One Man's Wilderness, 50th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Louis Proenneke

  Many lynx tracks along the shore of the lake. The cold began to seep in now that I was no longer climbing. Walking with my face down, into a light breeze, the sheepskin was good protection even though a mass of frost collected from much puffing and blowing.

  Smoke still coming from the chimney when I returned. A warm forty-five degrees in the cabin.

  December 9th. Minus thirty-four degrees. The ice is quieter now, but once in a while it lets loose with a bellow and sounds like thunder from below.

  December 12th. Plus twenty degrees. Can spring be far away? The ice is now twenty inches thick.

  December 13th. Plus eighteen degrees. T-shirt weather!

  I examined the different patterns of cracks in the ice. Some are really impressive and can be seen from top to bottom in the clear ice. It would be interesting to know what the pressure must rise to, to make so much noise and shatter so much ice. The lake has been quiet during this warm spell. About noon today the groaning started again. At times it sounded like the snoring of an army of giants.

  December 15th. Plus twenty-five degrees. Snow driven by a strong wind.

  The red fox is a regular visitor now to the moose handout. I believe he will get even tamer as the country gets more hungry.

  About eight inches of snow on the level now.

  December 16th. Plus four degrees. Four more inches of snow during the night.

  I have a tenant in the john. I heard a racket in there and glimpsed the squirrel flashing over the ridge log. Very soon he was back, his mouth looking like a powder puff. He was carrying moss from the roof. Inside he went, rattled around some, then back out and back in with another load, really working at high speed. While he was gone, I opened the door and looked in. A box of shavings for starting a fire sat just inside the door. It now contained moss as well. He is setting up winter quarters.

  December 17th. Minus nineteen degrees and not a twig stirring. The sun lit the high peaks across the lake at nine-thirty this morning.

  Very early this day I felt the cabin begin to shake as if some monster was tossing around beneath it. I heard a low roaring. The lake ice had been noisy, but this sudden earth tremor quieted it for several hours. Along toward daylight I felt another jolting. A look around after sunup convinced me all the mountains were still in their proper places.

  That spruce squirrel is working like he has a deadline to meet. A big wad of moss in the shavings box now and a small round hole right in the middle of it.

  Wood to saw and split every day. Got to keep up my payments at the Firewood Trust if I want to stay warm this winter. No real problem at all. Some folks had led me to believe it would be an everlasting job—cut wood all day to keep warm all night.

  December 19th. Plus thirty-two degrees. The cold is preferable to a spell like this, with heavy wet snow being dumped from the spruce boughs all through the day.

  There is now twenty-three inches of ice.

  A bad day for traveling. A good day for little jobs and a chance to catch up on my reading.

  December 21st. Plus four degrees. The shortest day. The sun lighted Allen Mountain across the lake down to the timber line, then dropped out of sight. It will be a pleasure to watch the sun line creep on down to the opposite beach and one day light up my cabin again.

  December 22nd. Wolves on the ice.

  I first saw them as little specks close together. Then the leader broke away and the others dropped back to each side to form a wide triangle. They stopped often to turn and look at the stillness surrounding them. Now they came on in a trot. Through the spotting scope I could make out the narrow heads, the erect ears, the long muzzles. I would like to see those green eyes up close. I moved. They froze like statues, 100 yards away. Suddenly one bolted nervously and loped down the ice. The others followed. Too bad I had been in the open when I first saw them. I think I would have gotten a closer look.

  December 24th. Clear, calm, and plus four degrees. I do believe winter at Twin Lakes is better than summer.

  Sheep were walking the skyline of the big pasture on Falls Mountain.

  I crossed a wolverine track that was headed for Low Pass Creek. I must be on the lookout for that character.

  December 25th. A very white Christmas. No hard feelings toward anyone.

  I chopped up some moose meat and scattered these presents for the magpies, the camp robbers, the chickadees, and the squirrel.

  Arctic ground squirrel.

  Out on the ice I examined a pressure ridge. It was a buckled wall of ice blocks at odd angles about a foot wide and at least four feet high. Some of the slabs of ice had beach rock imbedded in them.

  A plane! It was Babe’s 180 Cessna. He looked like a skinny Santa Claus as he landed and stepped out with sacks and boxes. He asked how long the lake had been frozen over. Lake Clark had closed up only three days ago.

  Lots of mail and grub. Nearly a sack of packages and letters. Six four-pound packages of rice, two large boxes of corn meal, four dozen eggs, plenty of spuds, carrots, lettuce, apples, and celery. Fifty pounds of flour and two slabs of bacon. Cheese, candy bars, and cocoa.

  Babe was having roast goose at home so he had to hurry back.

  I opened packages and read letters until I had to light the lantern to keep on reading. A Christmas I will never forget. The most no-nonsense Christmas I have ever had.

  Babe had given me a time correction. My watch was fifteen minutes fast after no check for four months.

  December 27th. The northern lights last night. No big display. Just a golden glow over the mountains to the northeast. Very much like the breaking of dawn in summer.

  It was minus five degrees when I decided to hike down to the lower end. The connecting stream was still open. I saw the bow waves of trout scooting for cover as I walked the bank.

  The water ouzels were working as usual, probing the crevices of the stones along the stream edge, then setting sail like miniature ducks, puddling, pirouetting, and disappearing. Moments later, out they came, powder dry and flying into the subzero air with something wriggling in their beaks. They are like big gray waterproof wrens.

  Nothing else in sight on the great expanse of snow and ice down country.

  The spruce squirrel seems to have a ball of moss for a door. I saw it move when I went to get my fuel to fill the lamp, and out he slipped over the eave log in the rear. I heard him return a few minutes later. In the flashlight beam I saw his “door” was closed. I think he grabs the moss edges at the opening and pulls them together. He will sleep warm tonight even though the temperature is minus ten degrees.

  December 28th. Sheep tracks on the lake. A single sheep had come from the direction of Allen Mountain. Must be a young ram out to see the world. It was the first sheep track I have ever seen on the ice.

  December 31st. Clear, calm, and minus thirty-four degrees.

  The squirrel slept in until eleven. I checked his quarters and his moss ball door was closed, almost as if he had put out a sign, do not disturb.

  Where do the birds go in these low temperatures?

  When I opened the door, a cloud of vapor would rush in through the lower half and roll to the fireplace. Then a cloud would rush out the top half and cover the overhang of the roof with frost.

  Thirty-two degrees below zero during the heat of the day.

  I sawed up a log to restore the dent I was putting in my wood supply. I wrapped the saw handle with paper and my hand didn’t get too cold.

  Toward evening I hiked a couple of miles down the lake. I was dressed in two sweaters, shirt vest, insulated coveralls, stocking cap and Navy foul weather cap, wool gloves and lined buckskin mittens, heavy Navy scarf, and my sheepskin hood. I found the hip pockets of my coveralls good protection for my mittened hands. It was minus thirty-six degrees when I returned to the cabin, my hood a mass of frost.

  For my waterhole I had cut a six-inch chunk from a big log and set it over the hole, filling around it with snow. No more than a half-inch of ice had formed under it. That saves a lot of
chipping.

  January 2nd. Forty-five below. A land without motion. In the dead of winter nothing seems to move, not even a twig on the willows.

  The thickness of the ice is now a strong twenty-eight inches. In this very cold weather the hole in the ice gradually closes in from the sides until it is a hole no longer.

  A pan of hot water tossed into the forty-five-below air turns to a cloud of steam with a loud hissing noise.

  January 3rd. Doldrum-still and minus forty-five degrees.

  Today I would go up the canyon to Low Pass 1,600 feet above the lake to see what problems a man would have to face at this temperature.

  What did I learn from my four-hour round trip? With no wind I could travel all day in minus-forty five-degree cold and be comfortable. A few mountains in the way might help. If a man carried an axe, it would be no problem to camp in thick timber, dry out, and sleep warm in a down sleeping bag. On such a trip snowshoes are a must, and climbers would be needed on the hard mountain crust.

  Brush breaks in the extreme cold as if dry and dead.

  It is warmer on top of the pass than it is along the lake. Moisture must make the difference. My face and fingers felt the bite of the cold as soon as I reached lake level.

  I found frost from top to bottom between my outside and second layer of clothing. My pacs had snow inside to the tip of the toes, and I was covered with frost. I had a heavy feeling in my chest and wondered if I had hauled too much of that forty-five-below air into my lungs.

  January 7th. Plus seven degrees and calm. A half inch of fluffy snow fell during the night.

  More fox tracks than I have ever seen. I think my moose bait is beginning to bring out the hungry ones.

  I hiked down to the connecting stream. It was still open. I doubt it will ice over this winter. The trees and brush along its banks are feathered with frost from the vapor rising from the open water. Tracks and a slide announced that an otter had traveled the stream. Run and slide, run and slide. He slides a great distance after only a step or two.

  No sign of caribou or any other game.

  January 9th. What do you know? Here comes Babe in the T-Craft on skis, his exhaust stacks streaming out two vapor trails!

  “Cold down here,” he greeted. It was thirty-five below. “Lots warmer up high.”

  He brought a burlap sack half full of butter beans, fifty pounds of sugar, four ten-pound sacks of fine graham flour, a big box of dried apples, six boxes of raisins, and five boxes of pitted dates. Also some mail.

  No hurry today. He sat and talked and watched my fresh kettle of beans cooking. Yes, this is what he would enjoy—living out like this in a cabin if he didn’t have so much responsibility that the Lord had heaped upon him. He felt it was his duty to talk to people and spread His word. A man could hardly do that living in a cabin.

  “Say,” he asked suddenly, “do you suppose those beans are done yet?” He ate two bowls full and allowed they were pretty good beans.

  We had covered the T-Craft engine to hold the heat, and it started first flip of the prop. He has a heater now, a catalyst-type gas heater sitting on the floor. Also has his engine heater handy, too. The old boy hasn’t lived all these years in the Far North for nothing.

  Next trip, he said, he might bring the mission girls along to see the cabin. I watched him zip over the crust and draw away, trailing a short stream of vapor.

  The ice is now thirty-two inches thick.

  As I stored some of my provisions away in Spike’s cabin, I thought about the cache I would build come spring.

  Babe also had brought me two pairs of heavy socks that his wife had knitted for me. And another surprise, a detachable parka hood quilted with feathers between the layers, and a ruff of wolfskin around the face.

  January 12th. Minus thirty-six degrees.

  I crossed the lake to see the sun. It was really a thrill to see my shadow again, but I could feel very little warmth. The pale golden light flooded the ice for about 100 yards from the far shore, then faded into shadow once more as the sun winked out of sight behind the shoulder of Gold Mountain.

  January 14th. A sliver of a moon and minus sixteen degrees.

  My first trip on snowshoes. It was good to hear the soft crunch of the crust beneath the webs as I slung along the creek trail. It had been tough going on previous days without snowshoes. I enjoyed looking back in the sharp air at my tracks winding through the white stillness. Very little game spotted. Two sheep, but just because you don’t see game, that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Today’s bonus was the exhilaration of the trip itself.

  January 15th. Warmer weather with the dark of the moon. Minus eight degrees.

  I had seen no moose in the cottonwoods across the lake since the low slopes had been in shadow, and I wondered if the coming of the sunlight to those levels would signal a return of the big animals.

  There were dark objects in the cottonwoods. Moose! Welcome back! I snowshoed up along the brush to get a better look. A huge bull with a majestic rack, a cow, and a young bull with antlers like a buck deer. They moved as they browsed, and when they stopped it was invariably behind brush or a tree. They moved not in alarm but warily, not affording me a view in the clear. In their slow passage they flushed ptarmigan, and the birds croaked their irritation as they scaled away to land farther on.

  The ice is now thirty-five inches thick.

  January 17th. Plus ten degrees.

  I am having a creosote problem. Too much low fire in the stove. Creosote runs down the stovepipe from each joint. Some of it is even running down on the roof and getting through to my logs.

  January 18th. Almost like summer. A plus twenty-two degrees.

  A good day to try to solve the creosote problem. I let the fire go out and took down the stovepipe. Then I relocated the damper and put the pipe back, bottom end up. Now the joints in the pipe lead in instead of out. Can’t be any worse than it was. Time will tell.

  January 20th. Plus two degrees.

  Field day. I scoured my table and counter top with Comet powder, soap, and bleach. With Babe always threatening to bring the mission girls next trip, I had better keep this place shipshape.

  My stovepipe has been staying clean. No strong odor when I build up my fire for cooking. That’s a good sign.

  I saw the squirrel today. He has been making himself scarce. I thought a fox got him, or maybe the weasel, but the little troublemaker is back.

  A slice of moon this evening. As that moon becomes full, the temperature will drop like a stone or I miss my guess.

  January 22nd. Three and a half inches of fluffy snow. Plus fifteen degrees.

  I made a snowshoe trail down country. When I returned later on the same trail, I found it all but drifted shut. I had a tendency to wander off course in the surrounding whiteness. Far out from shore I came across the trail of a mouse. I think he must have thought that this is a big world.

  The fox, the magpies, and some ravens were around the moose meat. They must have an understanding with each other. Sometimes the fox chases the magpies, but it seems more in play than anything else.

  Three big rams were above Glacier Creek, standing up to their bellies in the snow. Bare places show where they had foraged for grass.

  January 31st. Snowing. Plus eighteen degrees.

  Twenty-eight inches of snow on the level and as loose as feathers. January has not been the cold month I expected it to be. What will February bring?

  February 1st. Fog and snowing lightly. Minus two degrees.

  I snowshoed a narrow flight strip for Babe. It is good to have something by which to judge distance and the condition of the snow. This will be the Twin Lakes International Airport.

  A small flock of sparrow-sized birds have come in like a flurry of dry leaves to land and feed on the tips of the buckbrush. They show a rosy color. My field guide pictures them as hoary redpolls.

  February 3rd. Clear, calm, and thank the Lord! Forty-eight degrees below zero. That full moon has brought another chill to th
is land.

  It was a happy sight to see my cabin bathed in sunlight for one-half hour today.

  I was sawing wood when I heard a plane. The little Black Bird from Lake Clark. Babe was putting out a longer vapor trail than the last time he came. He made a circle and came in to light on my packed strip. He had trouble taxiing because the aluminum skis had a tendency to stick to the snow.

  “Man, it’s cold here!” he exclaimed, beating his mittened hands together. He bounced around in his wolfskin coat and sheepskin pants. He seemed to be causing his own fog bank.

  The thermometer wouldn’t let it get much colder.

  “Can’t stay long or I’ll be part of the scenery,” he said. He was afraid the oil would freeze at this low temperature. Lots of mail and packages. Two more pairs of very heavy woolen socks that Mary Alsworth had knitted. They’re so pretty I hate to think of wearing them. And three big bags of popping corn.

  But where were the mission girls? Next time he would bring them for sure.

  I broke him loose from the snow and held a wing until he was turned around. Away he went, anxious to climb a few thousand feet to where it was warm.

  I thawed a bowl of blueberries, bruised them up a bit for more juice, added some white sugar and syrup, and enjoyed a treat to celebrate the return of the sun.

  February 4th. Minus fifty-one degrees. Clear and cemetery-still.

  I find that it is as much as two degrees colder down on the lake than at the cabin, and there is only a difference of four feet in elevation.

  Hiking through a world that appeared to grow snow feathers. Soundless and motionless.

  I was eager to try a pair of my new heavy socks, along with a pair of insoles in my pacs, one pair of light wool socks, and the heavy ones over them. It was fifty below zero as I followed the trail up the hump, and thirty below on top. Those sixteen-inch heavy socks with their close knit really kept my feet warm or else I’m getting used to the frost.