Wishbone Lake Observation Journal

For my class this semester (Traditional Ecological Knowledge), one of the assignements was to go to an outdoor place, away from people and civilization, and just spend time there, alone. No phone. No dog. Just be. This was my resulting essay: 

Everywhere you go, there you are. As I sat in my camp chair in the middle of frozen Wishbone Lake, I had time to reflect on the space and time of my visit. 

It was a 10-mile snowmachine ride into the backcountry of the Talkeetna Mountains right behind our house. My husband and I took separate machines and he led the way, having explored that area a couple of weeks prior to my starting these observations. Even on Saturday afternoons, we seldom saw another soul on the well-worn trail through the trees, across creeks, and past ragged cliff faces. Recovering from achilles surgery, the vibration of the motor had a healing sensation on my foot, and I enjoyed the rides immensely. 

Once out on the lake, I set up my chair on the trail behind my machine and settled in to enjoy the peace and quiet that is so much a part of the last frontier while my husband continued on down the trail to give me some alone time for the next hour. 

As the silence closed in around me, my tinnitus heightened, and I found myself wishing for wind. On one occasion, the wind answered, bringing snow along for the ride. As I sat there, in the middle of the lake, I tried to see how much snow would pile up on me before the torn discs in my lower back begged me to move. The flakes were small, but my dark jacket and snow pants allowed for close examination of the hexagon shapes, each different and unique. I love the wind. I love the feel of it. I love the sound of it. I loved watching it roll through the trees and across the snowblown lake, creating drifts and shallows as it went. 

In all my time there, I never saw an animal, not a bird, not a sound. There were tracks, moose and rabbit, maybe a fox here or there. We saw wolf tracks on the trail on the way in, which made me feel the need to look behind me now and again as I sat there. I wondered if there was some being just inside the treeline, hunkered down, watching me and wondering what I was doing. Was a crossfox curiously scurrying from tree to tree? If he was there, I did not see him or hear him. Perhaps it was a she, fattened with kits, heading back to her den with a mouse or a vole who had met his demise. 

I couldn’t have been more than 5 miles from a blacktop road, just a couple of miles from a gravel road neighborhood and a lake, 17-mile Lake, filled with ice fishermen, women, and children. It was because of this that the complete silence took me by surprise. I noticed that I couldn’t even hear Gregg coming back until he had come over the top of ridge. 

I’ve only been to Wishbone Lake in the winter, this winter. I look forward to driving the 4-wheeler into it this summer, though, from the look of it, there may be some wet crossings that will add to the adventure. I wonder… will there be birds chirping in the trees in the summer? Will there be fish jumping in the lake? Will an occasional moose dare to show its face at the water’s edge? For now, the lake is sleeping. It’s tucked in under a thick blanket of snow, silently sleeping. 

The lake sits in a sort of hollow, surrounded by mountain peaks, and makes me grateful that this is in my backyard; we had driven the snowmachines straight from our house to this wild place. The hills that rise up from the edge of the lake are tree covered, but the craggy mountaintops are just beyond. I would say that I’m lucky, but really, luck had nothing to do with it. A lot of hard work and dream chasing brought me to that very spot on Wishbone Lake. There, I was. Everywhere I go, there I am.