Cranes Over Stonehenge
I live about a 6 minute run from the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail. If you’ve been to Anchorage, you may know that the Coastal Trail is one of the most beautiful and highly acclaimed recreational multi-use trails in the country. If you’re a runner or skier and you’ve been to Anchorage, you have undoubtedly laid down some miles (or kilometers) on the Coastal Trail. For those of us lucky enough to live within walking/biking/running/skiing distance of the trail, it represents the single biggest quality of life bonus about living in Anchorage – the ability to get out (and to feel like you’re far, far out) within moments of ending your workday, finishing a chore or closing the books on whatever mundane daily life bits come between you and having fun.
When the weather gods gift us with a fresh blanket of new snow, I can literally ski from my front door to the Coastal Trail. During the day, I can gaze out at Sleeping Lady huddled under her blanket of white, hair fanned out beside her. On a clear day, I can see Denali and Foraker. At night, I can see moonlight skipping along the water and lighting up the silty ice like diamonds. Apparently, the moose like the views as well – it’s unheard of to be on the Coastal Trail more than two or three days in a row without seeing a moose. Cleaning your skis almost always involves scraping off a little of the birch and willow roughage that keeps the moose regular and their output in the form of nuggets.
There’s a wide variety of bird life along the Coastal Trail. Ravens figure prominently near Point Woronzof, where they like to play and show off their aerobatic skills in the updrafts along the bluff. Eagles like to hunt there too, at least when the gangs of Ravens aren’t harrassing them just to prove they can.
Closer to Westchester Lagoon, there are ducks and geese and loons. On the way to Kincaid, little redpolls flit around, dashing from tree to tree in an aerial shell game, always trying to mislead the untrained eye as to where they will finally land.
Then there are the magpies, looking something like the uptown tuxedoed version of their cousins the bluejays. They seem to love darting in at eye level right in front of you, showing off their flashy blue and green overtones. I’ve heard that magpies are smarter still than the ravens and to see them work together, I’d believe it.
There are so many more and the real birders can tell you who they all are. I only know the ones who most like to play on or around the trail.
There’s nothing quite like a crane, though, to stop you in your tracks in awe and admiration. There’s such grace and majesty about them and something ancient, almost pre-historic at the same time. Seeing a crane in flight sweeps any other thought or image clear out of my mind. The thing of it is, though, that it’s relatively rare to see a crane in Anchorage. There are huge flocks of them in Fairbanks and seeing them prepare and then eventually set off on their southward migration is amazing, but here we just don’t see very many.
One day last year, I spotted 9 of them feeding on the mudflats along Cook Inlet. The sight was so out of context that there were several near misses on the trail as runners and dog-walkers and cyclists did a double take – “Are those…cranes??” It seemed impossible, yet there they were, picking their way along the mudflats exposed by the low tide. All along the trail that afternoon, we all greeted each other with the same question – “did you see the cranes?” They stayed for a time, but never got as close to the shore and the trail again as on that one afternoon.
I’ll come back to the cranes in a moment, but first we need to talk about jumble ice…
It takes a while for all the ice in Cook Inlet to break up. It’s never frozen solid and in the winter, you can easily see the tides come and go by watching the huge blocks of ice move along with the current. At low tide, it’s stunning to see them all pile up – they look deceptively small moving along with the tide but when they pile up, the scope and scale are a bit more obvious. And sound when they collide – WOW!
As things start to warm up in spring, the big chunks break up into smaller chunks and the surface of each melts in the sun and then refreezes overnight in the cooler temperatures. Over the course of a few weeks, the jagged blocks – “jumble ice” – smooth out and become a little more rounded. It’s like watching stones age and wear down under wind and water, but in the hyperspeed of the time-lapse photography. You really don’t notice the interesting shapes at first because by April, it’s the same piles of ice you’ve been looking at for nearly six months now. But then one day, the angle of the sun or moon hits it just right and the same old gray, silty ice you’ve been looking at for weeks hoping to see more water soon becomes something else entirely. In the dim moonlight, figures emerge out on the mudflats – monoliths, circles, enclosures, gates, portals to…is that how the cranes got here?
And so it is that on an otherwise dull and dirty gray spring day in Anchorage magic happened and we got Cranes over Stonehenge. I don’t have words to describe the two mysteries colliding in the most unlikely of places – it stopped me in my tracks repeatedly over the course of three or four days until the ice melted down and shifted a bit more and Stonehenge was no more. As if on cue, the cranes disappeared into the woods and now they’re back there in the marshy bits, taunting us with their laughing call.
I know I’m prone to flights of fancy, but I promise this one wasn’t just me. I know by the narrowly avoided crashes on the trail that others were captivated too. And I really hope that our cranes aren’t just taking a layover on their way to Fairbanks. It would be great to have another summer of ”are those…cranes?”
