Thirty Days in the Tongass

In July 2015 I flew to Southeast Alaska. It was the first flight I can remember, and I was seventeen. At the other end were sea kayaks, a temperate rainforest, no road out, and nothing to plug a battery into. I brought two cameras and meant to photograph the whole thing.

Oxkutzcab is a rural town in the Yucatán. I grew up there around animals: turkeys, chickens, cats, piglets, and whatever else was in the forest. My relatives were all storytellers, and I spent more time chasing the turkeys than listening to them. We moved to San Francisco when I was seven. 

In 2015 Daniel Fox was looking for a young person to send to Alaska. He had started the Wild Image Project. The scholarship was called W.I.L.D (Wilderness Immersion for Leadership & Discovery through Education, Conservation & Opportunities).
He had a chance encounter with our executive director and told her of his program. Our director, Diane, immediately thought of two folks who could take this on. Gravrielle and I.

Then I turned it down. 

I sent that email from the gate a few minutes later, Daniel wrote back within the minute: “Take it all in my friend. You will come back a changed man.”

I had been on a plane once before, when I was five, or seven, and I remember none of it, so this one counted as the first. On the descent the flaps came out of the back of the wing and kept going, further than I thought a wing was supposed to open. I was sure it was coming apart. Then we landed, and it turned out that is just what wings do.

Everything on this line is water we paddled, with one exception: between the head of Port Camden and Bay of Pillars the line crosses Kuiu on foot — tide flats, then a mile and a half of gravel road, boats dragged. It is the only part of the route that was not paddled, and the only reason the loop closes.

The gear containers were in Petersburg, the first 2 days was getting acclimated with Alaska, the town and how expensive it was. Then we went in to get ready to the trip. Everything came out of a shipping container. Life jackets on hangers, sleeping pads stacked to the ceiling, dry bags along the wall, a rail of NOLS shirts. You got fitted, you signed for it, you carried it out to the gravel. July 17. None of it was wet yet. 

We spent the first day on the water flipping the kayaks on purpose. Wet exits and self-rescues: get out from under it, climb back in, do it again.
There were 15 of us and we slept under tarps. We averaged 16 nautical miles a day. There were stretches where I asked myself what I was doing there. Nothing I had done before had been this hard.

The tide went further out than anyone expected, and the boats were already loaded. So we got out and dragged them; thick mud first, then an overgrown gravel road we towed them along. This was on Kuiu, before Kake.

We paddled into Kake on the third of August for food. Day twenty, nineteen days out, and the only town between the put-in and the take-out. Kake is a Tlingit village of about five hundred people, on the northwest shore of Kupreanof, on Keku Strait. You have to remember, we’ve been eating rations: hashbrowns, pasta with garlic salt and oregano, pancakes with blueberries we find in the rainforest, salmons we fished.
This was our chance to pickup some M&Ms, spam, cup of noodles, oreos, peanut butter. I stocked up on Muffin and mixed it with out dehydrated milk.
Absolute heaven.

The whales kept coming back. They woke us up early on their way past. I have almost no photographs of whales from those thirty days, these are from 2 out of the 5 encounters.

What I wrote at the time was that the rain meant I could really only use the cameras in camp, and most of what survives from thirty days is camp. Layover days allowed me to explore around with the cameras, repair them too! Not much exists, mostly from being dead tired.

Five in the morning, the one time I wrote the time down. Pack, unpack, pack again. Wet clothes, wet sleeping bags, wet shoes, and sand in all of it. In the boats, in the bags, in the straps. Wet sand on numb knuckles is sandpaper. Thirty mornings of that, and then we carried the boats down.

NOLS is a school, so there was school, and it was not optional. Navigation off a chart, kayaking, how to be an outdoor leader. Both instructors were photographers. Murilo was my assigned mentor, more than fifteen years in the backcountry, and I soaked all of it in. He was also standing between me and the best light of the day. Most of the time I was looking behind me at epic sunsets but stuck in a circle listening to a lecture.

There is no bathroom. There is a spot you walk to, and a decision to make: wet leaves, or a smooth rock. In a temperate rainforest nothing is dry, so neither one is a good option. I tried both, more than once. Rocks won.

Somebody decided I was the camp pizza chef. I had never made pizza. Dough will not rise in the cold, so it goes under your layers, against bare skin, and you carry it there until it does. That is the job. I was walking around camp with a bag of dough against my stomach, waiting for it to rise. Best pizza ever

Months later I wrote that I tried to avoid being eaten alive by mosquitoes, and failed miserably. The net works. It goes over your face and stays there for hours, and it works right up until you have to eat, or drink, or say something back to somebody without the mask on. You would open your mouth and immediately eat mosquitos

Eagles on the spruce tops, a loon out on flat water, whole flocks going up off the shore at once. None of this was the reason I was there and none of it was planned. It is what was in front of the camera on the days the camera came out. Stellar sealions would see our pod kayaking in their waters, they’d trail behind. It was an incredible sight, the size of them was hard to believe! As big if not bigger than our kayaks.

The viewfinder fogged from the inside. Not rain on the front of the lens; that I could wipe. This was water that had worked into the body over weeks of rain, sitting behind the glass where I could not reach it. If the camera quit out there it stayed quit. No replacement was coming, and I had no money for another one at home. So I took the lens off, turned the open camera up at the sun, and left the bare sensor there for about two hours. The sun being out at all was unusual. It worked. There is no photograph of any of it, which is the point. This occurred half way through the trip, and what followed was unexpected.

We paddled into Petersburg on the morning of 13 August. Day thirty, twenty-nine days after the put-in, and the loop closed by water rather than by the road we had driven out on. The last frame I made on the expedition is stamped 09:48 that morning — sixteen millimetres, f/14, a six-hundred-and-fortieth of a second. The first thing I did in town? Go buy some muffins for breakfast.

I didn’t have my camera with me when it happened, and I have never been able to put the creek on a map. I wrote it down within a month of getting off the water and published it here as “Spirit Animal”. The page was taken down as site upgrades/changes occurred. It didn’t fit, now it does.

I’ve always heard people talk about their spirit animal — an animal that connected and interacted with them. The stories were too good to be true.

While on expedition, I never expected the spirit of nature to show me an animal that will forever change the way I view wilderness and life.

As sunset passed, I return to camp to rejoin my group. The trees covered the sky, the light was dim but the route was still visible. With cameras in hand from the sunset, I enter the tarp and set my gear down. They ask me to go gather water for dinner so I grab our four empty dromedaries. I make my way back down with nothing else besides the droms, and walk along the slippery edge of the creek. It was muddy, my camp shoes were covered in smelly mud water. I jump and dock around the trees trying to keep my shoes clean. Talking to myself trying not to get scared of ghosts or bigfoot, I reach a good spot to refill.

I look around for anything potentially looking at me. Trying to go face to face with a bear, but no luck. You can only hear the sound of rushing water. Not a single person to be heard. I felt strange, as if I was all alone in the middle of the great wilderness, which I was at this time. But I focus and look around for a spot where the clear water runs. I scan around trying to see if anything is looking at me now. I’m in a vulnerable position, so I dunk and pull the drom to get full. I pull it out of the water and cap it, then let it rest on the flat rugged rock I’m kneeling on. I grab the second one and uncap it.

I drunk it in the same spot, below a boomer, and stay there listening. Then I hear the sound of rocks, pebbles crumbling down, “was it a bear, a snake,” I ask myself. Excited and scared, I focus back. I turn back to see if there was a bear, and see twigs moving. I freeze, my hand still in the running cold water. I see what looks like brown and white fur. It’s small and fast, I miss the head, but see the lengthy body. Before I know it, I feel two small indentations on my quad. I look and see a Weasel. At this moment I never knew a weasel existed or what it looked like. I thought I was for sure a goner, it was going to lunge at my neck and call it a day.

Screaming in the inside, I say, “Wow,” faintly. I look into its eyes and see myself. Then its ears move as if something was calling it. With its two paws on my quad, it looks around, curious, seeking something, looks at my hand and hops off me. It heads straight, the vegetation was thick there, his back facing me, and notice its ears move again, like scanners. It turns back and looks at me one last time. Then he disappears into the vegetation.

I pull out the drom, look around to see if I could see it once more but I couldn’t find him. I look at my leg and see the invisible indentations it made and still memorized, I sit there. I go speechless, dead silent, no thoughts or words. I stand up and put the cord of the dromedaries as a backpack. I scan the place again to see if it came back, nothing. I had to get back to my group because 10 minutes have passed. I head back, hop, shimmy, and jump around the trees trying to keep my shoes clean but fail.

Now, I will forever look after the weasel whenever I’m in the wild. It gave me company when I was alone, and acknowledged who I was and that I wasn’t a threat to him.

I will now carry its spirit with me on through my adventures.

Today, in 2026, I still remember that day vividly. If I could draw, I could map it out, the layout of the land, the creek and the bushes it came from. My logo now has The weasel perched on the Y in my name, on every page of this site, that’s the little dude I met and carry with me. It is the only digital picture of it there will ever be.

Everything else on this page came home on a card. I ended the piece I wrote for NOLS that December the way I would end this one: “I made sure to bring them with me, one image at a time.”

The year after the trip I cut the footage into W.I.L.D — eight minutes, forty-nine seconds. It is on YouTube exactly as I left it.