Caribou antler sheds; a moose rack attached to a skull suggested a successful hunt by wolves. In 1846, Thoreau needed only to travel from Concord, Massachusetts to Maine’s Mt. Katahdin* to immerse in the vital contact with wilderness he sought. During the 2022-2023 season, 105,000 tourists traveled to Antarctica – up from just 5,000 only a few years prior… which was up from somewhere near zero not so long before that. Even Alaska’s remote, far-north rivers are typically floated by multiple parties each year. Not long ago I came across a recent piece of video depicting an unimproved campsite I overnighted at on youthful floats down my native Clarion River. The site was seldom used in those days, nearly pristine, and you could nice-sized large trout in the pool and the riffle water that flowed by. The contemporary video showed trampled vegetation, fire pit scars, bags of trash…

There are no doubt as many definitions of wilderness as there are human expectations of what might be present or absent in such a place. The one certainty is that wilderness is becoming more difficult to find, to immerse in, to discover and explore. My recollection of reading Thoreau’s account of his attempt to ascend Katahdin is that at some point the climb (or was it the descent?) was terrifying. Perhaps therein lies a piece of what wilderness means… a place cut off from civilization, where things could go wrong, and if they do, you’re on your own. There’s something liberating in it.