Wolverine in the Archives

In June 2012, I spent a week on Davidson Glacier, above Haines, Alaska. Seven of us formed two rope teams of climbers, learning how to travel safely across a big river of ice. Every morning for seven days, we roped up and snowshoed across the glacier, then strapped on crampons and climbed up unnamed peaks of the Chilkat Range. Late every afternoon, we would trudge back to camp across the glacier, barely lifting our feet and listening to the shuffle of the snowshoes. The sun stayed out most of the night, but it didn’t stop us from sleeping soundly. One evening we were following our own snowshoe tracks back to camp after a long day of climbing. Suddenly, we all saw a distinct set of large tracks running right across our snowshoe prints from the morning. The wide paw tracks were the size of a human hand, and in the ice, you could see pads and claw marks, three middle ones very sharp. The tracks spread far apart, and they ran in a clear line from a ridge to the south of us, across the expanse of the glacier, toward a mountain that our instructors called The Dragon. Wolverine. It was as if you could see the intensity of the animal, an animal maybe 35 pounds or more, loping across the glacier from one mountain range to another, covering as much as 40 miles in a given day. The wolverine didn’t need snowshoes or crampons or ropes; his equipment was built in. Some of my companions may have been as awe-struck as I was. It was the first time any of us had seen tracks of a wolverine, and certainly the closest I had come to one. The tracks were exciting; they made me look across at The Dragon and wonder if we could ever climb it like the wolverine. We crossed the ice to camp with renewed energy