Lake Clark National Park. A park in motion.
A journey that begins in civilization, a city founded around it’s ideal of safe harbor. A placed named after what it was. An anchorage. A harbor in Cook’s Inlet where a ship could moor without foundering, safe from the massive tidal flats that border most of the inlet. Along the edge of Cook’s Inlet lies Lake Clark National Park. A wilderness with a beach for a narrow landing strip. On the upland side, a vast wilderness, heavy with vegetation, trees and rivers. A landscape that is being pushed up by colliding plates. Layers of ancient Jurassic rock, sediments from an ancient island arc, with no place to go but up. (Source West Cook Inlet Geology (U.S. National Park Service) (nps.gov)). It is not just orogeny at work, deep beneath it all, the heated melting magma bulges and penetrate the overlayers, erupting as the volcanos, Mount Iliana and Mount Redoubt. Mountains on top of mountains. In contrast the inlet side is flat, bulldozed. The result of the ever-persistent forces of erosion. Ice, rain, tides waves. All working to grind the mountains and deposit the remains along the shores. There they form the feeding trough for the animals that venture to it shores.
The motion is constant and consistent – slow, subtle, cyclical and even sometimes sudden. Sitting on the Alaska-Aleutian subduction zone the surrounding stratigraphic layers are raised upwards appearing to be stacked like fallen dominos. Forming a crown along the edge of Cook’s inlet, are volcanoes bringing the crust from deep within the earth, punctuating the surface to make the land even more grand. Within this land lie the jewels; glaciers, snow and ice that provide the sparkle for its crown. Unlike jewels set in stone, the mineral ice’s erosive power churns relentlessly to break up the bedrock, crushing it until it is ground to a flourlike consistency. Some of it is piled up on the edges as moraines, the rest carried by the meltwater, thickening the rivers like a chef making a roux for some exotic sauce. Until the slope can no longer provide enough power for the river, robbing it of its strength to carry so much sediment. As it enters the alluvial plains at the foot of the range, it chokes on the load it has been carrying. In its immediacy to dump the mountain, the river spreads out, building new channels, running over itself, braiding knots and finally emptying into the delta at the river’s mouth. Constantly and non-stop, slowly and surely lifting upwards measured sometime in centimeters per year, then being washed away at by the grinding and hydraulic forces of glaciers and meltwater.
The park is in motion. A body of water surrounded by giant mud deposits, the results of millions of years of eroded earth. Here the power of gravitation fields extending across the universe and astronomical alignment takes over. Combined with the orientation of the inlet the result are 35-foot tidal swings (source How to Surf Alaska's Bore Tide | Travel | Smithsonian Magazine). The influx and outflux of water acts to disperse the sediments, smoothing and flattening them out until they extend for miles into massive tidal flats. The mountains are then spread out across the shore like a chef would ice a cake. A motion that decorates the surface with regular ripples along the shoreline. A biome ideal for clams and bottom dwellers. Descendent relatives of Jurassic, giant Retroceramus bivalves (seen in the deposits at Fossil Point) burrow deep into nutrient rich muds. The motion of waves and tides.
The park is motion. Powered by natures abundance of nutritional nuggets. The site of a bear cub. Standing at the edge of a field. Playing with its sibling. And then you notice. The claws. Already long and hefty. Not weapons. Tools. Digging tools. Clam crackers. Dig, pull a clam, crack, eat and repeat. A little grass to provide some roughage. And when the bears have their fill, satisfied, and feeling content they play and wrestle in the fields. Moving, seeming to be slow but then they surprise you with the ground they cover. Back out to flats for more supper where the gulls strut and peck. The Eagle promenade then soar. A trip out to Duck Island finds the Brünnich’s guillemot rafting together in the thousands. A giant gunkholing expedition. Some diving for food, some splashing their way up into the air, touch and go flying, and arrestor cable stops; all in one continuous crush of motion. Flying amidst this cacophony are the puffins. Their frantic flight adding to what would seem to lead to a chaotic crash. But instead, it is just one kaleidoscope of motion.
The motion of a park. We only caught a glance. The cycle of the earth. The Jurassic layers being pushed further and further up, and then, even higher to be magnificently topped by the earths melted crust forming volcanoes and contrasted by the frozen water that rims its edge. To cycle downward, always driven down by ice, glaciers, meltwater, and rain. Flushed into rivers, carried out to sea. Spread along the coast by waves and tides. From clam to the behemoth bear, the floating and flying avian. All in motion. A park in motion.