3 Asx‘ée-L’ux (Eagle-Herbert) Archives

Two scales of geopdfs for Asx‘ée-L’ux watershed.

Asx‘ée-L’ux, twisted-tree/milky water (Eagle & Herbert Rivers)

Nexus!

Asx‘ée-L’ux, twisted-tree/milky water (Eagle & Herbert Rivers) meet below Glacier Highway, 28 miles north of Juneau (thumbnail, right). It’s an astoundingly productive and beautiful confluence.

Here is the beginning of my ‘placejournal for Asx’ée: mostly a mapping exercise with reminiscences about my time as caretaker there. The full collection is way too big for download from JuneauNature. But I do include some notes from the early 1980s, when I was a wet-behind-the-ears wannabe naturalist. Download 14mb pdf here:

I will always belong to the delta at Asx‘ée, the hundred-acre outpocketing of glacial sediment where I lived until 1992, learning to draw and take notes. The map I made in 1983 is here.

According to Gul’guyéil (William Kunz), Asx‘ée was a L’eeneidí winter village of more than 50 people on land later claimed by the Boy Scouts. Since canoe access is challenging throughout the delta’s sand and mudflats, likeliest village site was on a raised, sandy bench just south of today’s Boy Scout lodge. The last of this loose deposit, covered with spruces less than a century old, was washed away by storm waves in the 1980s, shortly my arrival.

LiDAR topography at mouth of Asx’ée, twisted tree (Eagle River). Colored for elevation. Upper edge of bright green is limit of high tide at peak of Little Ice Age. Labeled blue-line polygons are ‘subsheds’ delineated from LiDAR elevation model during our wetlands survey for CBJ.

On a rare clear day in late October, 2015, with my 3DR Solo quadcopter, I ‘flew’ the flats just west of their confluence. Toward the end of this 1-minute video, you’ll see an anomalous-looking mowed-grass mound that also clearly shows on the preceding bare-earth map—remnant from the days when it was okay to mine gravel from the banks of our finest salmon streams. Bob Armstrong says at salmon time many bears fish here, apparently mostly at night. They also dig for roots—of which species we haven’t determined.

Quadcopter views of high-marsh portion of the Eagle River delta, 20151025.