Denali - needs work

They’re practicing flying circles around the field, and soon they’ll write their seasonal goodbyes in a medium of earth with footprints in mud.

That unending feeling like there's always a storm on the horizon. But its just the coming long dark. It's almost to that point where I can leave groceries in the trunk until May, and I’ll be in a small cabin surrounded by an abyssal ocean, reminiscing on the color green.

This is one of the last times I'll listen to leaves swaying in the wind.

I grew up here and the forest feels like a dream. White and yellow isn’t a color combination one thinks of when they think of forests. But it occurs twice here - birch leaves in autumn, and tamarack needles that yellow at the first snow.

Kk'eeyh noghe' - The horizontal lines on birch bark, literally "birch's eyes". These are checked before bark is taken. Those with short lines are usually good canoe birch. Then roll it along something, and if it cracks, then make baskets or something else out of it instead.

Denali.

It's out there waiting for me. I take solace in you. I've visited you last week too, though I did not leave the city. And I visited you the week before, and the week before that, and countless times since I last set the Chakos on you. You are always in my mind as a fantastical escape from ennui.

The cold spirit.

Home in your wintry bastion.

I see you, watching us from your mountainous home over the next hill.

You phantom waiting to come down to us.

You’ll grasp us all with your slick, tingling fingers.

How cocky must one be to post pictures of this place and think they’ve captured it all? One will never acclimate to the vast beauty of this place or sense of smallness. I merely play, with this toy of a camera and hands that will last only a few seasons, to glimpse you.