|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Our time in Alaska was divided between Denali National Park in central interior Alaska, Lake Clark National Park along the Cook Inlet in western Alaska, and Glacier Bay National Park in southeast Alaska. Alaska is so big that each location was hundreds of miles from the other. This map shows the relative position of the three parks we visited. |
Transportation in the three parks was significantly different thus greatly influenced what we did and saw. Our first week included the train from Anchorage to Denali and back. The train took 7 hours each way. There is exactly one road in Denali National Park which runs from the railroad station at the park entrance to the former gold mine town of Kantishna, 92 miles west of the park entrance, and about 30 miles northwest of Mount McKinley. The bus to our lodge took six hours (and of course six hours back), with us spending almost every minute leaning out the windows watching for wild life and admiring the scenery. | ||
Lake Clark National Park has
zero roads. We arrived and departed by a
"puddle-jumper" plane, which used the beach as its
runway. The picture at the left shows our plane on the
beach and bears in the water at low tide. Our
principal activity was just standing in one place, watching
and enjoying the bears. The area we covered was
relatively small, about one mile wide and two miles long,
and an ATV (All Terrain Vehicle) was used to assist getting
around, including going through the slough at low
tide. (At high tide, we used a row boat to cross the
slough.) |
|
We had clouds and rain everyday during our first week in Alaska. We wanted to visit Denali National Park to see the “Great One” (Denali) as Mount McKinley is called, but we never saw it because of the clouds and rain. On clear days, Mount McKinley is reflected in the clear water of Wonder Lake, but we did the hike in rain gear instead. Oh, by the way, that is Mount McKinley behind us! We had signed up for a flight-seeing tour, but it never happened because of the weather. |
|
|
|
|
Our stay at the Kantishna Lodge was okay. Each morning of our three days we went for a guided hike and in the evenings there were talks on the history, culture and geology of the area. On our last night there was an excellent presentation by an Hoonah Tlingit Native American Indian. After talking about their culture and various aspects of past and present life, he and his daughter did hoop dances for us. It was really great. Of all the places we visited during
this trip, the mosquitoes at Kantishna were the largest
and most aggressive. Even though we wore netting and
put on repellant, we both had numerous bites. In our
room we had an electrified tennis racket which was labeled
"mosquito killer!" |
|
|
Lois, sow and cub |
|
Imagine a stretch of beach about two
miles long with a river at either end. There
is a meadow between the beach and the forest which varied
in width from one-quarter to one-half mile, with a
“slough” running down the middle. As we
learned, a slough is a saltwater estuary, or waterway
about 100 yards wide which filled and emptied with the
change in tides. And what a tide. This portion of
the the Cook Inlet has a 20-foot change between high and
low tides. This meant that at low tide, the sandy
exposed area of beach extends one-quarter to one-half mile
off shore. At high tide there is very little beach
and we had to use a row boat to cross the slough.
|
|
We watched the cubs romp and play in front, on the side, and in the backyard of the Lodge. | |
Salmon fishing in Alaska is very highly regulated to protect the stocks. The locals we interacted with applauded these rules. For this area of Lake Clark National Park, Monday and Thursday were the assigned fishing days, and the day we arrived, Monday, July 4th, was the opening day of the season. So, during low tide, about 2:00 PM, a gillnet was laid. This is a rectangular net about 300 feet long and 10 feet wide. It was set out on the beach, with buoys along the top and weights along the bottom. At very low tide a pulley had been anchored in the sand about 300 feet off shore. A rope had been passed through the pulley and was now used to pull the net out into the water. We were told that as the tide came in the net would right itself and be ready to catch the fish. We have to return at peak high tide, about 6:30 PM, to see the results. | ||
Talk about a new
experience: WOW! Neither of us had ever fished,
and here we were witnessing one of the oldest and most
widely used forms of fishing: gillnet fishing.
When we left the beach at 2:00 we still didn’t understand
the how’s and why’s and what was really going to happen. There was a crowd that returned about 6:00 PM to watch the exciting climax of the afternoon net laying. A retired commercial fisherman led the way and explained what was happening. Here’s a brief summary of the salmon life cycle and why the gillnet system works. |
|
|
Salmon are born in a stream, migrate to the ocean for a couple of years, and then return to the same stream to reproduce. Scientists believe that the fish “smell” their stream; we were told that each stream has a specific chemical make up like a finger print. To find their stream, the salmon swim into shore with an incoming high tide and then turn along the beach “smelling” for their stream then go back out with the outgoing tide. Putting a gillnet straight out from the beach catches the salmon as they come in with the tide and turn to find their stream. For our net, 43 sockeye or red salmon were caught. |
While Lake
Clark presented totally new bear and fishing experiences
it also enabled us to do some “old fashioned fun” as
well. We went for a fantastic canoeing trip through
Silver Salmon Lake adorned with beautiful yellow
water-lillies. Each day we took a stroll through the sedge grass meadows. On one of these outings we spotted a pair of bald eagles in two trees talking to each other. Suddenly the male flew to its mate as you can see in the video (a Ken Burns moment for videographer Jason). What an incredible set of experiences! |
|
|
|
But even more astonishing than the worms was the ice itself. When we walked up to the glacier and touched it, a piece broken off. Kimber explained how the ice that we were touching had fallen as snow a thousand years ago high in the mountains (about 11 miles from where we were). The ice we were touching was not created like ice in a freezer; that is, a glacier is not water which has been frozen like one big ice cube. Glacial ice is formed by snow flakes piled on snow flakes piled on snow flakes over thousands of years creating enormous pressure which compacts the snow, forcing out all air, and leaving the ice in a crystal form. We could easily break off a piece of the glacier as it was made of small, beautiful ice crystals. These millions of billions of small crystals then careen down the mountain as a sheet of ice (at a snails pace of course) working their architectural magic carving valleys and water filled fjords. As this sheet of ice twists and turns, moves over harder or softer base rock, it appears as a river flowing, with breaks and cracks (called crevasses) that give it character and beauty. |
Touching Reid Glacier |
|
|
The hike that was scheduled for our third day in Glacier Bay was to a ridge high above the water to view the Riggs Glacier. The route is shown in the picture to the left. Glacier Bay is a wilderness park with no roads nor man-made trails. All our hikes followed animal trails, narrow paths created by bears over the eons. For some routes, the animals followed the same path and over time the plants simply got mashed down and created a trail. We were going to just go part way along one of these trails, an easy scramble according to Kimber, but far enough to see the Riggs Glacier across its inlet. All our shipmates were going to climb to the top of the ridge. |
|
A stream came into the bay near where we were anchored and
our landing area was just beyond it. Once on the beach
we divided into two groups and the fast group began their
ascent. But a few minutes after we separated, these
well laid plans were disrupted by the sound of fish
splashing in the water. Salmon, for some unknown reason, leap from the water. Kimber said it may simply be “jumping for joy when they smell their birthing stream.” Whatever the reason, the bears in the forest hear the splash and it brings them to the water’s edge to fish. |
|
We were now in Glacier Bay,
not Lake Clark. The bears here may very occasionally,
if ever, see a human. They don’t know what we
are: friend, foe, food or fluff. Bear protocol
says that if you meet a bear you are to bunch together to
look bigger than the bear, speak softly, and back away to
give the bear space. The Park Service wants bears to
see humans as non-entities to be ignored. Well, Kimber, Lois and Jason are on this beach and the salmon are jumping for joy and down the mountain comes this adolescent male grizzly bear, maybe 500 pounds of teen spirits. He quickly swam the stream and Kimber says, “I recognize that bear. He charged me last year.” Next thing we know she has us scrambling up a big rock behind us (pictured left), where there was definitely no bear food around. |
|
Kimber afterward told folks that “Jason forgot he was blind the way he went up that rock!” In Lake Clark, we were only a few feet from huge bears and never felt threatened. But now, here we were 50 yards away, and our hearts racing - we were under attack. The bear came out of the stream and ran up the beach, stopped maybe 10 yards away, smelled the air and looked over the situation. That was a real heart stopper! The bear then turned and started eating berries. Kimber meanwhile was on the walkie-talkie with the other group, telling them to come down so we could make a “bigger” group and everyone would be safely on the beach, not on a high narrow bear path. Once we were on our rock and the bear was eating, she told them they could go ahead with their hike. We spent the next hour watching the bear eat. Once the bear left, the rest of the group came safely down the mountain and joined us and the skiff, which had been called to wait off shore, and took us back to our boat. |
On our fourth day of our Glacier Bay cruise a black bear was spotted on the beach. This was our first and only black bear of the trip and it really looked great from a quarter of a mile off shore! |
|
Margerie’s surface was radically different from what we had seen before: no whipped cream surface here, but spires and towers and pinnacles of varying shapes and sizes. She was stunning! |
We had an unexpected feast
for our eyes on our way back to Juneau. We took a
flight-seeing tour in a four-seater plane which took us
over Glacier Bay from 1000 feet. We saw each and
every glacier we had seen from the boat, as well as many
others and the Brady Ice Field (left photo). The Brady Ice
Field is vast, miles across and appearing flat and
smooth. It is fed by dozens of mountain glaciers
that surround it, and it is the source of many of the
glaciers that we saw which plunge into the sea.
What an
incredible two hours. |
The Johns Hopkins Glacier was visually exciting. As the glacier carved its way down the mountain, sides of the mountain caved in and left a black streak on the glacier. This has happened in such a way that there were ribbons of black and white interwoven along the miles of glacier as it worked its way to the sea. From the air the phrase “river of ice” came to life: the glaciers aren’t static inanimate objects but a turbulent, active moving force. We could see the rapids where hard base rock forced the glacier up and over, and smooth wide areas of softer easier soils. |
Our three favorite glacial experiences, the Reid which we actually touched, the McBride (pictured at right) with its turquoise ice filled inlet, and Margarie with its pinnacles and towers, calving and crackling, all showed how magnificent they were from the air. As we soared over we could see their origins high in the mountains, their sculpturing arms, and their watery finish. This was an awesome end to an incredible three weeks in Alaska. |