Cailey was restless in the night, pacing repeatedly and foiling my attempts at a good night’s sleep.  Afraid that she had diarrhea (which is the only reason she wakes me up in the middle of the night at home) I took her out twice in the night, and yet the pacing continued.  She finally settled down early in the morning and I slept until after 9:00 for the first time in many months.  And so we had a slightly lazy morning after our big ski the day before and didn’t get underway until 12:30.  This time we headed upriver to where the moose tracks were and then into the meadow on our side of the river to the main slough’s Big Bend.  It was ridiculously easy to cross the snowy landscape on skis compared to trudging through the dense brush and endless sloughs of the summer, and we made good time.  An adult bald eagle stood sentry on a lone cottonwood tree looking towards the mountain and another eagle flew along the mountainside and out of site downriver.  The stillness was broken by frequent avalanches (every chute on the mountainside was a mess of fallen snow and rocks), but we never saw one despite the lingering rumbles. 

We were surprised to find the snow untouched by tracks, expecting at the very least a lot of moose activity.  Instead we saw no evidence of mammals in the meadow, no tracks and no obvious sign of browse on the willows.  We’d both worked up a bit of an appetite by the time we reached the slough and picked out a picnic spot on a hill back toward the river at the edge of the forest that surrounds the lodge.  We headed there at a leisurely pace, skiing from one small clump of spruces, alders, and birches to another.  I knew very well that moraines littered the meadow but I had no idea just how prevalent they were--with the grasses and flowers and smaller shrubs buried in snow, the topography was laid plain and the sheer number of little hillocks was surprising.  I’m pretty sure I’d never even noticed the rather large hill we'd chosen for lunch.

We’d woken up that morning to a soft, overcast sky (it had rained during the night) , and the air was so warm that I’d quickly removed my snow pants once we reached the meadow and had brazenly skied in my long underwear only.  It started lightly raining as we approached the hill, though, so I put them back on to sit on the snow.  I’d thought the previous day that there was nothing better than sunshine and the broad views of the valley and the mountaintops unobscured by clouds, but standing in the middle of that meadow under a low, misty shroud, the mountains softened by the filtered light, there was an intimacy to the valley that was just as appealing as the sunshine.

We set up on the snow and ate bread, cheese, apples, a granola bar, and dark chocolate as the rain softened the snow around us.  Cailey ate our apple cores and entertained herself chewing off a willow or alder branch half buried in the snow.  After lunch we skied between several more large, long moraines near the river that were more densely timbered in shrubs and trees before breaking out into the nagoonberry meadows with its many young spruces.  On the way I heard the ravens again and watched two of them fly in from the river.  When we reached the dense forest surrounding the cabin, we decided to skirt around it and approach from the south.  We were just across the slough from the main avalanche behind the cabin at the edge of the timber when I heard a bird in the widely-spaced spruces nearby.  The vocalizations didn't sound like the winter finches we'd been hearing and seeing on and off both days, and there appeared to be only one individual calling.  I decided I had to stop and stalk this bird.  If I'd had to guess, I would have said it was a chickadee based on some indescribable quality of voice; however, there were no tell tale "dee dee" sounds and the bird was making a distinct, repeated call that I'd never heard a chickadee make before.  I skied into the trees as gently as I could and tracked the bird to a small clump nearby; thankfully it was fairly accommodating and before long I had it in my binoculars and sure enough if it wasn't a chickadee!  We'd watched him for a few minutes when I started hearing more chickadee sounds coming from some spruces about 50 feet away.  I guessed that some of their soft calls were companion calls to keep in touch as they flitted around their trees.  It was cheery life in the otherwise silent forest and I count that simple stalk as one of the highlights of the trip.  I also memorized the call, but have not yet found a recording that matches it.

That chickadee was responsible for the first track of the day, for right nearby we saw large prints in the snow, unfortunately degraded but very tantalizing.  Some of them appeared to show a long heel, they had claws, and most interesting of all, they formed a consistent pattern of three, quite unlike the wolf tracks we'd seen the day before.  Our best guess was wolverine.  We followed the tracks for 100 yards or so as they consistently moved from tree to tree, the tracks often disappearing into the frozen underworld of tangled spruce branches and emerging on the other side.  Actually, we were following the trail backwards since that's the direction we were going, but the tracks were too old to have hopes of discovering their owner anyway.  When we neared the end of the timber we left the tracks and cut straight to the river through a patch of widely spaced trees.  We turned upriver for a little ways before the young spruces made the going rough and we dropped down the steep slope to the river, passing over a four foot deep crack in the snow at the bottom of the bank where it separated from the snow on top.  We skied the rest of the way on the river, then drank Russian tea and listened to music on my phone when we returned.  My mother made a fantastic frittata for dinner and we desserted on the traditional cabin Krusteaz crumb cake.

On to Day 3

Cailey in the meadow	Avalanche chute	Mountain behind the lodge
Slough hole in the meadow	We ski through stands of trees	Birches
View from lunch hill	Wolverine tracks	The wolverin sweeps by trees
Mom descends the riverbank	Cailey explores the seeps at the riverbank	Looking up the misty river