The extremely steep scree slopes didn’t alarm me.  Neither did the ice in the drainages, the mud, or the incessant drizzle.  What did have me a bit unsettled was simple math.

Tyler and I had crested the ridge at 5500 feet, the valley floor was at 3900 feet, and the horizontal distance between the two was about a mile.  That implied an average grade of about 30%.  However, even though the initial descent off the ridge had been rather hairy, perhaps a 60% grade, the overall path down the drainage felt nowhere near steep enough.  We had a lot of vertical distance to drop without a lot of ground left to cover.

We worked our way down the drainage in a gap that was becoming increasingly narrow.  It was cold, wet, and gray.  We were looking forward to getting to the Toklat River valley and its gravel bar so that we could set up camp and dry out.

Soon, the rocks were so close together that we were walking in the creekbed itself; a slot canyon.  I was in the lead, and Tyler was a half dozen yards behind me.  I rounded a bend, and in that moment I saw where that missing elevation went.  Ten feet in front of me, the ground dropped away and the water rushed over it.  It was a waterfall.  A bloody waterfall.  I couldn’t believe it.

I crept to the edge to better assess the situation.  The waterfall was at least 80 feet high.  As we were in a narrow sheer-faced canyon, there were no routes around the waterfall. The rock alongside the fall was totally rotten and unclimbable.  It might have been possible to climb down the fall itself, but that would have required technical climbing gear, which we lacked.  An unprotected climb would have been suicide.

I backed away from the edge as Tyler came up behind me.  I was a bit freaked and was shaking from adrenaline.

We talked it over briefly, but our options were limited.  Neither of us relished the idea of regaining the 1000 vertical feet to go back over the ridge, especially considering the loose rock at the top of that route.  Going down the waterfall was clearly out, too.  We pulled out the topo map to consider our alternatives.

Another drainage a half mile to the north of the one we were in appeared to be viable.  The trouble was that waterfalls are not usually marked on USGS quads.  Another waterfall could have easily been hiding in that drainage; the map had provided no hints to the presence of the one we had already encountered.

The pass to that drainage was 700 feet above us and about a half-mile hike.  I was still feeling a bit shaky as we turned around and began hiking back up.

At that pass, we stared into the next drainage.  We had thought that coming down from the main ridge was a hairy descent, but that had nothing on our new challenge.  The slope below us was easily 45 degrees — a 100% grade — and consisted of loose scree, dirt, and mud.

The rain continued to fall, further complicating the situation.

Gaiters were donned.  (Twice for me.  I always seem to put them on the wrong legs on my first attempt.)

We began our trek down the extremely steep, sketchy hill, half stepping and half sliding.  Very slowly.

After quite a while, we made it to a slightly less extreme stream bed, which made the downclimb marginally easier.

The feet of altitude ticked away as we continued our descent.  There were some short cascades in the stream, but those were easily managed.  So too were a pair of small waterfalls, which we were able to skirt by traversing some steep talus.  Things were going well.

We were just a few hundred feet off the floor when the rock again narrowed into a slot canyon.  We crossed our fingers, but our luck ran out.  We rounded a bend and saw… a waterfall.  Another bloody waterfall.  I couldn’t believe it.

Fortunately, that one was considerable shorter than the first at about 12 feet high.  The rock was rotten again, but some of it appeared climbable, and attempting the descent did not seem likely to be fatal even if we cratered.

Tyler and I decided to commit.

I tossed my hiking pole to the base of the fall and began to downclimb the rock next to, but not in, the water stream.  Everything went fine for the first few feet, but then what I had feared came to pass: my holds flaked off, and I fell.

I felt the rocks give away and myself grinding down the face.

Fortunately, it wasn’t a long fall, and I managed to land on my feet at the base, staggering back a bit.  The rocks I had dislodged fell harmlessly around me. Tyler yelled down to me over the roar of water to see if I was OK.

A quick assessment showed some damaged gear, a sore chest, and a bleeding knee, but no bones broken or joints twisted.  I stood there in shock for a couple of minutes.

It soon was Tyler’s turn.  He wisely chose to climb down the fall itself, in the stream of water.  The rock was better there, and my view from the base revealed many viable holds.

Still, the climb was not without risk, and from Tyler’s perspective most of the holds were invisible beneath the rushing white frothy water.  That same water also did a fabulous job of totally drenching him.  Whatever the rain had not found, the waterfall’s flow did.

Happily, Tyler made it down without incident.  He had embraced the waterfall, and it had smiled upon him.

Tyler celebrates after climbing down a waterfall

Even better, the drainage opened up wide after that point, and we encountered no more major impediments.  We successfully made it down to the Toklat River: Denali Backcountry Unit 10.

When we were getting out backpacking permit, the ranger hadn’t batted an eye at our proposed itinerary. However, when we later told people about our surprise at encountering waterfalls when going form Unit 11 to Unit 10, they almost universally smiled and nodded in amused understanding.  It felt like we were the only people in the park who didn’t know that you’re not really supposed to go from Unit 11 to Unit 10 (at least not over the ridge).  Interestingly, the Unit 10 description mentions the waterfalls and two other problems we would later have: encounters with bears and the difficulty of the pass from Unit 10 to Unit 12.  It would seem that we overlooked those details.  We learned the hard way.

Our path that day, as recorded by my GPS. Note how the topo map doesn't really indicate the presence of a waterfall. (Click for larger annotated version)

The total distance was only 4 miles or so, but those were the most difficult 4 miles of backpacking I’ve ever done.

I had spent the morning hiking uphill through an old pine forest.  My route mimed the path of powerful Redearth Creek, a turquoise-colored torrent rushing noisily beside me.   Everything was soaked from the rain that had besieged the area for the previous few days. The muddy trail was a testament to that, but so was the lush green moss carpeting the nearby forest floor.

At the end of my 14 km trek — not particularly taxing, even with 440 m of elevation gain — I came to Re14, the Banff National Park backcountry campground that would be my home for the night.  Like everything else, the campground was saturated.  The area where the park service had set up bear cables was particularly muddy.

Fortunately, there was a small somewhat-dry spot beneath the boughs of three giant lodgepole pines.  There I set up my Tarptent-brand, um, tarp tent.  Then I ventured out to explore nearby Shadow Lake.

Almost immediately after I left the campground on the trail, I stumbled into Shadow Lake Lodge, a collection of a dozen beautiful log cabins in a clearing in the forest.  Glacier-topped Mt. Ball loomed large, dominating the westerly view.  The map had indicated the presence of a lodge, but it offered no other details, not even a name.

The main building at Shadow Lake Lodge

A couple of day hikers were munching on a snack at one of the lodge’s picnic tables.

“What is this place?” I asked.

“Talk to the girls inside the main building. They’ll tell you all about it,” came the reply.

And so I did.  Amy (from Australia) and Yana (from the Czech Republic) explained how the lodge had been in operation since the days of the railroad almost a century earlier.  They told me how they had just opened for the season, so there were not yet many guests.  They invited me to try the lodge’s afternoon tea service.

Yes, afternoon tea.  Despite being in a location that required all guests to make the same hike I had completed that morning, it was not so remote as to be uncivilized. In fact, the lodge provided breakfast, lunch, and a multi-course dinner to the guests staying overnight, in addition to the tea service.

I wasn’t staying at the lodge with its fancy wood walls and roof; I was roughing it, darn it. Thus, afternoon tea cost me $15, but that seemed reasonable for such an extravagance in the backcountry.  The spread was impressive: imported cheeses, various cookies, scones, grapes, vegetables, dip, salsa, chips, apple tart, lemonade, and, of course, tea.  All of the pastries and cookies were baked on site from scratch, so the building itself smelled great.  Okay, maybe the tea service voided my “roughing it” credentials for the day.

The spread at Shadow Lake's afternoon tea

The awkward part about the experience was the lack of other people.  I was the only customer at the tea.  That left me feeling guilty about both not eating much and as well eating as much as I did.  I figured I had to try at least one of everything, but that still left enough food for a dozen non-existent people.  My inner Minnesotan was tormented.  Seemingly sensing the situation, Amy gave me a plastic baggie and told me to take some cookies for later; I happily obliged.  The Minnesotan was mollified.

Kind of lonely...

While I was sipping my second cup of tea and munching on my third helping of goodies, a day hiker came by and reported that he heard several whistles while hiking along Shadow Lake, which was located about 1 km from the lodge. He wasn’t certain that it was a human, but he knew that whistles can be distress signals, and he thought it best to inform somebody rather than let it slide.  That somebody ended up being Amy.

Here’s the thing about Amy: great person, but not exactly experienced in the backcountry.  She had come over from Australia three weeks earlier, seen an ad in the paper in Banff advertising the job at Shadow Lake Lodge, and taken it.  Despite the remoteness of the lodge, backcountry experience in the Canadian Rockies was not a prerequisite for the position.

She wisely decided to defer to the park warden on the matter of the whistling.

The lodge didn’t have a normal telephone, but it did have an old autopatch-style radio telephone.  Amy tinkered with it for a while, but she was having trouble getting it to dial the park warden’s number.  I wasn’t much help beyond offering words of encouragement.  The other staff were all away from the cabins on hikes or something, so it was up to Amy to figure it out.  She briefly considered using the lodge’s Iridium satellite phone, but the phone reported the account being invalid (huh?).  My Globalstar satellite phone would have been another option, but the next satellite pass for its operation was 25 minutes away.

Tea and tart

After 15 more minutes of screwing around, Amy finally figured out the correct sequence of DTMF tones and timing to dial the park’s number.  She related the account of the whistling to the warden.  Much to everybody’s relief, the warden said that it was almost certainly a marmot, not a person.

According to him, marmots make noises that can sound strikingly similar to those produced by artificial human whistles.  Amy and I were surprised by that, so we keyed up a Youtube video of a marmot whistling. (Despite a lack of phone service, the lodge had high-speed internet access, most likely via satellite.)  Listen for yourself.  Imagine hearing just a couple of those bursts, perhaps each for a slightly longer duration; do they not sound at least a bit human?

Later, I went for my own hike along the shore of Shadow Lake.  I got drenched by the restarted rain and chilled by the temperature at altitude; snow dotted the ground beside me. I was enjoying view of the stoic  turquoise waters and the huge glaciers feeding them when I too heard a whistle in the woods.  It was clearly a marmot, but still, the resemblance to a human whistle was enough to make me holler out “Hello! Is anybody there?”  The gentle patter of raindrops was the only reply.

I munched down a cookie and hiked back to my tent.

The view of a ridge near Mt. Ball from camp the next morning

I was at the excellent Baked Cafe in Whitehorse a few days ago when I noticed this bit on their menu:

Oh wait, that’s pretty blurry.  Darn camera phone in low light.  Let’s fix the blur and try again:

As you can see, it’s an extra bargain when the temperature is below -30 degrees Celsius (-22 degrees Fahrenheit).  That threshold was met 26 times during the winter of 2010-11.  Good days for hot drinks, if you ask me.

I woke up in the morning of my first full day in Fairbanks with a fever, a sore back, and a tight chest.  The symptoms made my foggy mind briefly consider “pulmonary embolism,” but since it was more of a dull pain than a sharp pain, I pushed the fears out of my mind.  I figured I was just sore from a rough night due to the endless sunlight and the somewhat uncomfortable bed.  I made a token attempt to get going for the day but soon decided that more sleep was in order.

When I finally got up a couple hours later, I noticed there was a voice message from an unfamiliar number on my cell phone.  It was from a woman named Marcy who said that she had found something I had lost and was wondering if I wanted it back.  Out of it as I was, I thought she said she had found my “black Sterno,” as in alcohol-gel cooking fuel.  I couldn’t figure out what that meant, so I started digging through my belongings.  I was trying to find something that was both missing and would have enough identifiable information to facilitate a return attempt.

My computer and cameras were all accounted for, so I went to Sam and started looking through my other luggage.  I was sitting in Sam’s passenger seat, digging through the glove box, when it struck me: I was missing my beloved black Moleskine notebook.

It all made sense: the notebook had my name, phone number, and email address on the title page.  I vaguely recalled putting the notebook on Sam’s roof the previous evening, but I didn’t remember taking it down again.  And the voice message?  Marcy wasn’t saying “black Sterno,” she was saying “black steno,” as in notebook.

Was I ever lucky that my notebook had been found and that somebody was trying to return it to me!  Just one problem: Marcy hadn’t left a call-back number, and the number saved on my phone went to some sort of PBX system, so I had no way of getting in touch with her.  I had to hope that she’d call back or email.

She did both, and soon I was on my way to meet her on Fort Wainwright, the US Army base near Fairbanks.

Marcy was a smiling manager working for one of the civilian contractors on base.  She told me that she had noticed my notebook sitting on the road, stopped, and picked it up.  She had flipped through it and decided by its contents that somebody would want it back.  I think she described the doodles within as looking “like something one of my sons would have done.”

She returned the notebook to me and graciously refused to accept a reward.  I thanked her profusely and went back to assess the condition of my notebook.

It was clear that it had been run over by at least one car; the tire tracks professed as much.  Despite that, everything was intact.  The cover was in good shape, no pages were missing or torn, and the mechanical pencil was still inside (albeit broken).   Yes, some of the pages were wrinkled, but that didn’t affect usability.

A nice tread mark on my Moleskine notebook.

I was impressed by the durability of my Moleskine notebook.  For those keeping track, I had complained about the poor quality of my previous soft-cover Moleskine, so the one that eventually got run over was the replacement that the company sent to me.  That newer one certainly seemed to hold up well.

Marcy’s kindness touched me.  To think that she actually stopped, retrieved my notebook, and went through the effort of getting it back to me was very moving.  And the notebook itself? Well, it pulled through well enough that I intend to continue using it until it’s full.

Now if only the stiffness in my muscles would go away…