The Perfect Shot

No good backpacking experience is complete without that photograph - that definitive snapshot, that instant when the burdened hiker stands alone in a meadow of grass and lupine, shadowed in stark contrast by jagged mountain ridges, frozen in quiet awe at the lost and lonely landscape.

In the calm blackness of that moment one afternoon I heard the rustling of Geoff's backpack followed by a click.

"Why'd you stop?" he asked.

As quickly as he spoke, the sweeping silence of 40 miles of Alaskan wilderness rushed his words away. But my answer lingered. "I don't know."

Geoff stuffed his camera back into his pack and we continued toward the summit of the Resurrection Pass trail, 40 miles of backcountry that crosses half of the Kenai Peninsula through Chugach Mountains. The air was moist - a remnant of early morning cloud cover, and the alpine tundra radiated with short-lived colors of spring in July.

I looked down at my feet, wrapped in ratty boots but otherwise unharmed after three days of walking. I had endured horrible blisters in the past, but two months in Alaska has a way of making feet strong. They kicked up the rich dust of the trail, shuffling weightlessly beneath 180 pounds of me and my pack, and I knew then that they didn't need to stop. They could go forever. The gentle slope of Resurrection Pass is as relaxing a back country hike as there ever was, climbing from sea level to 2,600 feet elevation in 19 miles, and then dropping as much in another 20 miles. Small cabins line the trail, and great camping sites hug dozens of lakes and snowmelt streams. In two days since leaving Anchorage I had become almost completely immersed in the calm, simple lifestyle of the backpacker - dried beans and rice for dinner, and nights nestled beneath the twisted shadows of black spruce trees.

Resurrection Pass, Alaska

Is this why I stopped? Did the tranquility of the Chugach finally coax me into submission? Did the wilderness finally convince me to throw my pack down, kneel on the soft tundra and whisper - 'I'm home?' That isn't like me. I'm an urbanite, a city girl. My comfort revolves around cash flow, I drink enough soda to supply a year's worth of little league baseball games, and I feel lost without a daily fix of information supplied by newspapers, magazines and books. In other words, I'm not the type to walk into the Alaskan wilderness with noting but a knife and a garment made of caribou hide.

In fact, I had been reluctant to even hike the Resurrection Pass trail. After two months of wandering homelessly around western Canada and Alaska, my friends and I arrived in Anchorage broken down, soaked by a week of coastal rains and rapidly running out of funds. Our war-worn 1991 Ford van sat idly at a mechanic's getting a $400 brake job, and we decided that the Kenai backpacking trip we wanted to take was going to have to be now or never.

As we drove home to our dreary patch of gravel at an Anchorage RV park that night, we passed two women seeking food donations. Wearing cardboard-cutout costumes shaped like soup cans, they waved a hand-painted sign at us - "When you have no choice, it isn't much fun camping." I laughed to myself, because I agreed with them. I had never been one to pass up backcountry adventure, but this time I had nowhere else to go.

But then I crossed Resurrection Creek, leaving my meager assortment of worldly possessions behind. On the trail, I had almost forgotten that sinking feeling of displacement, the quiet abandonment of wandering with no place to go. In the Chugach I wasn't muddled in the erratic movement of traffic and breakdowns and routine gone awry. Resurrection Pass had found me.

As we rounded the pass and looked down at the trail the would lead us back to the highway, back to Anchorage, back to civilization, I realized why I had stopped. Geoff grabbed me and Chris, then directed us to stand next to a weathered wooden sign at the summit. "So smile already," he said. "This is our trip photo." Chris and I mugged at the camera, and another click burned one instant into history. We sat down to eat a lunch of bagels and cheese, and I remembered how badly I wanted a soda. I remembered the vehicle that was supposed to get us back to the States, the one with the brake problems and bad radiator. But I also remembered a moment when the lost and lonely landscape stretched toward me, wrapping me in a stillness even cameras can't capture.

Something tells me I'll take this image with me once I'm back on the road. I have no doubts about it. I'm in the photograph.

For more photos and stories about Jill's Canada/Alaska road trip, vist her website: Bike to Shine

Questions?
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