A water source for Craig
In April, 1987, Dan Bishop, Leigh Smith and I flew into a lovely lake 9 miles east of Craig, at 700 feet elevation. We’d been asked to evaluate it as a potential water source. We called it Big Dipper Lake, but it’s better known as North Fork Lake, being a branch of Saint Nicholas Creek. There appears to be no recorded Lingít place names for any features in the area.
Original for this map was in rapidograph on mylar, reproduced as a 40-inch foldout in the report’s back-cover map pocket. Took me forever to ‘flatbed’ it and reassemble in color
Reformatting our old report just now, 36 years later, sure brought back memories. To illustrate the value of note-taking (and reports like these!), the only tidbit my memory held about the week-long lake sojourn before looking through the archived Environaid materials was my first Alaskan sighting of an Audubon’s warbler, more southerly relative to the Myrtle form of yellow-rumped warbler familiar to birders of Áak’w & T’aaḵú Aaní.
Well, I guess I also remembered the knockout stench of a floating, scaly, beaver-severed wrist-diameter rhizome of pond lily, their main food on this mile-long lake. Usually buried in mud, 3 or more feet below the waterline, these are plant-parts even naturalists rarely encounter. The smell was so overpowering and unbotanical we joked it might have been a toe from the corpse of Alaska-Nellie, our answer to the Loch Ness monster. Strange ideas surface after 5 days on a wilderness lake. Today, for better and worse, you can drive to the outlet. No monsters in sight.
And maps! wow! What a way to bring back lands and waters you haven’t thought about in half a lifetime.
