paddling the upper chena

On Sunday, I paddled about 25 miles of the upper Chena River with a friend. It started blowing hard about half-way through, and we could hear thunder. It hailed a few miles up the road. We saw all kinds of ducks, at least one grayling, and, right at the end, a bald eagle. Ian knows a whole lot more than I do about permafrost, and he offered his thoughts on the various river-eroded bends and thin layers of vegetation when we passed them. The scraggly black spruce in the picture rely on really shallow roots and don't get very big at all. A tree a few inches thick might be 100 years old.
At one point, we came to a dirt wall on an outer bank that served as a cross-section of earth about 20 feet thick -- tiny black spruce on top, about a foot of moss and roots, then dirt that Ian figured was frozen solid about a foot in and all the way down. We grabbed at sticks and chunks of wood captured in the dirt in sediment layers a few feet apart. Ian guessed the piece I pulled into the boat (sending globs of soft dirt all over) was a few thousand years old. There was a special smell to the dirt as it thawed out and stuff started decomposing again.