Claire Henley: Adventures West (Beyond Realms: Part 2)

(Editor's Note: Chattanoogan Claire Henley started an adventure of a lifetime on the remote Pacific Crest Trail in April. Along the way, she had many adventures and found herself a husband named Big Spoon).

“The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure.”

-Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“What are we doing!” I cried out to Big Spoon. My hands trembled as they clung to loose rock; my right leg shook up and down like a sewing machine. I wouldn’t let myself look down. The steep mountainside where I was stuck hadn’t looked so steep from the bottom.

Before beginning the two-mile climb to the top of Primrose Ridge, Big Spoon and I analyzed the map, as well as the mountain, then picked a path that seemed doable and safe. We stepped onto the tundra. A hundred yards later the wet spongy ground turned to tall dense brush that hadn’t appeared so tall or dense from the road. We couldn’t see where we were going once we entered the brush. We could hardly see each other from ten feet away. But because the terrain ascended gradually, we pushed on in hopes of reaching a clearing before long.

The brush only got worse. At points I had to crawl on my knees. Saplings scraped and scratched me through my clothes. Then the ground shot up, suddenly, steeply. I grabbed the limbs of shrubs and trees as if they were ladder rungs to pull myself up the mountain. Big Spoon climbed ahead of me. It took three hours to go one mile through the shrubs and trees. The sun was setting by the time the thicket opened up to the bare mountainside. There I saw what I didn’t want to see. Big Spoon and I had gotten off our chosen path and were situated in the center of the most vertical slope. If we wanted to reach the top by sundown, the only way to go was up. Tilted boulders and loose scree made up the terrain ahead. Very slowly I took one step after another on the wobbly rock. Very slowly and carefully I stepped. Then came the rock that couldn’t bear my weight. The rock crackled, slid out from under my foot, and tumbled violently down the mountain. That’s when the paralyzing fear came over me. I couldn’t move forward another inch, only cling to the scree and tremble in place.

“What are we doing!” I cried out.

Big Spoon scrambled down to me, unstrapped my pack, and lifted it off my back. He calmly told me to sit. I did as he instructed and rested the weight of my body on the sloping hill.

“Listen to me,” he said while situating my pack onto a broken rock. “We’re not in a life or death situation. We got off course, but we’ll be okay.” He pulled the map from his back pocket and unfolded it for us both to see. “The ridge can’t be more than a quarter mile away. But camping looks limited at the top of this peak.”

With an hour of daylight left, Big Spoon decided to climb to the top without his pack to see if there were any accessible campsites. I was to stay seated on the slope and watch the packs until he returned. Sitting alone, I watched the sun dip into the tundra and mix its golden shine with the limes and teals of the land. I was calmer now, but the heavy stomp of my heart, ramped up by my fear, had made its way to my throat where it now paced like one unsure of what to do. I got choked up and started to cry. After all of this, I thought, after all of this–the trail, my marriage, Alaska–and I’m stuck. Good God, I thought, I’m stuck. I’d be going home soon. In a few days Big Spoon and I would be flying back East. Our adventure, like the sunset, was dipping deeper and more quickly out of sight. What were we going to do when it was gone? The tears ran down my face and splashed onto the scree. Over one hundred days of travel, and now I was stuck.

“We have to go back down,” Big Spoon said upon his return from the peak. “It’s very narrow up there, and windy. No good place to pitch a tent.”

This news relieved me. Sure it was unfortunate we wouldn’t sleep on Primrose Ridge, but at least now we knew the way to go to get back on solid ground. I wiped my eyes, picked myself and my pack up, and began my downward shuffle. It didn’t take half as long to walk down the mountain as it had to come up. Back on the level tundra Big Spoon and I found a patch of dirt and pitched our tent. The sun was gone now. And while I had assumed the darkness would take the sun’s place, to my wonderful surprise a green and violet glow spread across the sky. The lights were faint, but different, so very different than anything I’d ever seen in the sky, and so utterly stunning that, though they were dim, unless you were totally blind, they couldn’t be missed.

They illuminated the land just enough for us to see. “The Northern Lights,” I murmured, almost in disbelief. Earlier that day in the Rangers Station the ranger said we weren’t far enough north to see the Aurora Borealis this late in the summer. However, gazing up at the path of elegant light, there was no denying this was it, the Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights. The reassurance of this light was divine. Even in the dark uncertainty of what was to come, there appeared before me angels of light. Guidance, I thought. Beautiful guidance.

We left Denali the following morning and headed south toward the Kenai Peninsula. On the way we stopped in Sutton, the town Selena and Richard advised us to visit the other night when Big Spoon voiced his interest in hunting fossils.

“Go out of here and turn right on that gravel road,” said the convenience store cashier as she pointed to the road. Big Spoon and I had stopped at the store to inquire about where to find fossils. “Keep going straight for a mile or so then round the big bend,” the cashier continued. “You can’t miss it, and up on your left you’ll see Coyote Lake. There’s a big dirt wall at the far end of the lake. Well, it looks like a dirt wall but really it’s layered rock. Every rock you pick up is a fossil. I take my daughter there a lot.”

Not ten minutes later, Big Spoon and I were walking on the muddy rim of Coyote Lake to the fossil wall. A hill of crumbled rock led up to the wall. Big Spoon scaled the hill. He examined the sedimentary wall then carefully, slowly, pulled loose pieces of rock from it as if he were playing Jenga. I stayed at the bottom of the hill, stooped to my knees, and inspected the rocks around me. Just as the cashier had said, every rock I picked up displayed etchings of either insect wings or fronds. This was the first time I had ever been fossil hunting. I thought back to the first real conversation Big Spoon and I ever had, many months and miles ago in the California desert, during which he told me he hunted fossils. I had never heard of anyone who hunted fossils before. He said he loved the history behind them–the history, the story, of life before our own. How special he seemed to me then. Now here I was, married to this man, hunting fossils with him on a remote lake in Alaska. Life had a wild and mysterious way of leading us where we belonged.

A ziplock bag full of fossils later, Big Spoon and I were on our way. We traveled the open road, several hundred miles down Route 1. Have I mentioned yet the grandness of Alaska? Everything here was bigger–the animals, the mountains, the sea. Conical volcanoes shot up from the gulf. Moose grazed in the lush, vast land beyond guardrails. You wouldn’t see another car for miles at a time. Only the land. The pure land and the open road.

Darkness fell at 11 p.m. My eyes were maxed out from being spent on all the beauty. It would take another two hours before we reached Homer, our first town to visit along the Kenai. We slept in the car on a highway pull-off. It was a cramped sleep but uninterrupted as there was no one around to tell us to leave. At sunrise, again the road was ours. I rolled down my window to feel the misty morning air. The mist rolled into the Kenai River running beside us. The river was aquamarine. We soon approached a small group of people who had parked their vehicles on the side of the road and were leaning against the guardrail. They must be looking at the color of the river, I thought, as spectacular as it was. Then Big Spoon pointed out that a few of the people held binoculars. “There’s something in the river,” he said and turned around. We parked and joined the gazing crowd. Everyone was quiet as they looked. “What do you see?” I whispered to a woman in braids. But before she could answer I saw what there was to see, and I turned as quiet as everyone else.

Just beyond the guardrail, down a steep embankment, were two brown bears–grizzlies–romping around on the riverside. My heart nearly stopped for being so close to grizzlies in the wild. Big Spoon grabbed my hand. Neither of us spoke but watched the bears intently. They were so powerful, so solid, so free. They roamed the riverbank like big happy kids until one waded into the water. The bear walked deeper and deeper into the water until it could no longer stand. The current swept the bear down, and all you could see was its bobbing head as it swam diagonally with the current to the other side. The other bear watched its companion then dashed a little ways down the bank before following suit. The grizzlies rejoined and started to fish, their outstretched paws at the ready to spear. Every few minutes they walked back onto the bank to shake out their burly brown coats. If they knew people were watching them, they never let on. The grizzlies were living their day naturally, truly, uninterrupted by any outsider’s view.

How powerful, how solid, how free.

* * *

Claire's first book on her adventures while living in Colorado can be ordered here:

http://www.amazon.com/51-Weeks-The-Unfinished-Journey-ebook/dp/B00IWYDLBQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1394801373&sr=8-1&keywords=51+Weeks