Auke Lake trail looks just about like any other trail in Juneau until...

...you come out onto this metal ramp...huh? Pretty cool,...but why metal? It looks so metallic in all that water and wood landscape...like it's totally out of place! Somebody answer the question: why metal?

How many Juneauites who live downtown know about this walk?  How long has it been here?  I had no idea we could walk Auke Lake.  I had been wondering why i saw all those cars parked in that little out-cropping of a parking area on this side of the float planes.   It’s easy, peaceful and if it weren’t for the occasion field mouse running across the path, it’s almost boring.  There are no hurdles anymore; the City has paved so many of the trails we’ve been like there are no stumps to jump, no slipping and sliding amongst big roots and swampy puddles to dodge!  Where’s the excitement, man? We’ve got it so easy now.   Okay,  Okay, quit the complaining.   I am soaking up the scenery; that’s always exciting.

This is a significant sign! Especially for Dan and i who in the past year, with all the moving around I've done, to deal with the commotion and disorganization, he calls it "...oh, you're just packing it in and packing it out, packing it in and packing it out...I get it!"

Beautiful Auke Lake - when we were kids, we saw Auke Lake on occasion because very few of us in the neighborhood had cars...I was always in awe of Auke Lake...I'd call it the peaceful black lake (it doesn't move like the tides); it's still mysterious to me now and is was then...

Do any of you remember the Filipino photographer, Vincent Isturis?  He had a famous tinted, black and white photograph of Auke Lake back in the 60’s – the lake had no houses, the Mendenhall Glacier was very full behind the short trees and there was a yellow-painted wooden guard rail – remember that?  (goodness, the days of wooden guard rails!)  My friend Margie has a framed photo of this image that was a gift from Vincent to her father Frank.

Okay. I guess there's beauty in a metal walkway!

To answer that question of why a metal walkway?  We’ve got lots of rain, honey, we’re in a rain forest, remember?

The shallow underwater world of water lilies and fallen trees

A rippling reflection

Earthy lime green is everywhere in this climate - i grew up with this stuff - no wonder why green is my favorite color!

Several Alaskan folks who live elsewhere in the world have made comments upon seeing my blog of our Juneau walks – they say they get homesick.  I apologize for this.  I mean no harm in posting delicious reminders of what they are missing.  Honest.  I am just sharing this small part of our world.  I apologize to those folks, however, I must keep posting the beauty because that’s what I see, and also think about this:   sooner or later, there may be some natural (or man-made) disaster and then things will change and then it’s messy, and because our Earth is ever-changing and ever-forgiving,  it comes back to beauty again.  We gotta soak up what is about us while we can, as the world is ever-changing.  And because we can’t be in two places at once, we have to look at photos of our home State and so be it, we get homesick.   Isn’t it wonderful that you know you love a place so much by how much you get homesick?