Flood/Fire/Flux

Glaciers crack in the July heat.  Every summer in the Alaskan Interior is hotter than the last.

Drips of mountain water form a sliver of a stream.  Streams thread into creeks; creeks feed the Chena.   The Chena’s banks cannot restrain the river.

The drip is a torrent now. Limbs are ripped from low-lying trees.  They float in the whipping current like a boxer badly beaten, staggering.  The mighty river slugs the bank. Wave upon wave until the bank divorces itself.  Silt cascades into deluge–The Chena looks like diluted chocolate milk.  Yohoo.

Sand and silt are part-time passengers in the Chena’s journey.  They and the woody debris are dumped off at various places, piling on top of one another to form logjams and new islands.  Their revenge on the river is to change its course every year.  The Chena is a tangle of Chena’s past, present, and future.

The Chena’s bottom becomes the floodplain’s top.  There, pioneering plants take advantage of the open playing field, sending their roots deep into the fresh sediment.  Take a walk from the river bank inland and you’ll walk into the past. Substitute space for time–this is the succession of plants as they colonize, mature, recruit, and compete.

Alder, willow, White Spruce, Black Spruce.  Blueberry, crowberry, labrador tea, rose hips.  Lichens, moss, permafrost.  Understory. Canopy.  Lowland forest mosaic.

The Alaskan summer burns on.  Thunderstorms are bad here.  2,000 lightning strikes will hit the ground in one storm.  Many of them will send sparks into the thirsty, dry forest.  Several sparks will ignite.  Few fires will catch, sending the forest into a glorious blaze.  And perhaps one or two fires will burn for years, smoldering under the winter snow, consuming hundreds of thousands of acres of vegetation.

The energy of the Chena, stored in those charred poles of spruce, are released into the Alaskan interior once more.

glacial melt, flood, bank erosion, silt deposition, river course change, woody debris floating, terracing, colonial species, alder, balsam poplar, white spruce, black spruce, lowland, fire