Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
aparts, cheese omelets with bacon, melon, hot oatmeal if you want it and it'll fit, and the
best coffee I've ever drunk. After breakfast, Simon and Jenna Cole, daughter of Jerri and
Wally Cole and Simon's fiance, have the guests introduce themselves. There is a Latvian
businessman and his daughter, a retired couple from Calgary, a 737 pilot and an accounts
manager from Ohio, an attorney and a Mastercard market researcher from New York, a
slew of Fenwicks and a Fenwickian son-in-law from California, the Douglases from Jun-
eau, there with relatives from Massachusetts, a couple from Michigan, and a lady from
Georgia.
We make our own lunch from a buffet line in the mess hall, ham and cheese sand-
wiches, apples, oranges, cookies, with homemade bread and all the trimmings. I'm always
nervous when I'm fed this well, I suspect they're going to work it off me, and I'm right.
And then we're off, some of us on a strenuous hike up the ridge in back of the cabins,
some of us on a moderate hike across the tundra below. The moderate hike heads straight
out across the taiga, Simon in the lead, and is boggy and seriously buggy. I'm wearing a
headnet for the first time in my life, which creates my very own little private sauna.
“Anybody got a quarter for the wind machine?” Simon asks.
Around us upland sandpipers are giving out with their car-alarm bird calls. Simon takes
a ski pole and thrusts it straight down into the tundra. It stops with a solid “thunk” at four-
teen inches, hitting permafrost. We're walking on a layer of vegetation that is literally
floating on ice. Simon pulls up a handful of sphagnum, a dark green moss with antiseptic
qualities good for dressing wounds.
The elevation changes only two hundred feet in 1.8 miles, but the terrain changes from
taiga to tundra to alpine meadow. Balsam poplars, wild roses, dwarf dogwood, chiming
bells, lowbush cranberry, alpine bearberry, dwarf fireweed, quaking aspen, and crowberry
bushes elbow each other for room. White spruce straggle up in isolated patches, their bot-
tom branches healthy from where they've been covered by snow, their top branches
spindly from exposure to blowing snow and frost. Everywhere there are blueberries, it's
one big blueberry mat stretching for miles. “The berry picking here must be phenomenal,”
I say to Simon.
“The bears think so,” he replies.
